‘I don’t do moderation, in anything’: Why Treasurer Jim Chalmers went on the wagon

This story is part of the Good Weekend: Best of Features 2023 editon.See all 22 stories.

It was early November 2020, and Jim Chalmers was getting a routine prescription from his family doctor when he asked the medico to examine a mole on his chest. “He looked at it and said, that’s a bad one, we’re cutting that out.”

A few days later, the GP phoned to say pathology had confirmed it was a melanoma; Chalmers would have to see a specialist. A second, more invasive procedure took place later that month. That same evening, incredibly, Chalmers went out and gave not one, but two speeches: at an African community event and to a Labor Party branch meeting.

It was the beginning of a “horrible” three or four months, where the wound kept breaking down. But Chalmers, the then shadow treasurer, didn’t let up. “I would be at work, and I’d look down and my shirt would be all blood,” he recalls.

One evening, after a long session in parliament, he went to Canberra Hospital and spent the night there. The next morning, “I got a cab [back] from emergency to the front of parliament to go to work. I’d been up all night and the cameras were there, and I did a door-stop.” His wife Laura would see her husband, whose hair is greying on the sides, on TV. “Some days … she would say, ‘Your skin is the colour of your hair.’ I was so sick from it.”

For a while, he attended question time with a Pico pump (which acts like a suction cap) over the wound, a drainage tube running into his pocket. “I’d be [standing up] asking questions and then I’d sit down and make sure no one could see all the wires under my shirt.”

As he relates this story one Saturday morning in mid-September, over takeaway coffee beside a freeway in his electorate south of Brisbane, he starts worrying that it might put people off. “Go and get checked” is the message. And no, he insists, he didn’t undergo any kind of existential crisis after the diagnosis. Yet the account is most telling for what it says about his extraordinary drive – and its flip-side, his inability to slow down.

“I don’t do moderation, in anything,” the treasurer concedes. “I’m always going 100 miles an hour. If I eat a piece of chocolate, I eat a block of chocolate. If I want to work in politics, I want to be the treasurer. If I want to go for a run, I want to run 20 kilometres.” Now a teetotaller, he adds: “It’s the same with drinking. I can’t have [just] one beer. I can’t do it.” On which subject, more later.

The cabinet colleague to whom he’s closest, Finance Minister Katy Gallagher, says it’s often between five and six in the morning when she gets the first message from him. “But I’ve had one at 3.38am … His brain never stops. It’s one of his challenges, I think, that he can’t switch off.”

At 45, the treasurer has emerged as the most prominent of the younger generation of ministers in the Albanese cabinet: a policy wonk, a gifted political communicator, intellectual magpie, sports nut and – surprisingly – hip-hop aficionado, with The Notorious B.I.G., Tupac and Snoop Dogg on high rotation.

Presenting awards at Logan Brothers Rugby League club.Credit: Paul Harris

The Australian Financial Review’s Power list recently ranked him as the second most powerful person in the country, after Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Labor’s national president and former treasurer Wayne Swan, for whom he worked for more than half a decade, says Chalmers “ticks all the boxes”, adding, “He is multi-skilled, a good writer, he understands policy, he understands politics and he gets the media. He’s got a good feel for people and he comes out of [working-class] Logan City. He’s got a big future in the party.”

Chalmers will need all those skills to navigate what he calls the “perilous white water” ahead, to counter widespread angst over rising rents, interest-rate uncertainty, bloated house prices and a cost-of-living squeeze, set against the backdrop of a global climate emergency and escalating warfare in Europe and the Middle East.

And those are just the short-term challenges. Longer-term, tackling intergenerational inequity, the implications of massive technological change and the energy transformation loom large.

Sitting in his Parliament House office one evening after a day of back-to-back meetings, he points to the clock on the wall. “Do you hear that?”

We both stop to register its incessant ticking.

“Very occasionally,” Chalmers goes on, “when I feel like things are moving too slowly, I say to Steven [Kennedy, head of the Treasury Department] or someone, ‘Wait a minute, can you hear that?’ If you focus on that for a moment, you get the sense that, even if you are here for a relatively long time, you still don’t have any time to waste.

“I am petrified of that. I’m petrified of getting to the end of the day and not having made the most of it.”

