JIM CHALMERS MP 
SHADOW TREASURER
MEMBER FOR RANKIN

SENATOR KATY GALLAGHER
SHADOW MINISTER FOR FINANCE
SHADOW MINISTER FOR THE PUBLIC SERVICE
CHAIR OF THE SENATE SELECT COMMITTEE ON COVID-19
SENATOR FOR THE AUSTRALIAN CAPITAL TERRITORY
 

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
DOORSTOP INTERVIEW
PARLIAMENT HOUSE, CANBERRA
WEDNESDAY 12 MAY 2021

SUBJECT: Budget 2021

JIM CHALMERS, SHADOW TREASURER: Only a Liberal Government could spend $100 billion dollars, rack up a trillion dollars in debt and still have workers go backwards. The thanks that Australian workers get for everything they've done to get Australia through the pandemic is a cut in real wages. It's not a recovery if Australian workers get left behind. It's not a recovery if Australian workers have to cop a cut in their real wages. It's not a recovery if Australian workers don't get a slice of the action. I think it says everything about this Liberal-National Government in its eighth year - asking for 12 years at the next election, that having gone through all of this spin and marketing and all the rest of it, we discover in their own budget papers, after $100 billion dollars in spending, a trillion dollars in debt, Australian workers are still being asked to cop a cut in their real wages. Now, in the budget last night, there were deficits as far as the eye could see. But there was a deficit of vision in particular. It's remarkable that the Government could spend so much money in such a short period of time and have so little to show for it. One of the problems that we have with the Budget last night, it was a massive missed opportunity to set this country up for the future in a way that lets working Australians get a piece of the action. The thanks that working Australians have got from this Morrison Government, after all they've been through, is a cut in their real wages. A big difference between Labor and Liberal, when it comes to the budget, is that we recognise and understand there is not a recovery if working families and working people are left behind. I will go to the chief next and then take your questions.

KATY GALLAGHER, SHADOW MINISTER FOR FINANCE: Thanks Jim. Well, this budget is a political fix. It's like the Prime Minister said to all his Ministers - look give me a list of all the problems that you've got, all the political problems we've got - and let's tick them off one by one. It was a Budget put together with an eye on an election, not an eye on the Australian people. And we can also see in this budget, secret allocations of funding hidden away for a rainy day for when it suits the Prime Minister. $9 billion dollars in decisions taken but not announced. And of course, reverting to type, their favourite way of using taxpayers money, which is to funnel it into grants and rort funds to use in an election campaign to win seats and do favours for their mates. And what we saw in this Budget is 21 separate, new or topped up grants programs, costing around $4 billion dollars. 21 of them. Now, this is their favourite way of funnelling money into seats they want to win, or MPs and Senators they want to reward or giving money to people they want to give money to. Public funds, and I'll give you two examples. The Building Better Regions Fund - since the 2019 Election, 90 per cent of that funding has flown to coalition seats. Well that got $250 million dollars of public funds funnelled into it. The Community Development Support Grants Program got an extra $50 million dollars. Again, 70 per cent of that, since the 2019 Election, has gone to Government MPs and Senators, to their electorates. So, this is the way they operate when it comes to public money. They want to pretend they're patching up all the areas they've neglected for eight years. The aged care system on its knees, here's some here's some money there and here's the money for childcare. And here's a special women's booklet - how lucky are we to get that? After abolishing it in 2014 and saying there's no need for a women's budget statement, the Prime Minister gets put under pressure by the women in this country and all of a sudden we get our own booklet full of a list of mismatch of programs. It's like he's gone to the sector and just gone what do I fund? I don't know, I don't understand actually, I haven't been paying attention. And they've gone well, these are some ideas - oh great. There's the Women's Budget Statement. But, when we go back and have a look and we'll do more of this in Estimates and in the months ahead, we can see that their favourite way of funnelling money - to their mates to seats they want to win, to announcements they want to make in the lead up to election, it's all there in this Budget. It's a political fix with an eye on the Prime Minister keeping his job, not on the Australian people. 

JOURNALIST: Senator Gallagher, on the women and what should and shouldn't be funded. What about paid parental leave in terms of Super being offered. It's one of the only types of leave that doesn't provide Super. That wasn't addressed in the Budget. Should it have been and will Labor be pushing for that change.

GALLAGHER: We will be making our announcements in the lead up to the election. That is one that we understood was going to be in there. I think there was a drop about it being in there and suddenly it wasn't. So, we'll explore that a little more at Estimates but it is something that certainly when we're looking at women's economic security, when we look at women in Super, we know that they have a lot less than men. We know that that's caused by having breaks from the workplace. And ensuring women have enough retirement income to retire on is and always has been a priority for Labor. But, it's over to the Government, why they dropped out that they were going to do it and then somehow backtracked and it disappeared from the Budget papers.

