The Treasurer has been preparing for the job for more than 20 years, including an apprenticeship for Wayne Swan, but not everyone is convinced of his budget credentials.
As in the lead-up to his first budget last October, the Treasurer told the tight-knit group he was thinking of the years of hard grind in the last federal Labor government, elected as the global financial crisis began to surge.“He has never forgotten where he’s come from,” one person who received the message toldCharged with delivering a budget to bolster the economy amid new international headwinds, Chalmers is determined to deliver on Labor’s promise not to leave vulnerable Australians behind.
“I always thought he was good company, and he always excelled, but it’d be a stretch to say I thought he was going to end up being Treasurer and that I’d be in the Senate,” Chisholm says.“He obviously has experience seeing things up close. I think he also a good sense of what he would want to do differently, having learned from those experiences.
“He learned a tremendous amount from the period. I think he’s been able to apply those lessons, being so close to decision-making previously, I think it means the government and the country are better off as a result.”Former staffer Ryan Liddell describes Chalmers’ time in Swan’s office as the best training for the Herculean budget process, including understanding the guardrails, the role of Treasury and cabinet’s powerful expenditure review committee.
Chalmers was part of Bill Shorten’s top-end-of-town attacks during the 2019 election campaign, and previously pushed for the expensive JobKeeper program to be retained. HeDespite talking big on the need for fiscal discipline, Chalmers’ first budget delivered $9.8 billion more in new spending than new saving, funded from the economy delivering the budget an extra $52.4 billion.
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