Treasurer Jim Chalmers channels Logan City and Paul Keating for Labor’s 2023 federal budget
The Treasurer admits growing up in Logan City gave him a chip on his shoulder. On budget day it was at the front of his mind ... just as it was for Paul Keating.
There are echoes of Paul Keating in Jim Chalmers’ second budget.
Chalmers, like Keating did, represents a working class electorate, and their needs and aspirations frame his economic thinking.
But he also thinks long-term, hoping to make his mark as an economic reformer.
Keating is unrivalled as an economic change agent but the verdict is still out on Chalmers, who wrote his PhD on Keating as a “statesman” and “brawler”.
However, along with Peter Costello, they are the only treasurers to deliver a surplus since 1952-53, according to the budget papers at the time.
Fiscal consolidation became a Labor article of faith under Keating. Chalmers seeks to reclaim it by banking 87 per cent of revenue upgrades across his two budgets.
While revenue and spending as a percentage of GDP is historically high, the structural budget deficit is heroically projected to disappear by 2033-34.
A few Saturdays ago, Chalmers was playing backyard basketball with son Leo when he received a text message from Keating. The former treasurer and prime minister had driven through Logan the day before.
“Very big now,” Keating texted. “I had one of those places for 40 years, Bankstown.”
Chalmers replied that he was raising his kids 900m from the house he grew up in. His mother still lives in the family home and the son often returns for a cup of coffee, with nostalgic memories. “This place means everything to me, in my blood and in my bones,” Chalmers replied to Keating. “All I want to do is make them proud.”
Keating represented the seat of Blaxland, in Western Sydney, from 1969 to 1996. Blaxland and Rankin have much in common. Keating moved to Canberra when he became treasurer in 1983. That working class community, and those people, never left him.
“I did everything I could to lift them up,” Keating texted Chalmers. “To do for them what they were unable to do themselves. It’s why you and I don’t need polls to tell you what they think.”
Every treasurer invests themselves in a budget, bringing to the task their personal experiences, values and principles. For Chalmers, Logan City, south of Brisbane, is front of mind.
“One of the great gifts that I’ve been given is the opportunity to serve the community I grew up in,” Chalmers tells The Australian in an interview. “My community has its share of challenges but it is a community of realists and they understand that we will do what we can to help them, but we can’t do everything at once.
“Growing up in Logan City armed me with a sense of pride that people from communities like mine can be the treasurer and that people like Anthony (Albanese) growing up with his background can be the prime minister. So, I hope it sends a signal to my community, and particularly to the young people, that running the country should not be just the preserve of people who come from fancy suburbs.”
Chalmers admits he had a bit of a chip on his shoulder, perhaps like Keating. “If you have the capacity to speak up for a community like mine, you’ve got a responsibility to speak up for a community like mine,” he explains. “That’s what Paul learned as a young fella and that’s something that I take to heart as well.”
Born in Rochedale South and raised in Springwood, Chalmers says the values of hard work, reward for effort, a sense of community and a commitment to help those less fortunate with a hand-up rather than a hand-out, is part of his DNA as it was Keating’s.
“Mum was a nurse and a midwife, she worked night shift for almost all my life,” he says. “My dad was a courier driver. For a big chunk of my childhood, it was just me and my mum growing up in Logan City. My mum worked so hard for me and for my sisters, and that rubs off on you.”
Rankin is traditional Labor. It has been held by Labor at every election since 1984. It is younger, with a lower median income, more multicultural with a greater number of constituents born overseas and speaking a language other than English at home, and more likely to be renters or paying off a home mortgage, than the average for Queensland and Australia.
Many in Rankin are struggling with higher rents and mortgage payments, and seeing the steep rise in inflation reflected at the supermarket and petrol bowser. The median weekly household income is $1610 compared to $1746 nationally. The unemployment rate for Logan is 6.5 per cent, almost twice the national rate of 3.5 per cent. In some parts of the electorate, more than 20 per cent of adults are unemployed.
Rankin is also the second highest electorate held by cabinet ministers for welfare payments, following Blaxland, now held by Jason Clare. Many rely on government assistance to survive.
Chalmers lives where he grew up, in Springwood, with wife Laura and children Leo (age 8), Annabel (6) and Jack (4). This accumulated lived experience and the personal stories of his constituents are reflected in the budget. “They’ve been front and centre,” Chalmers says.
There are a number of cost-of-living measures in the budget: increases in JobSeeker, the single parent payment, rent assistance, the youth and study allowances; energy bill relief; a 15 per cent pay increase for aged care workers; a boost to the GP bulk-billing incentive; lower childcare costs; and cheaper medicines.
Almost $200 million has been allocated for place-based strategies to help alleviate entrenched disadvantage in communities such as Logan City by better co-ordinating governments, service providers and philanthropic organisations. It is a passion project for Chalmers.
The treasurer also has an eye towards the levers of long term growth, efficiency and productivity, again following the Keating model. He has spoken about values-based capitalism, better designed markets and working with business. The decarbonisation of the economy is identified as a defining economic challenge. Keating led a reform revolution in the 1980s to float the dollar, lower tariff barriers and overhaul taxation. Chalmers’ reform agenda is just getting started.
Since the 1960s, as Keating understood, Labor has had to straddle two constituencies: the largely school-educated, working-and-middle-class, with financial pressures, living in the suburbs and often conservative, and on other hand, tertiary-educated, wealthier, inner city constituencies often motivated by post-materialist issues.
Chalmers says cabinet includes ministers representing very different electorates. Holding both constituencies, he adds, is the only way Labor can win elections. Keating did it 30 years ago, in 1993, just like Albanese did it last year.
“I have always rejected this false choice between doing something for the most vulnerable and being aspirational,” he explains. “Everybody is entitled to this sense of aspiration and upward social mobility. It is about making the middle class as big as it can be and making sure that governments are helping people by giving them the tools to succeed in life.”