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Behind the wheel of the late-model family Kluger a few days later, driving around his electorate, Jim Chalmers appears in an upbeat mood. Again, all is not what it seems. “I see photos of myself, and I feel I look intense,” he says, when I remark on his generally sunny demeanour. “I feel like I carry everything around with me and I don’t compartmentalise.”

Does he mean he carries the cares of the nation, or the family? “All of it. I worry all of the time. I worry from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep.”

Albanese doesn’t seem to do that, I venture. “Correct,” Chalmers replies. “That’s his strength.”

Chalmers is highly media-savvy, so I find these admissions surprising. Most politicians put more of a wall up around their private headspace. But he says having agreed to this profile, he doesn’t want to be “half-arsed about it”.

Chalmers with Tyson Deen, the manager of his local F45 gym, after an early-morning workout.Credit: Paul Harris

As usual, he’s started the day by driving his body hard, with an early-morning workout at the local F45 gym, located at the back of a public car park near his electoral office. The place is comfortably grungy and there’s an easy, sweaty familiarity between him and the other patrons, many of them members of the local Pasifika community.

Chalmers’ electorate of Rankin, where he grew up, is sandwiched between Brisbane and the Gold Coast and takes in some of the most socially and economically disadvantaged suburban postcodes in Australia, though its outer areas are more upwardly mobile.

As the Kluger makes its way along the heaving freeways which cut through the sprawling, low-rise suburbs, he talks about maintaining a sense of place, even when focused on the big, national picture.

“It’s personal, it’s all motivated by here,” he says, gesturing outside. “Even when the national economy is going well and unemployment is low, there are still concentrated pockets of intergenerational disadvantage.”

This morning, he’s due to present sports awards to local clubs, but first, he wants to drop in on Nicky Pati, a beaming, gentle giant of a man, Samoan-born, who runs Spasifik Cuts, a barber shop/informal drop-in centre on the edge of one of those freeways. The pair greet each other warmly.

Pati’s business is men’s souls as well as their hair. He runs evening men’s groups in the shop and let one homeless individual sleep here for months. He’s also in the habit of shooting Chalmers random, morale-boosting texts, such as the latest: “Good morning Jim, I hope you well my friend. Just wanna check in to say thankyou for all you do brother. Have a wonderful day.” These local relationships provide an anchor, “some kind of ballast” against “getting knocked around so much”, Chalmers tells me.

Barber Nicky Pati sends morale-boosting texts to Chalmers, including wishing him “a wonderful day”.Credit: Paul Harris

By mid-afternoon, the sporting prizes have been distributed and we’re on the way to the single-storey weatherboard house in Springwood where he spent his teenage years with his mother, Carol.

It’s soon apparent where Chalmers’ ease in his own skin comes from. At 71, Carol possesses a ready laugh and an almost Zen-like calm. But she’s mystified about the source of the drive that’s taken her son to his current position. “It just blows my mind, to tell you the truth,” she says.

Chalmers grew up with two older sisters: Chelley, five years his senior, who oversees early childhood centres for the Queensland government, and Jenni, three years older, who works as a prison officer in the state’s north. (“Couple of control freaks,” Chalmers jokes.)

When they were children, Chelley, who wanted to be a teacher, would make the other two “play at school”. Consequently, Chalmers says, he could read by the time he started year 1. His father Graham, a courier driver, used to get his young son to read aloud from the local paper to friends as a kind of party trick.

Carol and Graham split when their son was in early high school. “It didn’t work out with Mum, but Dad worked hard for our family; he was a good dad when he was there,” Chalmers says. His sisters moved out of home not long after the split, leaving Chalmers and his mother alone. It rendered them exceptionally close. “He did go off the rails a bit when his father and I first separated,” Carol says. “We had a big fight and he said, ‘I’ll go and live with Dad,’ and I said, ‘Okay, if that’s what you want to do.’ But he hadn’t even spoken to his father, so that was the end of that.” She laughs. “We got on fine after that.”

Hearing this now, a slightly mortified Chalmers puts his head in his hands: “I don’t even remember that. Jeez, what a prick!” Sitting on the back deck, shaded by a large macadamia tree, he and his mother compare notes. Carol’s night shifts as a nurse and midwife left Chalmers to work out his own routine as an adolescent. “I remember you giving me the sense of, ‘You can go and do what you need to do, but you’ve got to get your shit sorted out in the end,’ ” he tells her, “like, you trusting me to do that – that no matter how much I ran amok, it would be all right at some future point.”

