JIM CHALMERS MP
SHADOW TREASURER
MEMBER FOR RANKIN
E&OE TRANSCRIPT
TELEVISION INTERVIEW
NINE NEWS BUDGET SPECIAL
TUESDAY, 11 MAY 2021
SUBJECTS: Budget 2021; one trillion dollars of debt with not enough to show for it; unemployment and underemployment; border closures; budget repair; women’s budget statement; business investment; population growth.
CHRIS UHLMANN, HOST: Jim Chalmers, with unemployment heading down towards five per cent, the welfare spend, what's not to like about this?
JIM CHALMERS, SHADOW TREASURER: Well, I think Australians have learned not to take too seriously what the government announces on budget night, whether it’s job forecasts or whatever it might be. There’s a big gap between what the Government announces and what they actually deliver. This is another budget defined by marketing, mismanagement and missed opportunities. They’ve spent $100 billion in new spending racked up, a trillion dollars in debt, still got real wages going backwards, still falling short of the Royal Commission recommendations when it comes to aged care, still haven’t undone all the damage of the last eight long years of this government.
UHLMANN: Yeah, but unemployment is at 5.6 per cent. You don't think that people’s experience of what's going on is that things are improving?
CHALMERS: Well, there are almost 2 million Australians who either can’t find a job or can’t find enough hours to support their loved ones. So, the labour market is still softer than we’d like. But yes, the economy is recovering. That’s a good thing. We welcome that. It’s a tribute not to Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg; it’s a tribute to the Australian people, who did the right thing by each other to limit the spread of the virus. That’s why the economy is recovering. The credit belongs to them.
UHLMANN: They did shut the international borders and that certainly, certainly slowed the spread of the disease here.
CHALMERS: Well, governments of all persuasions at all levels have made difficult decisions to try and limit the spread of the virus. But overwhelmingly Australians have done the right thing by each other. That's why the economy is recovering. The economic recovery would be stronger if Scott Morrison hadn’t absolutely stuffed up the vaccine rollout. The budget tonight was an opportunity for them to come clean about the costs and consequences of that. They didn’t take that opportunity.
UHLMANN: What about keeping the borders closed until the middle of next year? That seems extraordinary? Would you do that differently?
CHALMERS: Well, it all comes back to the vaccinations and to quarantine – the things that Scott Morrison refuses to take responsibility for. The budget tonight had some weasel words about when that might be possible to reopen. But it all comes back to the vaccinations. You can’t have a first-rate economic recovery with a third-rate vaccine rollout. But that’s what the Prime Minister has given us.
UHLMANN: He talked about the spending and the debt. So, we do hit a trillion dollars of gross debt in the not too distant future. The deficits don’t just go for the next four years. In fact, in the mid-term predictions, there is no point in the next decade when the Government posts a surplus. Could you do that? Do you think that any government could do that?
CHALMERS: Well, first of all, it just absolutely shreds their economic credibility. They’ve spent most of the last 10 years talking about a debt and deficit disaster when debt and deficit was a tiny fraction of what it is now. So, the Government's credibility on this is completely shredded. There is no plan in the budget for what they intend to do about these record levels of debt, which are many multiples of what they inherited from Labor. We’ve said all along, we've been consistent, the priority is going to be jobs. But you need to make sure you’ve got actually something to show for that trillion dollars in debt. I don't think the Government's got enough to show for it.
UHLMANN: And how would you go about cutting that at some stage? Someone either has to cut services or lift taxes. There aren’t any other ways that you can start to rein that spending in.
CHALMERS: Well, the first priority is to get the economy growing fast enough that the debt as a proportion of the economy comes down. That’s our first objective. At some future point a government will have to contemplate what they do with spending or what they do with taxes. My fear is, and I think the Australian people fear this too, is the Government’s pretending to be one thing before an election, we'll get some harsh austerity after the election if they're re-elected. They’ve been there for eight long years now. They’re trying to pretend to be something that they’re not now to get them through an election – a series of cobbled together political fixes and marketing exercises. If the Government’s re-elected and get 12 years in office, I think they’ll revert to type.
UHLMANN: The Government, of course, has been accused of having a tin ear on women. It has a women’s budget package this evening and $1.8 billion of that is actually on childcare. Do you think that the women’s package is underdone?
CHALMERS: Well, I think if this government really cared about the prospects of Australian women, they would have done something more substantial by now. We all know why they’re in this position. They’re using the budget as a way to address political problems, including an issue that they’ve got with Australian women. We’ll go through all the detail of what’s being proposed here. Clearly, we welcome more investment in women’s health services and in other areas. But we’ll go through it with Tanya Plibersek and others to make sure that what they’re proposing is the right way to go about it.
UHLMANN: The Government seems to also be assuming that there’ll be a big surge in business investment. Do you see anything in this budget that actually will spark that?
CHALMERS: Well, they’ve got an extension of the instant expensing measure in the budget, quite an expensive measure. But business investment’s been a problem for a really long time in this economy. It’s one of the reasons why we haven’t got that wages growth. It’s one of the defining failures of this government’s economic mismanagement. They’ve extended temporarily one of the measures that they had in the last budget. It remains to be seen whether that will work.
UHLMANN: What about population growth? Are you concerned in the long run, given we’re going to have the border shut for quite a long time, you may not get back to migration growth for several more years, yet in the short term that seems to have been okay? In the long term is that a problem?
CHALMERS: I think so. I mean, much of the growth in the economy before COVID-19 was because of population growth, in fact all of it was about population growth before COVID-19. It’s obviously not sustainable to have no migration for a longer period than is absolutely necessary. It's necessary in the short term to close down our borders to international traffic. But it won't be sustainable in the long term.
UHLMANN: So, in a year’s time you might be looking at this economy and running this economy. And some of the things that you talked about in terms of underemployment, how would you go about addressing that?
CHALMERS: Well, there’s two sets of issues here. Firstly, growing the economy in a sustained and broad way so that people actually get a slice of the action. That’s part of it, getting unemployment down, underemployment down. But there are also structural issues around people’s access to work, whether it’s long-term unemployment, concentrated disadvantage, skills mismatches, keeping up with technology, childcare, industrial relations. There are a whole range of issues that haven’t just been ignored over the last eight years, but actively made worse.
UHLMANN: Now, if the Government was attacking you over this, they’d just go debt and deficit disaster. One of the problems that you have is that you would spend more money in some areas. So, is it too much spending, too little spending, or just bad spending?
CHALMERS: I think it’s bad spending in some areas. We would spend money more effectively than the Government. We wouldn’t have these sports rorts and dodgy land deals and billions of dollars wasted on JobKeeper for already profitable companies, a billion-dollar spend on political advertising. What matters here is bang for buck, whether they actually have something to show for that trillion dollars in debt that they’ve racked up. We feel like they don’t have enough jobs and opportunities to show for it. We would do things better.
UHLMANN: So, the Treasurer has his one liner for his budget. What’s your one liner for his budget?
CHALMERS: I think it’s marketing, mismanagement and missed opportunities.
UHLMANN: Jim Chalmers, thank you.
CHALMERS: Thank you Chris.
ENDS
