E&OE TRANSCRIPT
RADIO INTERVIEW
ABC MELBOURNE MORNINGS
THURSDAY, 4 JUNE 2020

SUBJECTS: Recession; Recovery; HomeBuilder; Social housing; Skills and training; Labor’s response to the GFC.

VIRGINIA TRIOLI, HOST: Dr Chalmers, good morning to you.

JIM CHALMERS, SHADOW TREASURER: Good morning, Virginia.

TRIOLI: What's your prediction for how long and how hard this recession will be?

CHALMERS: It will definitely be a difficult time for hundreds of thousands of workers. I think already something like 800,000 extra people have signed up for the JobSeeker payment. They've joined the unemployment queues and it will be a really difficult time. We do get caught up in the conversation about the numbers and the technical jargon, but really this is about people's capacity to work and to provide for their loved ones and in that regard it's going to be really a really difficult period ahead.

TRIOLI: The Government has handled this entire situation pretty much as a Labor Government would have. We have to acknowledge that this morning, don't we, which is to use the money and to spend your way out of it? Are you prepared to acknowledge that as Shadow Treasurer?

CHALMERS: At that level Virginia, I think that's true that the Government's been prepared to intervene in the economy to provide some support. We differ on how some of these programs have been implemented. I think the JobKeeper program in particular has been fairly substantially botched; too many people have been excluded from it and that means too many people left out and left behind. It is also the single biggest blunder in the budget of all time. Clearly there have been some issues in execution. Recognising how serious these times are for a lot of people in our society and communities, we've tried to be as responsible and constructive as we can be but being constructive doesn't mean being silent when there are some very serious failures of implementation going on.

TRIOLI: We might get to those if we have time, but let's stick with the HomeBuilder program as we know it today. Does the income-cap slash borrowing-requirement-ratio actually work? If you're earning a maximum of $200,000 as a couple - that's how it's going to be capped if there's two of you together - can you really afford then to spend a minimum of $150,000? Can you afford to borrow that much in order to take up the grant?

CHALMERS: In one regard it remains to be seen. I thought Karl when he called in before from Ballarat made a good point about that. We are talking about people who can afford a $150,000-plus reno so I think there are questions to be asked of the Treasurer about that. The main two concerns that people will have more broadly, and the reason why I think people might be a bit disappointed today with this package, is first of all we doubt that it's comprehensive enough to make a real difference, and related to that -

TRIOLI: What do you mean by that? You mean it's not broad enough?

CHALMERS: We're not convinced that something of this size and targeted this way will do enough for the half a million or so tradies who we think will be doing it tough. Related to that, we think it's disappointing frankly that the Treasurer can find $700 million for a program but there's not a cent in here for public housing, for maintenance of public housing, for mums and kids fleeing domestic violence, for veterans sleeping in parks, or for front line workers. There's nothing to try and invest in that public housing stock. The reason that's disappointing is because when the Government is spending this kind of money you need to find ways to tick more than one box. Supporting the building industry is a good thing. We welcome support for the industry itself; there is a problem in the construction sector. If you're going to do that let's find a way to protect jobs but also to build something that lasts for the most vulnerable people in our community. In that regard I think today is a missed opportunity.

TRIOLI: The PM is saying this is a tradie-led recovery to help spark the economy, but data is showing today that more than 100,000 apprentices and trainees are going to lose their jobs this year because of COVID-19. Can the construction program work in the face of that reality?

CHALMERS: We want it to work and we need it to work. I think the big issue with apprentices, and again not to be too partisan about it, is that there's been a lot of hollowing out of training over the last seven years and there are consequences of that for the system. It's one of the ways that we came into this crisis from a position of weakness rather than strength. We've had the hollowing out of TAFE. We had fewer training places at the end of that seven-year period than at the beginning. These sorts of things really matter when you're trying to build your way out of this fairly serious hole that we're in as country and as an economy.

TRIOLI: Some have been suggesting and worried that there might be intimations of Labor's insulation program with its rorts and tragedies. There's an opportunity this morning for the Treasurer Josh Frydenberg to acknowledge what Labor Governments did in a similar way here and perhaps change his line of criticism around that. I'll offer him that opportunity but to be fair I need to do the same here. Has the Government designed a program that avoids these potential problems, and do you wish that Labor had used existing State and Territory systems to administer your insulation program all those years ago?

CHALMERS: There's been multiple reviews of the home insulation program. It's been a decade or so now. We've said repeatedly that clearly things could have been done better in that program and I think it's right to make both sides accountable for those sorts of things. Similarly, the Treasurer should put his hand up for the bungles in JobKeeper and some of the other implementation issues; Robodebt's obviously been a disaster as well. If it's good for us to acknowledge that things can be done better, then it's good for them as well.

Overall one of the lessons that we've learned, particularly yesterday when we found out that Australia's in a recession, is that what Labor did during the Global Financial Crisis was remarkably successful. We avoided recession when most of the countries we compare ourselves to didn't. That hasn't been the case this time and so that remarkable 29 years of continuous economic growth ends now as a consequence of this pandemic. But the point that we'd make is the unemployment queues are longer than they need to be and the downturn is deeper than it needs to be because the Treasurer and the Prime Minister have made big mistakes with this JobKeeper program which means that people who would like to access it are instead heading off to Centrelink.

TRIOLI: We'll leave the conversation there this morning. Dr Jim Chalmers thanks so much.

CHALMERS: Thanks Virginia.

ENDS