“Yep,” she replies. “Yep.”

With his mother Carol, a nurse, who says her son “did go off the rails a bit” when she and his father separated.Credit: Paul Harris

By the start of year 11, Chalmers was playing up at Clairvaux Mackillop College, recalling (without further detail) that “things could probably have gone either way”. He credits his turnaround to his history teacher that year, Norbert Greulich, an East German émigré who fired Chalmers’ imagination with tales of Europe’s emergence from the Cold War. (Years later, after completing his PhD in political science and international relations, Chalmers would write to Greulich, thanking him effusively: “You have always believed in me, even when I’ve found it difficult to believe in myself.“)

Chalmers began devouring books on history and politics from the local library and at the age of 17, became fixated on a biography of Labor hero Paul Keating, written by the late The Age journalist Michael Gordon. He identifies this as the moment he was “bitten by the politics bug”.

“Paul said when he was a kid that he saw Churchill and said, ‘If that’s the game he was in, I want to be in that.’ That’s precisely what it was [for me], seeing someone [Keating] from the outer suburbs bringing together the policy and the language and the heart and the head.”

Having found his mission in life, Chalmers needed to find people to help him get there. At Griffith University, he struck up a friendship with 18-year-old fellow student Anthony Chisholm, the first member of the Labor Party he’d ever met. (Today, Chisholm is a fellow minister and Chalmers’ closest ally in the party’s Right faction). The pair studied political science under Pat Weller, who recalls Chalmers as one of the two most gifted students he’s ever taught, the other being the brilliant academic and bureaucrat Glyn Davis, who currently heads the prime minister’s department.

As a toddler with his dad Graham, a courier driver, and aged about 12 with sisters Jenni (left) and Chelley. Credit: Courtesy of Jim Chalmers

Chalmers sought out Davis while at university, and after graduating with first-class honours went to work for him in the Queensland premier’s department, which Davis was heading at the time. (It’s a standing joke between them that Chalmers used to take the cabinet notes for Davis; now, the roles are reversed.)

Other mentors followed. In 2001, Chalmers travelled to Canberra to take up a PhD scholarship at the Australian National University, and the following year was hired by Labor’s then-national secretary Geoff Walsh to head the party’s research unit.

In 2005, he joined the office of then-shadow treasurer, Wayne Swan. He would remain on Swan’s staff, in increasingly senior roles, for most of the next seven years, through the transition into government in 2007, the tempest of the global financial crisis in 2008, and the bitter civil war that consumed first Kevin Rudd’s prime ministership, then Julia Gillard’s. (Swan was to become one of Gillard’s fiercest allies.)

Chalmers left Swan’s employ only once in those years, to work briefly as deputy chief of staff to then-federal opposition leader Kim Beazley in 2006 and, fleetingly, for then-NSW premier Morris Iemma and corporate outfit CPR Queensland in 2006-07. “There are quite a lot of bright people around,” Beazley says. “But there are some who are a bit more incandescent, and Jim is one of them.”

Looking at the list of men who played a significant role in his life over those years – Greulich, Weller, Davis, Walsh, Beazley, Swan – I suggest half-jokingly that he must have been looking for a father figure. “Half this building [Parliament House] is like that,” he replies. “I mean, there’s a direct correlation between people in this line of work and single-parent families.”

In June 2013, Craig Emerson, the then-MP for Rankin, revealed he would not contest the next federal election. By then, Chalmers had left Swan’s office and was increasingly working from his home base in Logan, running Labor’s Chifley Research Centre and readying himself for a tilt at the seat. But Rudd (who’d been reinstated as prime minister) had not forgotten Swan’s public condemnation of him, nor what he considered to be Chalmers’ supporting role. Word got around that he was preparing to block Chalmers’ preselection bid.

Chalmers with Wayne Swan, his boss for nearly seven years.Credit: Courtesy of Jim Chalmers

An apprehensive Chalmers finally gained an audience with Rudd, who would later write that the younger man wept, begging for his political future. This Chalmers has always denied. Albanese, who was also present, has kept his own counsel. (Chalmers doesn’t wish to revisit this episode, and emphasises that he and Rudd – who is Australian ambassador in Washington – now work together closely and “speak all the time”.)

