This is part two of our series on Treasurer Dr Jim Chalmers. Part one draws on his 2013 book Glory Daze to examine the measure of the man, identify his strengths and see if he has learned from his mistakes.
The good news about Jim Chalmers is this: he has deep government experience. That is abundantly clear in reading his 2013 book, Glory Daze. Chalmers has sat in committee meetings, cabinet meetings and IMF meetings. He knows it matters how a minister manages staff, how hard that minister works and how they relate to the department. His experience is not limited to opposition, where a good week involves managing one media person to get one quote in the press.
One advantage the Labor Party has is a steady flow of people with considerable government experience into its parliamentary ranks. Hacks, apparatchiks — call them what you will, they are more useful to governing stably (if unimaginatively) than what the other side has: a steady flow of former small business owners and former police officers running on a platform of taking common sense to Canberra (among whom a sense of how Canberra works is uncommon). This matters to getting things done.
An example that delighted me is Chalmers’ description of how Wayne Swan tried to boost perceptions of the importance of Treasury by having a photo opportunity with Ken Henry in the early days of his treasurership. “We resolved to put our department at the very centre of the action again,” Chalmers wrote in 2013.
Chalmers has borrowed Swan’s playbook. Just a few days ago he appeared in the pages of the Financial Review in a photo opportunity with Treasury Secretary Steven Kennedy.
Is that good or bad? His adulation for Wayne Swan in the book is so thick I suspect anyone who did not have a lot of time for Swan would barf. Chalmers breaks the great rule of writing by not only showing us how good Swan is but repeatedly telling us. Repeatedly.
(This is nothing compared to his PhD thesis on Keating, entitled “Brawler statesman”, which I have only dipped into but appears to be 100,000 words about how amazing at being prime minister Paul Keating was.)
Chalmers has been baptised in the font of Labor history. Not a few Catholic drops on the forehead either, but a major, born again-style immersion. He’s so pruny from the waters of Labor past that any reader of his book begins to wonder what he can offer to the party’s future.
So I read a couple of recent news items with pleasure. They show a Chalmers who has perhaps evolved and learned.
Beyond the numbers
One big criticism I have of the Chalmers revealed in Glory Daze was his insistence that the economic data told the true story. When there was a contrast between the economic data he was looking at and the mood of the nation — if data was upbeat and people were downbeat — he didn’t question the data but the view of the Australian people, believing they had it wrong.
Chalmers describes “a gaping disjunction between the national mood and Australia’s world-beating economy” with evident frustration. But as they say: the map is not the territory. Economic statistics are not the economy and neither is the economy people’s wellbeing. The biggest mistakes in economic policy are decisions made that will juice the economic statistics but not make people happy.
My concerns about Chalmers’ determination to make economic statistics tell the true story were but magnified by scenes of him celebrating economic data in a way that was, to me, unbalanced.
“This was as good as it got,” he wrote — without irony — about a national accounts figure showing a seasonally adjusted quarterly GDP growth of 0.4%, which meant Australia had dodged the technical definition of a recession. He describes scenes of staffers running through the corridors of Parliament House and giving each other high-fives. “It was a wonderful day for the country and for the government and one I won’t ever forget.”
OK, the government could celebrate dodging a recession on its watch, but the way the story is told in the book — without a touch of shame about hanging on the minutiae of the ABS estimate — added to my concerns about the centrality of economic data in Chalmers’ understanding of the economy.
Economic data can be wrong in multiple ways — by showing averages that obscure the experience of many people, or by measuring the wrong things. An example is a focus on unemployment at the expense of underemployment (underemployment is not mentioned in the book despite beginning to diverge from unemployment at that time).
With this in mind, I read with some pleasure a more recent news item.
“Chalmers looks at including ‘well-being’ measures in Labor’s budget”, read the AFR headline. Could this be a sign he’s come to appreciate that hard economic data doesn’t tell the whole story? One can hope.
A line from an April speech also reveals a Chalmers who may have mellowed his insistence that the Australian people be pleased about the economic data the government is delivering.
“Shouting louder and louder at Australians about how great they’ve got it and how grateful they should be doesn’t make it true,” he told the National Press Club in April.
He was using that line to berate the Morrison government, but it was exactly what I wanted to tell him as I read his book. Hopefully the line represents a belief, not just a rhetorical flourish, because a treasurer who is the servant of the people — not of the economic data — is one who will do best for the country.
