‘There Are More Important Issues’: Labor Treasury Defends Delayed Policy Costings Release

Shadow Treasurer Jim Chalmers during a doorstop at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia on May 11, 2021. Sam Mooy/Getty Images

Labor Treasury spokesman Jim Chalmers has rejected the claims that Australia Labor party’s (ALP)  leader Anthony Albanese cannot handle the pressure after the opposition leader abruptly left his press conference in Perth on Wednesday.

Albanese has reportedly brushed off several questions about Labor’s policy costings and whether it would post higher deficits than forecast. Instead, he argued that the ALP’s policy costings will be outlined on Thursday, two days before the polling day on Saturday.

“Our costings will be out on Thursday. They’ll be released at the same time, that the last time there was a change of government occurred,” Albanese said.

During the campaign trail, the opposition leader has come under fire for being unable to explain his own policies and has been alleged to have been duplicating the Coalition’s policies.

In early May, Albanese refused to be drawn on questions about Labor’s National Disability Insurance Scheme policy. He was also unable to provide details about the unemployment rate and the official cash rate in the first week of the campaign.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has criticised Labor’s decision not to submit any of its policy costings to the parliamentary budget office or to the Treasurer, saying that the opposition was trying to avoid scrutiny.

“Having never held a Treasury portfolio and having never ­delivered a Budget, the leader of the opposition is simply not up to the job of managing Australia’s $2 trillion economy,” Frydenberg wrote in an op-ed for the Daily Telegraph on April 12.

However, responding to allegations against the Labor leader, Chalmers said “the government wants you focused on the timing of costings or press conferences and all the rest of it in a desperate last-minute attempt to distract people from what really matters.”

“In that press conference [on Wednesday] alone, I think he (Albanese) took 18 or 20 questions. He‘d already taken questions after a speech earlier. He’d done a heap of radio interviews,” Chalmers said on the Today’s show when asked whether the Labor leader can “handle the heat.”

“What I am saying, is that there are more important issues than that—a cost of living crisis, real wages going backwards, a trillion dollars of debt in the Budget with not enough to show for it. These are the things I think that people are focused on.”

“It’s not about whether Labor releases its costings on a Tuesday or Thursday, it’s about whether people can feed their kids during this cost of living crisis on Scott Morrison’s watch.

Additionally, Chalmers said while Labor would consider extending the temporary hold on excise duty on fuel, which runs out in September, it will be difficult to “find the billions of dollars to extend that forever.”

The Queensland MP also praised Labor’s childcare policy, saying it aims “to treat child care support not as social security but as a crucial economic reform to get people working more and earning more if they want to do that.”

“We’ve got a labour shortage and a skills shortage in this economy, which has been left unattended. If we want people to work more and earn more, then we need to make it easier for people to do that,” he said.

“It’s not welfare, it’s an important way to satisfy a really key economic objective.”