E&OE TRANSCRIPT
DOORSTOP
CANBERRA
MONDAY, 31 AUGUST 2020
SUBJECTS: Jobs Crisis; National Accounts; JobKeeper; Josh Frydenberg’s lack a plan for jobs and the recovery; Aged care crisis; Anthony Albanese’s plan for aged care; Newspoll.
JIM CHALMERS, SHADOW TREASURER: This week we'll get the National Accounts for the June quarter. We don't need to wait for these National Accounts to know that we have a jobs crisis in this country. We have a jobs crisis but we have a Government without a plan to deal with it. We have a jobs crisis but we have a Government which says that we have to wait until the October Budget before they'll put forward some ideas for how to deal with it. Australians are tired of being told by this Government how bad things are going to get; they want to know what the Government is actually going to do about it.
This Morrison Government has a plan to wind back JobKeeper, to cut super, and to freeze the pension but they don't have a plan for new jobs in this country. It's a new plan which is desperately needed for jobs. We know now that a million Australians are unemployed and that the Government expects another 400,000 Australians will join the jobless queues between now and Christmas, but we don't know what the Government intends to do about it.
We have a Government which spends all of its time blame shifting and finger pointing. The Treasurer Josh Frydenberg was at it again this morning. This guy only ever talks about the Labor Party or the Victorian State Government, and that's because he has no ideas of his own for how to deal with this jobs crisis which has emerged on his watch. He actually said this morning that with numbers as bad as they are in Victoria, we can't wait any longer for a plan. The same logic applies to his lack of a plan when it comes to this jobs crisis in Australia more broadly. He is the sort of Treasurer that spends all his time chasing headlines and not enough time chasing jobs. That's why his colleagues have started to criticise him so openly in the newspapers in recent days.
This is a Government which is long on marketing, but short of a plan. We do have a genuine jobs crisis in this country. We need a Government chasing jobs, not just chasing headlines. Unfortunately we don't have that right now. This Government, which wants to freeze the pension, cut super, and wind back JobKeeper will spend most of this week telling us how bad the economy is and trying to pretend that it's all about Victoria. But I think Australians know, understand, and appreciate that it is long past time for the Morison Government to come up with a plan for the jobs crisis which has emerged on their watch.
JOURNALIST: Is now the right time to be playing with JobKeeper when [INAUDIBLE]?
CHALMERS: We've been saying for some time that JobKeeper needs to be tailored to the economic conditions. The economy has deteriorated substantially since the Government announced their most recent changes to JobKeeper. We've said that those changes should be reconsidered. We've made that very clear for some time.
JOURNALIST: Is there also a problem here though that JobKeeper is creating a whole bunch of zombie companies that are going to die anyway? At some stage that support is going to have to be reduced, isn't it?
CHALMERS: Our priority is jobs. The original instinct and reason for JobKeeper was to keep people attached to work, and to get them through the worst of the crisis. We're not out of the woods yet when it comes to this jobs crisis and this first recession in three decades. We need to be conscious of that. We need to be doing what we responsibly can to keep people in work, and we need a jobs plan to create new jobs for people to fill in the medium-term as well.
JOURNALIST: The aged care sector has been underfunded for a long time. This has exposed it. Would you support perhaps looking at the Medicare levy, increasing that, or some form of other levy to get through this? I mean, the Government has a huge deficit on its hands?
CHALMERS: The ball is in the Government's court in many ways; this aged care crisis developed on their watch and even with the plan that Anthony Albanese put forward last week at the National Press Club, we won’t be able to implement that plan as a Government for some time. The ball is in the Government's court. Clearly there are substantial issues in aged care. Too many people are dying because of the Government's failures in aged care. They need to deal with those issues urgently. Before we get to some of the issues around funding aged care in the longer-term, we need to remember that this Government has made all kinds of announcements about funding aged care but they haven't got all the money out the door. Anthony Albanese's plan for aged care which focuses on staffing, equipment, standards, and getting all of those things right is so important. Anthony Albanese has a plan for aged care. It beggars belief that after all of these deaths and all of these failures, the Government still doesn't have a comprehensive plan to deal with what's happening in the horror show that is aged care right now.
JOURNALIST: Just finally on the Newspoll today showing that voters are backing the Premiers over the Government in their border battle, what do you make of that?
CHALMERS: A couple of things about that. First of all, we haven't got too carried away with polls in either direction in recent months. That's because our priority has to be jobs. The most important numbers aren't the numbers in the opinion polls, they are the unemployment numbers and the underemployment numbers, the numbers which reflect the jobs crisis in this country. It is no surprise that Australians are tiring of a Prime Minister who chases headlines and not jobs, a Prime Minister who's there for the photo-op but not there for the follow through. Australians will be increasingly tired of that. This Government is always pointing the finger at the states, always talking about the Labor Party, and that's to try and distract from their failures in aged care which have cost lives and their failures in the economy which have cost jobs.
Thank you.
ENDS