JOURNALIST: Is Labor having it both ways by complaining about debt and deficit, but wanting wages to be higher? Which would take more spending, not less. And how are you going to increase wages? 

CHALMERS: Well, as Katy has just outlined, it's not just the level of debt that matters, that matters. But, what matters is the quality of the spend. And this is a Government, which is absolutely addicted to rorts and waste for political purposes. This Budget was designed wholly and solely with an election in mind and not to set the economy up and particularly working people up for the future. And that's the difference between what we're talking about and what the Government's talking about. We think that the investment could have been made more effectively. We've said repeatedly, over some time, that there's been wastage in some of the Government's programs. If that money was spent more effectively, we'd have more to show for the Government's trillion dollars in debt.

JOURNALIST: Labor's fiscal strategy - is to spend more than the Government or less, you know (INAUDIBLE) Where are we up to? (INAUDIBLE)

CHALMERS: We think there are a number of opportunities to spend more effectively, to invest in the future of this country. Among the many deficits in the Budget last night, there was a deficit of vision. There was an inability for this Government to look beyond the next election, the difference between us and them when it comes to the Budget, obviously, the level of debt matters, the deficits matter. Their credibility is shredded when it comes to those issues, given the campaign they've run for much of the last decade. But we think when you look at the Budget, all of the rorts that Katy mentioned over a long period of time now. Clearly, there's a case to spend money more effectively, we measure that effectiveness not just by what it means for unemployment, but underemployment and getting wages going in this country again.

JOURNALIST: How much of a concern is it that there is no money for purpose built quarantine facilities?

CHALMERS: Well Katy and I were in the lockup last night and assuming that there was some big, glossy marketing brochure about quarantine facilities and it wasn't there. And that's one of the holes in the Budget. It beggars belief that the Government can spend $100 billion dollars, rack up a trillion dollars in debt and still not say anything meaningful about quarantine. Two of the defining debacles of Scott Morrison's Prime Ministership are his failures on vaccines, and he's failures on quarantine. The Budget last night was a missed opportunity to fix up the shambles that Scott Morrison has made of vaccines and quarantine. He didn't take that opportunity. And when it comes to vaccines, the Prime Minister has been out and about this morning, we are none the wiser on what his assumptions are about the rollout of this vaccine. It's been one humiliation after another when it comes to the Prime Minister and vaccinations. He made all of these promises which he failed to deliver, then he abandoned the targets all together. There are weasel words in the Budget about vaccinations. And nobody is any the wiser today when the Prime Minister thinks that the Australian people will be vaccinated so that we can properly open up the economy again. You can't have a first rate economic recovery with a third rate vaccine rollout. That's what we're learning. We are hostage to the Prime Minister's incompetence on vaccinations and quarantine.

JOURNALIST: Senator Gallagher (INAUDIBLE). What is your inclination about the affordability of the stage three tax cuts? Are you inclined to support them on what to pare them back (INAUDIBLE)?

GALLAGHER: Well, I think we've been saying for some time that we'll make our decisions about that well before the election, so people will understand exactly where we are on the tax cuts. I think this Budget says it all about the Government though. When we look at the LAMITO extension. They have extended it for one year, perhaps that's to get them over the next selection. But the tax cuts for stage three remain there permanently. So, our focus has been on making sure that those on low and middle income, get their fair share of tax cuts. But this Government has only extended it for a year and kept stage three permanently in the forward Estimates years. 

JOURNALIST: Senator, how do you think it's received with women that half of the women's special package is childcare? 

GALLAGHER: Well, it's a very old fashioned way of looking at childcare. I think any working parent knows that it's not a women's issue. I mean, how you care for your children is a shared responsibility across the family, but it has been used to bulk up for a headline how much this Government is spending on women's issues. But childcare should not be seen as a women's issue. Yes, it's affects how women work and the hours with which they work and as often as primary caregivers, but the responsibility around childcare is a family issue. I think the other thing about the childcare package is spending $1.7 billion dollars, but not expecting any significant productivity benefit, in terms of workforce participation. So again, it seems to me this is all papering over little political irritant problems they've got rather than looking at what is the best thing to get parents looking after small children into the workforce, working the hours they want on the days they want. 

JOURNALIST: The Government has found $17 billion dollars for aged care, but that's far less than the Royal Commission recommended. Will Labor commit to spend more on aged care?

CHALMERS: Look, we'll have more to say about aged care via our spokespeople, especially Mark Butler. I think it's extraordinary that the Government found $17 billion dollars for aged care and still fell short of implementing the Royal Commission recommendations. Clearly there are issues in aged care which have developed over the eight long years of this Government. The Government did some of what was recommended by the Royal Commission, but not all of what was recommended. There are a range of workforce issues in particular, which have been more or less ignored. So, we'll go through the detail of what the Government proposed last night. We can't have an ongoing situation in this country of maggots in wounds and people being malnourished. The aged care system in this country has been a disgrace for the life of this Government. They had an opportunity to fix it last night. They went some of the way but not the whole way. 