Whatever happened in that room, Rudd’s opposition appeared to soften, and Chalmers was elected as the member for Rankin in the September 2013 federal election – the one Rudd lost to Tony Abbott. Chalmers had won a seat but was now on the opposition benches.

For the next few years, he kept a talisman in his wallet – a sheet of paper he’d souvenired from the cabinet room, stamped with official letterhead, “a permanent reminder that I wanted to get back in”. In May last year, with the defeat of the Morrison government, Chalmers – who had been Labor’s shadow treasurer since 2019 – got his homecoming.

“It felt familiar to be a treasurer,” he says. “I don’t want to sound hubristic but [having worked for Swan] was probably the biggest advantage I had coming back through this door … Other ministers were introducing themselves to their departmental heads for the first time, saying, ‘Hey, should we grab a bite for dinner and get to know each other?’ but I’d known [Treasury head] Steven Kennedy for 15 years.”

A month after taking office, Chalmers walked over to Treasury to rev up his bureaucratic minions, urging them to “get the whole place firing”. He told them: “We’re not here as some kind of think tank. I want to encourage you to have the same kind of mindset that I have, which is [using] this very powerful machine that we have here, winning arguments, changing outcomes, imposing ourselves … being the most influential part of a successful reforming government that builds big reserves of economic credibility.”

It was the kind of barnstorming speech you could imagine being delivered by Chalmers’ great hero, Paul Keating. (Chalmers had written his doctoral thesis, entitled Brawler, Statesman, about Keating’s prime ministership.) But while Keating launched into reform at breakneck speed on becoming treasurer in 1983, Chalmers is yoked to an altogether slower wagon – a government wary of overstepping its modest, first-term mandate, even more so since last month’s resounding Voice referendum defeat.

Paul Keating, Chalmers’ political hero, and Kevin Rudd, with whom there had been friction; today, the pair “speak all the time”.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Critics on both the Right and the Left continue to urge radically different prescriptions for the economy 18 months into Chalmers’ treasurership. On tax, for instance, one side would raise and broaden the GST, while the other would hack into perks enjoyed by the wealthy. Both camps are inclined to draw unflattering comparisons between the Albanese government and the reforming zeal of the early Keating era, irking Chalmers, who’s dismissive of what he calls “Austalgia” – his term for “nostalgia for politics past”.

Former Business Council of Australia chief Jennifer Westacott says she’s found Chalmers “accessible, courteous, extremely intelligent and thoughtful”. Yet she bemoans the failure to champion bolder reform, particularly in tax, competition policy and productivity, where Labor’s roadmap remains incremental and ill-defined. “At some point, the country has to come to terms with the fact that the tax system will neither raise the revenue we need, nor raise it in a way that drives the economic growth we need,” Westacott warns. A Labor insider, meanwhile, grumbles, “It’s not Jim’s fault, but he hasn’t done anything really hard yet.”

Commonwealth Bank chief Matt Comyn offers a more generous assessment, saying: “I’m sympathetic to the pragmatism that’s required in the political environment.” He believes Chalmers hasn’t “had enough credit for the fiscal discipline he’s shown” in unveiling a recent, $22 billion budget surplus.

Chalmers himself reckons he’s achieved plenty: brought down two budgets in 18 months, overhauled the Reserve Bank, introduced “tens of billions” of dollars in cost-of-living relief, raised the petroleum resource rent tax and tax on high-balance super accounts, and started preparing for future shocks through the release of the recent employment White Paper and the 2023 Intergenerational Report. “You can be a big supporter of Paul’s and the reform agenda of the ’80s while recognising that our job isn’t to photocopy their agenda,” he says.

When I ring Keating to get his take on Chalmers, he declares that “imagination is the key, imagination and courage”. “I think what Jim is probably doing is trying to imagine the bigger world, and working his way through it and being able to take positions with confidence. Because, in the end, to become the authority figure in cabinet, the cabinet has to believe you have the answers.” He admires Chalmers’ ability to “pull the threads of an argument together and give it clarity”. What he doesn’t buy is the Albanese government’s idea that you shouldn’t scare the horses too much in the first term, hoping for larger reform opportunities in the second. “I don’t believe any of that. No, no.”

