Asked if Labor would have a “spendathon” election,Chalmers said:“I don’t believe so. Certainly not from our point of view.”
The treasurer suggested voters would reward the government for making the right economic call rather than spending money.
“What we’ve shown is a willingness to make the right economic decisions for the right economic reasons,and the politics,I believe,will take care of themselves if you get those big calls right,” he said.
“Even when you think about the last budget,I got a bit of grief in the press gallery about saying that there are not just inflation risks,but there’s global economic uncertainty. That’s proven to be the case. We’ve been right.
“Our judgments about the economy have been right the last couple of years,and that’s because we’ve prioritised good economic decisions over political decisions. And people can expect that even in the context of an election.”
On coming to office,Chalmers commissioned anindependent review of the Reserve Bank,the first in 40 years,which recommended a string of major changes including the creation of a separate committee to make decisions on interest rate settings.
Chalmers had hoped to have that committee in place by July 1. But the Coalition has questioned its membership,with some Liberal MPs claiming the treasurer would “stack” it with people less focused on inflation. The bank has not had inflation within its target band for most of the past 10 years.
According to Chalmers,the Coalition raised concerns around six key issues and he was prepared to give ground on each. They include keeping RBA governor Michele Bullock as head of the bank’s governance board,and flexibility around the length of time people can serve on the board.
He said he was prepared to negotiate an appropriate “landing point” on the board’s make-up with shadow treasurer Angus Taylor.
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Chalmers wrote to Taylor on Thursday offering to move all members of the governance board onto the monetary policy committee,in a move that would end the deadlock between the major parties.
“I’m not going to be pig-headed about these reforms,” he said.
“I hope that that means that we can come to an agreement and legislate these changes in time for a start,not in the middle of the year,which is what we had originally intended,but perhaps closer to the start of next year.”
A large part of the government’s agenda has been taken up with housing. The average Australian mortgage has climbed to a record $637,000,increasing by $154 a day over the past year,while record-low rental vacancy rates have pushed rents up at their fastest pace since 2010.
Chalmers said he was worried about the intergenerational and macroeconomic issues created by high house prices,arguing it was one of the reasons the government had pumped $32 billion into housing policies since coming to power.
“We don’t want this to be a country where finding a good place to live near where the jobs and opportunities are being created is a memory. And we don’t want it to be a memory,we want it to be a feature of our economy,” he said.
Listen to the full interview with Treasurer Jim Chalmers on a special edition of theInside Politicspodcast.