JOURNALIST: On the vaccines Jim - Josh Frydenberg did say yesterday that the assumption was in the Budget that everyone who wanted a vaccine will get to get two shots by the end of the year. He wouldn't say what number was but that could be around 30 million extra vaccines by the end of the year. Number one, do you have any confidence that we can get to that number? And number two, the slowness of the vaccine might mean borders as closed for longer. Obviously, that effects a number of industries - the tourism industry is already screaming about not having enough, I guess, of the targeted assistance going into the future. What would you do there? 

CHALMERS: There are a range of aspects to that question. I mean, first of all, we want the vaccination program to succeed. We want the vaccines to be rolled out quickly and effectively and safely as soon as possible. We want as many people to get vaccinated as possible. It is the key to opening up the economy. So we want it to succeed. When it comes to confidence, we want the Australian people to have the capacity to be confident about the rollout of this vaccine. But this has been a shambles from the beginning. All of this over promising and under delivering. On Sunday, we had the Prime Minister and the Treasurer contradict each other. We've had in the last 24 hours, the Treasurer and the Prime Minister contradict each other. It's remarkable that in the Budget, they had an opportunity to come clean on the costs and consequences of the Prime Minister's vaccination debacle. They didn't take it. We still are none the wiser. It's more confusing now than it was before the weekend what the Government's vaccination target is and what that means for the economy. And all of us know that we are hostage to the Prime Minister's incompetence on vaccines and quarantine. The economy will not properly open up until they get this right. They've given us no confidence that they've made any progress towards getting it right. Meanwhile, other countries are vaccinating millions of people a day. And we can't even meet the most basic objectives that the Prime Minister has set out for himself.

JOURNALIST: Senator Gallagher - on the public service, we've seen an increase in the numbers of public servants in the Budget. But one of the biggest agencies, Services Australia is seeing a cut. Does that show one step forward, one step back, what does that show?

GALLAGHER: Well, this Government's never had a commitment to the public service, right. They came in, they slashed about 13,000 jobs. Their consultants and contractors budget has gone through the roof and continues to grow every year. So, they don't really care about public servants. And one of the lessons we've learned from the pandemic is that when the pandemic hit, they weren't ready for it. The public service was under-invested in and couldn't deliver the services they needed. I think what we're seeing in this budget is an acknowledgment in the political fix up of the programs that they've got to have more people on the ground to actually roll the program out. Their ASL cap remains which is a ridiculous policy that actually costs the public money because it inflates - the work still has to be done, they just buy it from the private sector at higher rates. So we'll see. Services Australia, one thing we saw in the pandemic was waitlists went down, people actually had the phone answered and actually got a service from having more people in that agency. And so while we're seeing growth in agencies like PM&C and other agencies, you would have thought that the priority should be the agency that actually delivers, answers the phone to real people struggling trying to get their forms filled out and their money paid. So, I think that is disappointing because you take 800 out of Services Australia and the waiting times will go up, and the staff will be overworked again.

JOURNALIST: Population growth has been pretty slammed by the pandemic, there's been a few things in the budget to sort of help with increases to migration, is there enough in there to kind of help us snap back when we open the borders again? 

CHALMERS: Well, much of the growth, as you know, from before COVID-19 relied heavily on population growth. In the absence of population growth in the lead up to COVID-19, the Government's woeful record on economic growth would have looked even worse. So clearly, it's not sustainable for us to have closed borders for longer than is necessary. The economy requires us to get productivity and participation right, but also population. This is an opportunity to think deeply about what we want our migration settings to look like, particularly our skilled migration settings. There's no evidence that the Government's engaged in that rethink of what is necessary here. Clearly, part of that needs to be doing a far more effective job of training Australians for job vacancies. 

JOURNALIST: I take it from your comments on the LAMITO that Labor now thinks it should be a permanent or should be made permanent? 

CHALMERS: We're just pointing out the fact that under this Government, if you're a lower or middle income earner, this additional tax relief is temporary, but if you're the highest income earner, then you get a big tax cut a couple of years down the track, forever. And we're entitled to point out the difference in their approach. We have said and Katy said a moment ago that we'll make our views clear on income tax broadly, including these components of income tax, between now and the next election. We will weigh up all of these things against all of the other various priorities that we have. And when it comes to low and middle income earners in this country, one of the reasons why we support tax relief is because under the eight long years of this Government, working people have had stagnant wages. They haven't been able to get ahead they've been held back by a Government which hasn't made them a priority and we saw that again in the budget. Thanks very much.

ENDS