JIM CHALMERS MP
SHADOW TREASURER
MEMBER FOR RANKIN
 

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
RADIO INTERVIEW
AUSTRALIA TODAY WITH STEVE PRICE
FRIDAY, 17 DECEMBER 2021

SUBJECTS: $1 trillion in debt with not enough to show for it; Coalition’s secret slush funds before the election and secret cuts after it, which is why the Morrison Government doesn’t want a federal anti-corruption commission; MYEFO assumes the Coalition will get everything right when they’ve got lots of the big calls wrong; Despite the unemployment figure 1.7 million Australians still searching for work or more hours; Treasurer always takes the credit but never takes responsibility; Labor’s positive plans to grow the economy the right way; MYEFO silent on housing affordability and skyrocketing costs of living.

STEVE PRICE, HOST: The Shadow Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, has been kind enough to give us some time. Good to talk to you again.

JIM CHALMERS, SHADOW TREASURER: Good morning, Steve. How are you?

PRICE: Good thanks. Those figures released yesterday show that our debt will peak at around $1.2 trillion. That's a huge amount of money.

CHALMERS: It is, Steve. And one of the reasons why we don't have anywhere near enough to show for all of that is because the Government's got all this rorts and waste in the Budget. Instead of learning from the furore that they've faced over all of the politically-motivated rorts that they've been sprung handing out in marginal seats - instead of learning from that - the Budget update yesterday actually doubled-down on that, they squirrelled away $16 billion for politically-motivated rorts and waste. That's been their form for much of the last decade they've been in office.

PRICE: You've been around a long time, both sides do pork barrel.

CHALMERS: I don't accept that the pork barrelling that we've seen under this Government has been a feature of earlier governments. Even, in fairness, earlier Liberal governments haven't gone about wasting and rorting public money to the extent that this Morrison Government has. I think that's been borne out some of the independent analysis that's been carried out. I think that's one of the reasons they don't want a national anti-corruption commission, because they've taken rorting the budget to this ridiculous new level and we saw it again in the update. That's one of the reasons why we've got that trillion dollars in debt. It's one of the reasons why we've got deficits as far as the eye can see. And it's one of the reasons why a lot of that trillion dollars in debt Steve, was actually racked up before the pandemic. When you've got Frydenberg on later on, he'll try and pretend that it's all a consequence of the pandemic, when about half the debt that they've racked up was actually racked up before any of us had even heard of the coronavirus.

PRICE: Jim, one of the most interesting aspects of this for me - and I will ask the Treasurer about it - all of the Treasury assumptions, or the key assumptions at least, seem to - and this is analysis from Geoff Chambers in The Australian today - seem to be based on there being no more lockdowns and removing the majority of the COVID restrictions and reopening domestic borders. Now, none of those things are within the control of the federal government?

CHALMERS: More than that Steve, it assumes that the federal government's going to get everything absolutely bang-on when it comes to managing this pandemic. Whereas we know from the last 12 to 24 months that they've got key things wrong - like not ordering enough vaccines, not getting purpose-built quarantine, some of the economic support, and other issues. We hope that things unfold as the Government's Budget update predicts. We want to make sure that we stay on top of this new strain of the virus and that we can open up confidently and responsibly, but assuming that that will be the case, I think, ignores the form that the Government has the last year or two when it comes to mismanaging key aspects of the health part of the pandemic.

PRICE: Have you picked apart what happened with unemployment numbers? I mean, dropping from 5.7% to 4.6%, the participation rate up as well. The Treasurer saying they've created 366,000 jobs - well they haven't created any, but businesses have - is that figure something to be celebrated? Clearly, more people are in work, but is there anything in there that you found that might not be as good a news as what we think?

CHALMERS: Obviously, we want the unemployment rate to be as low as possible, that's self-evident. What those numbers released yesterday showed is there's still about 1.7 million Australians who are either looking for work or looking for more hours at work. Even in that unemployment rate, it captures a lot of people who are working zero hours in the way that they do the survey. We want the unemployment rate to be low, but there's a lot of issues in the labour market - insecure work, underemployment, stagnant wages, and the Budget update says that people's real wages will go backwards this year. There's a lot of issues that we don't want the Government to ignore.

I think when you do have the Treasurer on the radio in a minute, it's important to remember that he seems to want to take credit for anything good that happens in the labour market, but not take responsibility for the fact that we have shed in different months this year a couple of hundred thousand jobs because of those mistakes on vaccines and quarantine. So if you're going to take credit for the good, you've got to take responsibility for the bad as well.

PRICE: The wages growth, that's the thing that obviously the people listening to us are keen and want to know about. How would you get wages going up? I mean, inflation is obviously going to push it to a certain degree, but how would you get wage growth into the Australian economy if you were to win the election in March or May or whenever it is?

CHALMERS: I think this is a really important thing, Steve. Ideally, yesterday's update would have been about this - how do we help families meet the skyrocketing costs of living, and we didn't hear much about it. We got these assumptions about wages growth into the future. The Government has made 55 predictions about wages growth and 52 of them have come up short. What we say about that, is if you're serious about getting wages going again you got to come at it in two ways.

First of all, grow the economy the right way. That means more investment. That's why we've got policies around skills and training, cleaner and cheaper energy, better NBN, all of those policies.

At the individual level, you've got to make sure that people can turn insecure work into more secure work. It's actually insecure work and underemployment that's creating this problem with stagnant wages. So you need to empower Fair Work Australia to turn casual jobs into more secure jobs. You need to deal with issues like labour hire undercutting wages. There are a whole range of these issues that we've got policies out there on already.

PRICE: The other issue is housing affordability. I mean, we saw record numbers of profit, you know, prices of housing going through the roof in the last twelve months. How the hell is anyone under the age of 35 ever going to be able to afford to buy a house in a capital city in Australia? How are we going to fix that problem?

CHALMERS: It's out of control. Obviously, you can't walk down any street in Australia without people raising this as an issue. The regulators have taken some important steps when it comes to lending standards, which I hope will make a bit of a difference. We've said that our highest priority is to build more affordable homes, that's why we've got the Housing Future Fund and there'll be other policies that we'll announce between now and the election that we're working on at the moment. Housing is obviously one of those key issues.

Again, a big mid-year Budget update yesterday, and nothing about housing, nothing about costs of living, nothing about getting stagnant wages going again, nothing about the risks in our supply chains which are hurting businesses and pushing up costs - just more of the same rorts before the election and they say that they'll cut the Budget after the election but they won't tell us how. So I think there's a big risk associated with all that for Australian working families.

PRICE: We're in for a very interesting six months. Thank you very much for making yourself available during the year. It's been great talking to you. I look forward to catching up next year. Thanks, Jim.

CHALMERS: I appreciate it, Steve. Merry Christmas to you, and your loved ones, and your listeners.

PRICE: Good on you. Jim Chalmers, Shadow Treasurer.

ENDS