Chalmers is careful in his response. “I care about what Paul thinks of me ... But I’ve tried not to get too carried away with the free advice I get [from many others]. If Paul was here right now, he’d be doing the energy transformation, he’d be adopting and adapting technology, he’d be focused on the care economy workforce, the Intergenerational Report, the employment white paper, all of the things that I’m focused on … All my stuff is about how we make our people beneficiaries of change rather than its victims.”

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One of Jim Chalmers’ biggest challenges is getting out of his own head. Sport plays a big part in that. Basketball is his first love (he worked early mornings and evenings at a basketball centre while at university) but he’s also a big Brisbane Broncos fan and will hoover up any sporting documentary to unwind. He keeps tapped into a circle of similarly sports-mad mates. Dan Walton, the former head of the powerful Australian Workers’ Union and a Cronulla Sharks fan, jokes that the pair have a “deep hatred of each other’s football teams”, adding, “Jim’s whip-funny, not too many people see that side in public.”

Australian cricketer Usman Khawaja (or “Uzzy”, as Chalmers calls him), a fellow fan of ’90s hip-hop, has become another text buddy after their paths crossed at Islamic community events in Brisbane and Logan. Khawaja says they banter about sport and politics but also trade thoughts on dealing with “high-pressure environments in the public eye”.

With cricketer Usman Khawaja, also a ’90s hip-hop fan.Credit: @usman_khawajy/Instagram

“He is always trying to understand the psyche of sportsmen, because deep down … he knows that in a lot of these fields, these things are interchangeable,” Khawaja says.

Indeed, Chalmers seems perpetually on the hunt for things that will give him an edge. He gees himself up before big, set-piece events by writing what he calls “affirmations” on slips of paper or in his speaking notes. A favourite is “Pressure is a privilege”, a quote of famed US tennis player Billie Jean King. He coined another at the National Press Club recently, extolling the need to follow the “pilot light of purpose”. (A snippy headline in The Australian Financial Review the next day declared that “Jim’s pilot light of purpose is yet to fully ignite.”)

Mid-pandemic, he began following the Mojo Crowe app, developed by elite mindset coach Ben Crowe, whose celebrity clients include tennis champion Ash Barty and the Broncos. Crowe, who’s since done some work with Chalmers, says he’s been “blown away by Jim’s vulnerability … He has been on a journey, I guess, as we all are, to make sense of his insecurities and crucible moments and to find his authenticity. I’d had a lot of very famous people come into my life, but I hadn’t had a politician of Jim’s stature ask for help in that way. It was quite humbling and impressive.”

Chalmers confesses that he suffers from bouts of imposter syndrome – a lingering unease he attributes to growing up in a household devoid of political talk or awareness. “I rolled into Young Labor and there were all these kids whose parents talked about politics their whole life, and I was so intimidated by it,” he says by way of explanation. “When I sit in the cabinet room, there’s like an establishment, and obviously being the treasurer means you are on the inside … [but] I still feel like I’m coming in from the outside.”

It’s difficult to square this professed insecurity with his unstoppable rise up the political ladder over the past decade.

With Finance Minister Katy Gallagher, his “sister from another mister”.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Finance Minister Katy Gallagher observes Chalmers as “quite an emotional person”, adding, “He feels things deeply and he ruminates on them as well. I think that can give you extreme highs; it can also give you some extremely tough times.” Politics can be lonelier than most people realise, she says. “It can be lonely at 4am at an airport, lonely leaving your family all the time, lonely sitting in your house in Canberra on your own, reading briefs for the next day. He’s been very generous to me, and I would like to think we are there for each other.”

Chalmers, for his part, calls Gallagher his “sister from another mister”: “She is the most selfless, considerate, collegiate, unbelievable colleague. The best colleague I have ever had – ever.”

As a father of young children, Chalmers has reflected publicly on the toll political life takes on his family. When we drop in at his family home, he heads out the back to shoot hoops with his eldest son, Leo. His wife Laura is a former press-gallery journalist who now works as a senior magazine editor for News Corp. The Labor power couple started courting when she was working for then-prime minister Gillard, and Chalmers for Gillard’s then-deputy Swan. As chance would have it, the nuptials took place in the immediate aftermath of another chapter in the Gillard v Rudd wars, which had triggered an exodus of ministers the previous day. Gillard and Swan were left putting a new cabinet together in one of the anterooms at the reception.

