E&OE TRANSCRIPT
TELEVISION INTERVIEW
CHANNEL 10 THE PROJECT
WEDNESDAY, 7 OCTOBER 2020
 
SUBJECT: Federal Budget. 
 
CARRIE BICKMORE, HOST: We're catching up with Shadow Treasurer, Jim Chalmers. Jim, a big focus on stimulus here which kind of sounds like the kind of thing Labor would love. Can we assume your side will be supporting the measures through parliament?
 
JIM CHALMERS, SHADOW TREASURER: We certainly think the economy needs a lot of help at the moment. We're in the worst recession for almost a century so there's a role for government to step in and support people in their jobs. We've been really constructive about it. We'll certainly be supporting the tax cuts for low and middle income earners because we need that money circulating in our shops and small businesses.
 
WALEED ALY, HOST: I note your criticisms of the youth wage subsidy today. Given the pandemic has disproportionately hit young people - it really hit them hard, they've lost their jobs in very significant numbers - why would you oppose that youth subsidy like that?
 
CHALMERS: Waleed, we're not opposed to helping young people out. We're saying there's something like 928,000 Australian workers who are on unemployment benefits who aren't eligible for a hiring subsidy. That doesn't seem to be quite right so we've been trying to say to the Government that there might be a better way to go about it.
 
ALY: But you understand that if you subsidise everybody, it's like subsidising no one, right? By subsidising young people, you give them a relative advantage to get that job and there might not be that many of them out there. That's how you would do it.
 
CHALMERS: There are all kinds of issues with that, Waleed. I do understand the point that you're making, but there are all kinds of issues with that. When you cut it off arbitrarily at 35 for example, you're cutting into a lot of the workforce who might have young families; there are issues around whether or not the Government can properly police whether people are putting off older workers and hiring younger workers and all of those issues of churn. A lot of people have missed out on some kind of help. Frequently, it's the same people who've had their JobKeeper cut. We don't want to see them go back onto a JobSeeker payment which is only $40 a day.
 
BICKMORE: Speaking of vulnerable people in our society, women have been hit hardest in the pandemic. There's been a lot of criticism that there wasn't a lot for them in the budget. What would you have liked to have seen?
 
CHALMERS: One of the key omissions from the budget, one of the things that a lot of Australians are scratching their heads about is why they couldn't do something about childcare in particular. We don't want a lot of working parents, often mums, to have to make a decision about going to work when almost all of their salary goes into paying for childcare. We'll have more to say about childcare but that's one of the obvious omissions from the budget.
 
BICKMORE: Your big budget announcement this week would be to establish an Australian Centre for Disease Control, but given Australia's pandemic response has been the envy of the world is that the best way to spend the money?
 
CHALMERS: We can always do better. We're actually the only country in the OECD that doesn't have a Centre for Disease Control or an equivalent. We can do much better. We can be much better prepared. There were areas unfortunately, where we were unprepared. We were overly reliant on overseas supply chains for some of our equipment, the stockpile wasn't what it should have been. We hadn't run a drill for something like 12 years before this pandemic hit. We're saying let's have a Centre for Disease Control that can run those drills, manage the stockpile, interact with the states and with global best practice do all those sorts of things so that if there is another pandemic at some point in the future, we're better prepared.
 
BICKMORE: Right, Jim. Good to chat. Thanks for your time.
 
CHALMERS: Thanks for your time.
 
ENDS