E&OE TRANSCRIPT
TELEVISION INTERVIEW
TEN NEWS
TUESDAY, 6 OCTOBER 2020
 
SUBJECT: Federal Budget.
 
PETER VAN ONSELEN, HOST: If Labor was in power, would you have spent as much as this Government during this pandemic?
 
JIM CHALMERS, SHADOW TREASURER: We've always acknowledged that there is a role for the Government to step in and support people's jobs and support people's communities in a really difficult time like this. Our issue is with the effectiveness of this spend. It's quite remarkable that in this budget the Government's racked up a trillion dollars in debt, but there's still no long-term vision for the country.
 
VAN ONSELEN: So where should the debt be going if you're not happy with where it is?
 
CHALMERS: I'll give you one example, you think about the hiring subsidy that the Government announced today. What they don't want people to know is that 928,000 Australian workers who are currently on unemployment benefits aren't even eligible for that hiring subsidy. That's clearly something which is concerning to us. There are issues in superannuation that we are worried about and we'll take our time to work through the detail. But overall, there are some things we can support. The main issue we have is a trillion dollars of debt without the bang for the buck you'd expect.
 
VAN ONSELEN: And you'd also keep JobSeeker and JobKeeper higher than what they're leaving them, where would you take money away to do all those things, or would you just have more debt?
 
CHALMERS: We've had a series of pork barrelling scandals, we've had a series of rorts, we've had a Liberal Party donor paid $30 million for a $3 million dollar parcel of land -
 
VAN ONSELEN: But that's chump change compared to the billions we're talking about.
 
CHALMERS: But the point that we're making is the Government's not good at spending this money effectively. A trillion dollars in debt, no long-term plan and unemployment is still expected to be higher in four years’ time than what it was before COVID-19. There’s still no plan for childcare and still people left out in this budget. Our concern is the effectiveness of the spend. We don't think it's fair.
 
VAN ONSELEN: Are you comfortable with four years from now them projecting a deficit of sixty-seven billion dollars? It seems high.
 
CHALMERS: It remains to be seen. The budget actually has, for ten years, quite sizable deficits. That's pretty remarkable when you consider that Morrison and Frydenberg said that they had already got the budget back into surplus. Clearly that hasn't proven to be the case and they need to explain that.
 
VAN ONSELEN: I asked the Treasurer this and I'll ask you: do you think you're going to ever see a surplus budget in your political career now?
 
CHALMERS: It's hard to imagine. It rests on the fact that we need to get this economy growing much faster in the recovery. We need to kickstart the recovery. That means getting cleaner and cheaper energy, doing more to turn our ideas into jobs, it means teaching and training our people for technological change. What we really need to do is turbocharge and kick-start this recovery and get the place growing in a sustainable way. If we do that, we can fix the Budget.
 
VAN ONSELEN: So, if this was a Jim Chalmers not a Josh Frydenberg budget, what would the centrepiece of it be?
 
CHALMERS: I think energy policy certainly is a big part of the story here, the lack of it has meant there hasn't been enough business investment -
 
VAN ONSELEN: You guys don't even have a target.
 
CHALMERS: What's required here and when I talk to business right around Australia, what they really want, is some stability in policy. They  want to invest in cleaner and cheaper energy but they're worried that the Government's had 22 policies in the last seven years. Nothing in the budget undoes the damage caused by that uncertainty.
 
VAN ONSELEN: Jim Chalmers, appreciate your time.
 
CHALMERS: Thanks very much.
 
ENDS