JIM CHALMERS MP
SHADOW TREASURER
MEMBER FOR RANKIN

E&OE TRANSCRIPT 
PODCAST INTERVIEW
NEW POLITICS
SATURDAY, 12 FEBRUARY 2022
 
SUBJECTS: Labor’s plan for an economy and society that is stronger after COVID than it was before; Morrison Government’s generational debt without a generational dividend; Morrison Government’s incompetence and complacency risks cruelling the recovery for workers and small businesses; Labor successfully amending the Religious Discrimination legislation to help protect children;  Australians deserve so much more than a second decade of wage stagnation, rorts and waste; Anthony Albanese and Labor believe this election is about whether Australia can be better, stronger and more inclusive.
 

EDDY JOKOVICH, HOST: The economy's going to feature strongly in the next federal election – as it always does – and Australia is facing some challenging economic issues going into the future. Jim Chalmers is the federal member for the seat of Rankin in Queensland. He's been in Parliament since 2013, and he's also the Shadow Treasurer who will need to convince the electorate about Labor's economic credentials. Jim Chalmers, welcome to New Politics.

JIM CHALMERS, SHADOW TREASURER: Thanks for having me on your show, Eddy.

JOKOVICH: There's a federal election coming up soon and you're the Shadow Treasurer hoping to become the actual Treasurer. What are the key economic issues that you'll be running with this year?

CHALMERS: I think wages are the most important thing, Eddy. That's because wage stagnation has been a feature of the economy - not just the last couple of years through the pandemic - but for much of the last decade that the Coalition has been in office. I think what really turbocharges that as an economic challenge is the fact that we've got cost of living going through the roof now as well.

Ordinary working people are going backwards at the same time as the Government's crowing about the economy and about the recovery. I think the difference between us and them is we want the economy and the recovery to work for everyone, and not just be some kind of abstract recovery on a page that's celebrated for political purposes. It's not a real recovery unless ordinary working people who work hard can get ahead.

JOKOVICH: Just looking at some of the figures, the big issues that usually surround the Labor Party when they're in government are debt and deficits. When Labor lost the election in 2013, national government net debt was $175 billion. In August 2021, after eight years of Coalition government, it was $626 billion, and it's more than likely to be a little bit higher than that. Political parties of all persuasions, they'll try and claim that the government has got national debt too high, and it's not managing the finances very well. But in the current circumstances of a pandemic, is this high level of debt necessary? Should we be going further into debt? Or should government start paying down these debts as soon as possible?

CHALMERS: I think what really matters here is what we've got to show for all that debt. When debt was a fraction of what it is now, the Liberals and Nationals said it was a disaster. Now it’s at some multiples of that and they say it's manageable - and much of that debt was accumulated even before COVID-19. That's the context.

I think what matters here is we've got this generational debt but we haven't got a generational dividend from it. It's not like the Government borrowed and got this remarkable, ongoing economic dividend from it, a lot of it is poor quality spending. You think about the sports rorts, or the car park rorts, or the dodgy land deals, or JobKeeper which was given to companies that were already profitable, you think about the billions of dollars that the submarines debacle will cost the Budget – all those sorts of things. There's two things here: quality of the debt; quantity of the debt. The quantity of debt matters, but not having something to show for it, I think matters more.

JOKOVICH: Just looking a little bit at economic history – because our audience does like to know a little bit more about that than just the day-to-day political process - governments didn't spend enough money in the Depression era during the 1930s, and that caused great hardship for many people in the community. In the post-war era, all the way through to the end of the 1970s, that was influenced by Keynesian economics – governments were only too happy to spend money and not too many people at the time were complaining about government debt. Since the 1980s, we’ve had a focus on supply side economics, taking way too much from that relationship between the economy and people that actually make up that economy. As you know, economic thinking does go up and down in cycles. We've had 40 years of neoliberalism – before that, 30 to 40 years of Keynesian economic thinking - and we've probably reached the end of one of those economic cycles. Do you think that it's time for new economic thinking that we could use to address some of those economic problems that we've got at the moment?

