Change agent Jim Chalmers caught red-handed on Future Fund

Treasurer Jim Chalmers on Thursday. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Jim Chalmers has been caught trying to sneak away with the ­nation’s golden nest egg and seems a bit surprised, even hurt, that he’s been accused of theft and of trying to hide it.

The Treasurer can’t claim that he’s not really changing the fundamental priorities of the $230bn Future Fund in favour of Labor’s pet projects when in the same breath he declares it is change and it is meant to improve the fund’s performance and to do so in keeping with the major challenges Labor considers “we face as a nation”. It’s either change or it’s not.

“This is about modernising the Future Fund and making sure it serves our national economic interests to the ultimate benefit of the Australian people,” the Treasurer declared.

Of course, no-one, including Chalmers, has suggested the fund, which has built its original funding of $60bn to $230bn today and a projected $380bn by 2032, has not been successful. So, Chalmers’ new priorities are either change for change’s sake, which is pointless, or designed to direct the sovereign fund’s investment into specific sectors, which corrupts the fund’s intent and role.

It is here that Chalmers’ intentions are exposed: even he concedes the fund’s outcomes will be “improved” with the “modernisation” and his job is “not just to preserve what I’ve inherited, it’s to improve it”. And it is here former Liberal treasurer Peter Costello, speared Chalmers’ no-change argument, saying the new priorities “open the door for off-budget subsidies to be provided to pet projects through ­concessional debt or equity instruments owned by the Future Fund”.

“When governments direct savings to particular areas they usually end in political decisions that lose money,” Costello said.

In parliament Chalmers ducked and weaved as he derided questions from his counterpart, Angus Taylor. He’s lucky he doesn’t have Costello across the dispatch box.