Of Laura, Chalmers says: “She’s the spiritual leader of our family – she is the hub and we are the spokes. She sorts the birthdays, the Christmases, makes sure the homework is done and keeps everyone happy and pointed in the right direction while doing a demanding job of her own. Hers is the indispensable role.”

Chalmers calls his wife Laura “the spiritual leader of our family – she is the hub and we are the spokes”.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Three years ago, Chalmers decided to give up alcohol, in large part because of the poor example he felt he was setting to the couple’s three children, Leo, 8, Annabel, 6, and Jack, 4. “I’ll try to say this without getting emotional,” he says. “For their whole life, up until three years ago, my main way of winding down was to drink beers and wines at night on the couch. And it wasn’t one or two. I didn’t want them to get to a certain age and think that’s what adults do every night.”

I remark that there was also talk of him “cutting a bit loose socially” (my words) around Parliament House. “Because I was drinking too much,” he answers, bluntly. Was it another reason for giving up? “Not really – I knew that if I wanted to do a big, serious job, I couldn’t keep drinking six or seven nights a week, basically.”

He says he was already on the wagon by the time the melanoma was diagnosed, but the aftermath of the treatment made it easier to give up altogether. “I find it hard sometimes, at the end of a really long or hot day, but [overall] it’s gotten easier.”

The children give him keepsakes for when he’s travelling, such as the small, green, laminated handprint from Jack, which lives in Chalmers’ suit pocket and sometimes appears on the lectern at a press conference. Annabel has snapped a hairband onto his wrist, which he’s not allowed to take off “ever”. (It keeps company with several woven wristbands, placed there by Indian swamis who have visited the Hindu mandir, or temple, in his electorate.)

Daughter Annabel, whose hairband gift adorns his wrist; in the backyard with older son Leo.Credit: Courtesy of Jim Chalmers

He picks up a framed image from his Parliament House desk, a photo which he took minutes before his critical debate against then-treasurer Josh Frydenberg at the National Press Club during last year’s election campaign. This photo shows the view from his lectern, on which he has placed a black-and-white shot of Laura and his kids bearing the handwritten inscription: Make Them Proud.

By some accounts, Chalmers can at times be a hard taskmaster, balanced out by his chief of staff Claudia Crawford; she heads up a 21-strong team and worked with him in Swan’s office. She has a “wonderful EQ/IQ mix”, he says. “You need someone who can give it to you straight, and she is wonderful at that.”

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Recent political history would suggest that relationships between prime ministers and treasurers have unique navigational challenges, especially when the treasurer is seen as a potential successor.

Kim Beazley makes a pertinent observation about the dynamic: “The thing I’ve found about treasurers is that once you’ve been treasurer, you don’t want to be anything [else in politics] other than prime minister. Because once you’re treasurer, you realise there is no job bigger than you, other than the PM – but you’re almost as big as that.”

Keating’s series of swashbuckling reforms in the 1980s usually had then-prime minister Bob Hawke’s backing, but not always. Keating lost patience with Hawke and would end up challenging him twice before seizing the top job in 1991. The next prime minister’s treasurer, Peter Costello, thought he had a deal with John Howard to take over after two terms, but Howard denied it, straining the relationship. Malcolm Turnbull, as prime minister, would complain about what he considered to be his then-treasurer Scott Morrison’s constant habit of “front-running” policies he was trying to get through the cabinet via leaks to favoured media outlets.

Chalmers, who shares a March 2 birth date with Anthony Albanese but 15 years apart – roughly the same age gap, incidentally, as between Hawke and Keating – says he’s absorbed the lesson that a stable prime minister-treasurer relationship is a critical foundation for a government.

Chalmers and PM Albanese. “I’m really determined to be … the kind of treasurer that I think Anthony needs.”Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

“I think deep and long about [that relationship] all the time,” Chalmers says. “One of the things that I’m really determined to be is the kind of treasurer that I think Anthony needs … And part of that is understanding history. Paul and Bob, in particular, but I think about Wayne and Kevin, Wayne and Julia, Costello and Howard … I think about all that a lot.”