CHALMERS: I think so, Eddy. I'm attracted to the thinking by Mariana Mazzucato, this idea that government in partnership with business can invest in ways that we get these long term economic dividends. I think that's the kind of thinking we should be involved in now. A lot of our policies, in some way or another, interact with the idea that there's a role for government - not to direct all aspects of the economy - but to work with the private sector, to co-invest with the private sector, in areas like the care economy, or advanced manufacturing and the like. But I think that history is really important, and I think it's really instructive. You think about the mistakes made during the Great Depression. You think about the failure of 40 years of trickle-down neoliberalism around the world, but particularly in Thatchers’ Britain and Reagan's America, the downsides of that, particularly from a human perspective, but also from an economic perspective.

The period that impacted me the most was during the Global Financial Crisis. I was working in various senior roles for the Rudd and Gillard Governments in the Treasurer's office. One of the lessons we tried to learn from earlier periods, was that yes it matters how you intervene in the economy when it's at its lowest ebb, but it also matters how you withdraw that support, and if you do it too quickly it can cruel the recovery. I think that's one of the lessons that hasn't been learned by this current government, in the aftermath of the first recession in almost three decades. You need to make sure that as the economy recovers, you actually secure that recovery, and one of the ways you do that is to make sure you're not leaving people and small businesses behind by prematurely – for political reasons – turning off the important support on the economy. So yes, you need to learn the lessons from history, we have tried to do that. I'm not sure that the current government understands some of those lessons that have been learned over the past 100 years or so.

JOKOVICH: Economic policy plays a part in virtually every sector of the community, and there's so many areas at the moment that seem to have been neglected over the past decade. I'm not suggesting that the country is falling apart at the seams – but so many issues seem to have been overlooked. There's women's safety issues, there's the funding of the NDIS, there's climate change, there's the management of the pandemic, and a lot of these issues seem to be moving very slowly or going backwards. And Labor, based on what it has been announcing over the past two or three years, seems to be keen to address many of these issues. But if you do go on to win the next election, will Labor be limited in what it can hope to achieve, given the state of the economy at the moment.

CHALMERS: I think we need to recognise that you can't have a good economy without a good society. A lot of those other issues that you raise are crucial, in overarching terms but also in terms of the economy. You think about issues of security - whether it's personal security, energy security, national security - these are all absolutely critical to economic security. So yes, we would take a broader view. And if there's one lesson that we should have learned from the pandemic, it’s that you can't have a healthy economy without healthy people and healthy communities. So I think that is arguably the key conclusion.

In terms of how ambitious or how broad ranging a new Labor Government would be under Anthony Albanese - obviously, we will be ambitious, but we also need to recognise that a lot of these issues that have festered in our communities and in our economy over the last decade or so of the Liberals and Nationals in charge in Canberra, they can't be undone or fixed - certainly in a first Budget of a Labor Government, arguably in a first term. So we've got to work out what we care about most and what we want to address first. We can be ambitious without pretending that we can kind of fix 100 or 200 problems in the first 100 days in office, so we need to be realistic about that as well.

JOKOVICH: Build back better. That's the theme that Labor has been pushing over the past few months – I've seen the posters and I've seen some of the stickers – and I guess that's something that you will be pushing during the election campaign. The Coalition was pushing that idea of the ‘snap back’ for the economy during the early stages of the pandemic. The world has changed dramatically over the past two years, and most of us will probably never see change like this again in our lives. It might not be possible for the economy to “snap back” to the way that things used to be but, for the Labor Party, what is build back better, and what does it actually look like?

CHALMERS: Build back better means an economy and a society which is stronger after COVID-19 than it was before. It's a major difference between the parties because we think Australia can do better than go back to all the wage stagnation, and job insecurity, and flatlining living standards, and weak business investment, and all the rest of it, which has characterised the economy for that period before the pandemic. A lot of these problems in our economy, the Government wants to pretend they just appeared in January of 2020 and they couldn't do anything about it.

People who have a proper understanding of the pandemic know that it just turbocharged some of the existing weaknesses that we had in the economy, particularly around the people-facing part of the economy. So for us, build back better means trying to ensure that as the economy recovers, that recovery works for everyone - it doesn't leave people behind and we do better than have all of that wage stagnation and economic insecurity which had characterised the six or eight years before any of us had even heard of the Coronavirus.

JOKOVICH: And just to question on a matter outside your portfolio, the Religious Discrimination Bill. I had to ask because it's been the talk of the parliament for most of this week. Why did Labor decide to support the bill. I do realise that you put in those amendments to protect the rights of transgender people, but I've heard no one in the community asking for such a Bill in the first place and it seems to be more of an esoteric wishlist from the Prime Minister more than anything else. Would have just been better for Labor to fully oppose the bill?

