Albanese Ally Murray Watt Admits Labor Team Is Leaking Against Chalmers

Murray Watt didn't dodge. Asked in Canberra whether he wanted the undermining and leaking aimed at Jim Chalmers to end, the environment minister said: 'Yes, I would.' Ministers were in the capital to find budget cuts, but the treasurer's internal problems walked into the room with them.

Watt, a senior supporter of Anthony Albanese, framed the leak campaign as an open secret. 'I think it's pretty obvious that there's all sorts of people making all sorts of comments,' he said, calling Chalmers 'an excellent job as a treasurer in what are very difficult economic times.'

The bad blood has been building for weeks. A run of newspaper stories has exposed caucus tensions over Labor's economic management while the Reserve Bank keeps hiking interest rates to fight inflation. This masthead reported last month that MPs blamed a mix of real concern over near-record spending, ideological opponents in the media, midterm grumbling and factional gripes from Chalmers' internal critics.

Chalmers isn't factionally aligned with Albanese, and his allies have previously argued the prime minister's senior backers did little to push back on the criticism. On the Inside Politics podcast two weeks ago he offered a partial mea culpa, admitting his budget measures were causing pain, saying he 'should make more time for my colleagues' despite being 'locked in windowless rooms,' and appearing to tie Labor's falling polls to Albanese.

Albanese pushed back his departure for the COP climate summit in Turkey by a day to hold multiple budget meetings on Monday. Labor has promised savings in the December budget update but is under pressure to deliver net savings, with tax hikes as an alternative that voters tend to punish. The prime minister told reporters he'd be able to say at the next election that Australia 'haven't had a single quarter of negative growth' — though growth per person has fallen across several quarters since Labor took office in 2022.

Across the aisle, Opposition Leader Angus Taylor announced a taskforce to cut red tape by 25 per cent if the Coalition wins, and said indexing tax brackets to inflation would cost $220 billion over eight years — requiring far deeper savings than the opposition has so far outlined. Taylor told reporters in Sydney the government's waste was 'dragging resources out of the private sector.'