E&OE TRANSCRIPT
TELEVISION INTERVIEW
SKY NEWS NEWSDAY
TUESDAY, 24 NOVEMBER 2020
 
SUBJECTS: Melanoma diagnosis; Superannuation guarantee; Queensland borders; Qantas no-jab, no-fly policy.
 
ASHLEIGH GILLON, HOST: Joining me live is the Shadow Treasurer, Jim Chalmers. Jim, good to see you. Thanks for your time. We arranged this interview to talk about superannuation and I'm going to get to that shortly. First though, I'm sorry to learn that you've just revealed in the past hour or so that you've been diagnosed with skin cancer, a melanoma. What's the plan of attack?
 
JIM CHALMERS, SHADOW TREASURER: Hi Ash. Thanks for raising it. I umm'd and ahh'd about whether or not to talk about this, but it's a good prompt to remind people to get tested, especially if they see something which is a bit unusual. My plan of attack is to have some relatively minor surgery on Thursday afternoon and get stitched up and hopefully be ready to go after that. But my story is like many of the 16,000 or so Australians who will be diagnosed with some form of skin cancer this year. I noticed some months ago a mole which was quite black, much darker than any others that I have. I mentioned it to my doctor in passing two Fridays ago, and he immediately wanted to cut it out and have it tested. It was a melanoma. I was off to a specialist this morning at Greenslopes Hospital here in Brisbane. We've got some remarkable specialists and experts in Queensland as you'd expect. I'll have some more surgery on Thursday and hopefully that will be the end of the matter. Really the message is, to all of your viewers, if you spot something which looks a bit unusual, get it checked out; get regularly checked in any case because it is something that affects a lot of us and if you get onto it early enough you can get it sorted out and move on.
 
GILLON: You're a relatively young man, you’ve got three young beautiful children. It must have been a real shock to hear that diagnosis? A pretty scary moment, I'd imagine?
 
CHALMERS: The shock, and this is pretty common too when talking to others including my parliamentary colleagues Jason Clare and Graham Perrett and no doubt there are others in the parliament and right throughout the community, one of the things that really hits you is you shouldn't be complacent about it. The truth is I did spot it some months ago and I thought it looked unusual. I raised it in passing rather than specifically making an appointment to go and get it checked out. All of those things are mistakes. As soon as you spot something which looks a bit dodgy you should get it checked out. You should get checked regularly in any case. If you do that then you can be relatively confident with the expertise and the healthcare system that we have in this country that you can get it sorted out and you will be fine. Again, I can't say it enough to your viewers Ash, if you spot something unusual get it checked out. Get checked anyway and relatively regularly. Talk to your doctor about it. If you do that, then you will be fine, but don't wait any longer than you need to. 
 
GILLON: Okay, well we all hope that everything goes smoothly on Thursday and that is the end of it, as you say. Let's move on to some other issues: today your home state of Queensland has opened up its borders. Many are saying it's about time. We've also seen Qantas sounding pretty confident about interstate travel and getting back to a case of semi-normal. It's announced this plan as well for passengers flying overseas that they need to be vaccinated against coronavirus before traveling. Is that something that you support?
 
CHALMERS: I'm a big supporter of trying to make sure that as many people are vaccinated as possible. I know that in some parts of our community that's contentious but I think whether it's the Labor Opposition or the Government, we are in agreement that we want to see as many people get the vaccine as possible. Discovering the vaccine is one thing, deploying the vaccine in the community is another thing. The individual decisions made by companies like Qantas are a matter for them at the end of the day. We will typically be supportive of anything that gets those vaccination rates up. The broader story that you mentioned about opening up; obviously that's a very good thing. We can't be complacent about it. We need to be cautious about it but the more that we can sensibly and responsibly open up our communities and open up our economy, the better. We're seeing that in Queensland. We're seeing that in other places as well. Australians have overwhelmingly done the right thing by each other in the last six or nine months and we've done better than most of getting on top of the health aspects of this and limiting the spread of the virus. We need to be vigilant in an ongoing way but opening up is a really good thing, not just for the community but for the economy as well.
 
GILLON: Just looking at the debate over superannuation, that does appear to be getting traction after that report last week cast doubt over the Government's plans to increase mandatory contributions. How realistic, in your view, are these fears that plans to increase those minimum super contributions could slow the country's economic recovery from the pandemic? I know that you've cast doubts over the aspect of wage growth and the impacts of increasing super contributions on that, but more broadly are you worried that it could slow our recovery?
 
CHALMERS: First of all on the report itself, Ash, I don't want to give the impression that every aspect of that report is wrong. Certainly we have respect for the reviewers who put it together, including Mike Callaghan who's known to many of us. We think that that key conclusion, the one that you refer to, that if we freeze the superannuation guarantee again that we'll get miraculously the same amount of wages growth, I think that hasn't been borne out by recent experience. The super guarantee was frozen in 2014. The Government made the same claims that they're making now, that this will mean that we'll get stronger wages growth. Instead we actually got weaker wages. If you compare the six years before the last super guarantee freeze compared with the six years since then, wages growth was actually much stronger before then than it has been in the six years since then. The Government sat on this report for four months for no reason. Our fear all along was that they would use this report as a stalking horse for more cuts to super so that people will have less money to retire on. Unfortunately our fears look like they've been well-founded. The Government is gearing up to cut people's super again. They say it's about wages but if they truly cared about wages they wouldn't have overseen what has been the most stagnant wages of any government ever over the last seven-plus years.
 
GILLON: Jim Chalmers, I have a feeling that we're going to be hearing a lot more on the superannuation debate in the coming weeks and months. Thank you for your time. I appreciate you joining us on Newsday.
 
CHALMERS: Thanks for your time Ash.
 
ENDS