CHALMERS: Our big priority there - and certainly my big priority – was how do we make sure that we get the genuine protections for people who want to practice their faith - you think about Muslim women, for example, who want to be able to wear a hijab without the risk of being discriminated against. I think that's an important principle and some parts of the bill are very, very supportable from a progressive point of view. So we wanted to make sure that we could have those kinds of protections for people right across the faiths, without making life harder - or making it easier to discriminate against, for example, transgender kids. So everyone in our team wanted to try and find a way that we could protect the kids and introduce some issues around racial vilification and some of the other legal and constitutional issues.

We decided we wanted to fix those, and if we could fix those then we could get the faith-based protections at the same time as we could protect kids, especially trans kids, but also deal with some of these other sorts of issues. It's an on-balance call, and I know that in the community there's a range of views, obviously, as there are in the parliament and in the parties themselves. But in that all-night sitting, we had a big win when we were able to convince some elements of the Liberal Party to come over, particularly on those protections for kids and trans kids especially. So I think, in lots of ways, that's a vindication of the position that we took. We anticipated at that point that the fight would move to the Senate, where we could try and strike a better balance and get a better bill than the Government was proposing.

But the Government ran for the hills, they were more interested in some kind of political outcome than actually protecting people from discrimination. So our understanding is that they've now shelved the bill, so there won't be a bill at all. For those people who didn't want to see the bill proceed, that's effectively the outcome that we have now. We did our best for trans kids and for kids more broadly, and to try and combat racial vilification in a way that maintains some of the useful parts of the bill from a progressive point of view. Now it seems like that all-night sitting was effectively for nothing, because the Government doesn't even have the guts to bowl the bill up in the Senate. That's where we're at now.

JOKOVICH: Jim, you're a member of the federal Labor Caucus, so I’d expect that you’d understand the Labor history a little bit. But 50 years ago in 1972, Labor's election slogan was “It's Time”. Labor won that election and ended 23 years of Coalition government. You've been in Opposition for almost nine years and, unfortunately for you, all of your parliamentary career has been in Opposition…

CHALMERS:…every day!…

JOKOVICH: …and you've realised that it's not much fun being in Opposition. Elections are always difficult to win, especially from Opposition. But if it's going to be “time” for Labor in 2022, what else do you need to do to make sure that you can get there?

CHALMERS: I think it's really two things. I heard the Prime Minister say the other day, elections are not a referendum on the Government's performance, it's a choice. I think your listeners would understand, and the broader community would understand, that it's both. People have worked Scott Morrison out - just like his colleagues have, sending those character assessments around about how he's, I think, temperamentally incapable of taking the responsibilities of leadership. So it's partly a referendum on Scott Morrison and his temperament and his failures, essentially, over the last couple of years. But it is also genuinely a choice, and the reason we talk about a better future is because we feel like the Government has basically vacated the field. They think about kind of one headline to another, one news bulletin to another, without a big plan for the country.

The country deserves better. The people who've made so many sacrifices for each other to get through the pandemic, the thanks that they get can't be another second decade of stagnant wages and all these other things we've been talking about. That's why we want cleaner and cheaper, renewable energy. It's why we want a better NBN, when we've got an economy where more people are working for home. We want free TAFE where there are skill shortages and more uni places. We want more accessible child care. We want a future made in Australia, particularly when it comes to advanced manufacturing and the care economy and all the rest of it. This is our forward agenda. 

You think about the wonderful campaign that Gough and his colleagues ran in 1972, it was an opportunity for the country to think about how it could be bigger, and more successful, and more inclusive in the future than it was in the past. So there are parallels here. just like there are parallels with ’83 and 2007.

This election is about whether or not we can do better as a country, and be fairer, and more inclusive, and more sustainable, and all of that. This is what the election is about - partly a referendum, partly a choice. One of the reasons that gives us confidence, but not complacency, is because we think there's an appetite in the community, just like there was in those other inflection points in our political history, for something better and something more inclusive. I think Anthony and our team is uniquely placed at this moment to provide it.

JOKOVICH: Jim Chalmers, thanks for your time today.

CHALMERS: Much appreciated Eddy, I'll talk to you again soon.

ENDS