In 2019, Chalmers briefly trailed his coat for the leadership against Albanese, in the wake of Bill Shorten’s shattering election loss, before ruling himself out as a candidate. I ask why he considered putting his hand up. “We’d lost that stinker of an election and, politically, the world had fallen apart … I basically spent four or five days thinking about the best thing for Labor and I concluded at the end of it, in ways that I am now quite proud of, that the best thing was that we get around Anthony, and that conclusion has been vindicated.”

Late last year, Chalmers flew a kite about scaling back the Morrison government’s forthcoming stage- three tax cuts, which had been criticised for their generosity towards high-income earners. Albanese let the speculation run for a few days, then made it clear the tax cuts would stand. Chalmers denies that this signalled a split between them. “I didn’t see it that way and I don’t think he would,” he says. “It was the early days of the government, and we were trying to give people a sense of the pressures on the budget that we were grappling with … I deeply understand, and appreciate, that everything that I want to do in my portfolio relies on not just the great relationship between me and Anthony, but the great relationship between him and the Australian people.”

Chalmers is inclined towards intellectual restlessness. “I find I get more and more needy for inspiration from places,” he says. He’s read all the prime ministerial memoirs but rates Malcolm Turnbull’s 2020 book A Bigger Picture the highest, for what he calls its “hinterland” or intellectual curiosity.

He’s written two books of his own, the first, in 2013, an insider’s account on the global financial crisis and his second, in 2017, as a co-author with former NBN head Mike Quigley about technology and jobs. Last Christmas holidays, he worked on a 6000-word essay for The Monthly, which came out in February, showcasing his aspirations as a thought-leader. Opening with a quote from the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, it was a personal manifesto envisaging a brave new world of a capitalism based as much on “values” as value, and calling for recognition that “economic inclusion is fundamental to the health of democracies”.

Well-received in progressive circles, it drew scorn from some conservative economic commentators, who, according to Chalmers, “caricatured it as some kind of far-left thing, when it was the opposite”. Some on his own side weren’t impressed either, feeling it distracted from the government’s core agenda.

“That was pretty rugged, to be honest,” he says of the broader reaction from the financial press. “I wrote a piece for The Fin [in response] saying, ‘What don’t you like about more collaboration between business and government, better-designed and better-informed markets and being more conscious about the economic opportunities of the future?’ ”

When we last speak, Chalmers has been reading On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times – a 2021 work by Canadian thinker and writer Michael Ignatieff that explores how people find comfort in music, literature, religion and philosophy. Ignatieff’s 2013 book, Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics, is one of Chalmers’ long-time favourites, a searing account of how the author was parachuted from a comfortable academic life at Harvard into the Canadian parliament, then catapulted into his party’s leadership. The experiment ended in electoral wipeout.

Why the attraction to these themes? “I like thinking about how people steel themselves, how people get through,” Chalmers says. “I love reading about the end of things, that Dylan Thomas thing, raging against the dying of the light … You know, every career has an arc and I like reading about how people think about the end of the arc. I don’t know why.”

All this suggests that Chalmers is keenly aware of the extreme vagaries of political life. If circumstances were to throw up the opportunity for a shot at party leadership down the track, would he take it?

Albanese has made it clear he wants to stay for two terms, should the Australian public want him. Whenever he leaves, there would be other leadership contenders, particularly from within the powerful NSW Right faction, and Chalmers’ toughest tests on the budget and economy are still ahead of him.

Keating says it would be improper for him to comment on anyone’s future leadership prospects but observes that, in addition to the “anointed prime minister … a leader will pick themselves out if they become the authority figure in the cabinet. And I think Jim rather prides himself on pushing the cabinet along.”

Chalmers himself says he’s so “engrossed” by his current role, “breathing it, every waking second”, that he doesn’t think about what comes afterwards. “I don’t like to tempt fate and talk about multiple terms … I want to be here long enough to bed down change. Down the track, I would sit on the porch happy if I was a good treasurer in a great government. If that was it, I would be okay with that.” Few in political life believe this is where his ambition ends.

He reckons his third (and final) book will be a reflective memoir, similar in sweep to Ignatieff’s bracingly honest Fire and Ashes. “Then I’m finished,” he says.

Finished what? The treasurer’s job – or politics?

“Politics,” he replies, adding, “it might be the same thing.”

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