TRANSCRIPT: DOORSTOP INTERVIEW - SYDNEY - SUNDAY, 5 MARCH 2020

E&OE TRANSCRIPT 
PRESS CONFERENCE
SYDNEY
SUNDAY, 5 APRIL 2020

SUBJECTS: Parliament; coronavirus; wage subsidy.

TONY BURKE: First of all with respect to Parliament. When the government decided that Parliament would not sit for five or six months, that we would not need to meet again until the 11th of August, Labor opposed it, spoke against it, and voted against it. There has never been a time where the meeting of the Parliament has been more important. We said at the time that there was no doubt that the settings that had been put in place would not yet be right and Parliament would need to return. Within about a week the government started to acknowledge that Parliament needed to return.

What the government should be doing is scheduling regular sittings of Parliament during this time. And we need it for two reasons. First of all as this keeps shifting, we need to be keeping the legislation up to date. And also the legislation that is already passing, it's not all going to be right. When you push $200 billion dollars out the door within the space of about six months, with legislation that's drafted only days before it gets introduced and goes through all stages, mistakes will happen. And we need to have the Parliament sitting regularly to be able to deal with those errors. We have found ways now to be able to sit as we’ll be sitting this time, with only a third of the members of the House of Representatives present, with similar arrangements in the Senate. We need to be there to make sure that legislation can be adapted as is required. And also with $200 billion dollars going out the door and there being no scrutiny on the floor of the House on a regular basis. And even within government, them not having party room meetings where their own backbenchers will ask some questions. It's not what you need at a time of crisis. So we are cooperating with Wednesday’s sittings and we've been cooperative in working that through with the government. We need to meet, we need to get the legislation through. But can I also say the government has to revisit this concept that a time of crisis, when the Australian people need us to get this right, the Parliament meeting is more important than ever. And to think that after Wednesday we won't have to come back until the 11th of August is absurd.

With respect to industrial relations. I want to start by saying for the JobKeeper package - we want to see it get through the Parliament and we want to find it getting its way into businesses so that it gets passed on into the pockets of Australian workers. We called for the JobKeeper package. We called for there to be a wage subsidy. We're pleased that the government after - and don't forget it was only days before they announced it that they were still ruling it out – we're pleased that the government is now supporting a wage subsidy. So we want to get this through. We want to get this done. There are ways in which what the government has proposed can be improved. And I want to talk about a couple of those improvements now. One affecting casuals one affecting permanents. As far as casuals are concerned we get a whole lot of perverse outcomes with the 12 month rule that the government is currently imposing. There'll be workplaces for example where a casual has only turned up once a week or once a fortnight but has been regularly employed. But maybe only for one three or four hour shift. They're about to see themselves by the government's own explanation receive a massive multiple of what they would already ordinarily earn and see that go up to $1500 dollars. The government has decided to design it that way and so be it. We didn’t call for that but they've decided to design it that way, so be it. But beside them will be a worker who is a casual, has a shift every day, is reliant on that shift every day or five days a week or whatever the situation might be for them, to be able to pay the bills at home, and if they've only been there for eight months they're going to be ineligible. There will be casual teachers for example who have been working as casuals as teachers for five years but have been working as casuals in the private sector and therefore don't have 12 months with one school and they're going to be ineligible. There'll be people in the construction industry who work as casuals, and by the nature of that industry go from site to site, who will find themselves ineligible because they haven't been at the same site with the same employer for a full 12 months. So this system as announced by the government can be improved. And Christian Porter today in his media conference said he was listening to these arguments and they were still working through them. I hope that's right, and I hope when we see the legislation we see some amendments that deal with that.

The other issue affects permanents. Now there was something – most of the media conference was good from the Minister for Industrial Relations but there was one thing that was a bit mischievous that I just want to call out, and that was the reference to what happens with people on leave. The Minister referred to decisions that have just gone through the industrial commission, supported by employees and employers, to have amendments made so that people if they were going to get nothing because of stand downs would be able to take their leave, or take their leave entitlements at half the pay for double the period of time. So if you’ve got four weeks leave owing and you're about to go onto nothing then instead you can take over eight weeks and spread that money out over a longer period of time. Now that was put at a time when JobKeeper did not exist – and the Minister today tried to fudge some issues around JobKeeper by saying the unions have already supported this circumstance. That circumstance is there for workers who would otherwise have nothing. That's nothing to do with JobKeeper. The challenge that comes with JobKeeper is this and it's a really simple improvement that the government could make, by not paying it while somebody is being told they have to run down their leave provisions. And here’s the challenge. An employer at the moment, if they force someone to take leave that someone has built up over the last year in some cases they will have built up their leave over a lot of years, that's a liability that the employer already owes the worker, that's already on the books. But at the moment, the way the Government's described it, the employer can register for JobKeeper, register that employee as part of the scheme, and even though the employees are simply getting what they were already owed and already entitled to long before anyone had ever heard of coronavirus, the employer will be getting $1500 a fortnight and get to keep it to improve their own balance sheet. Now, that's not what this program was established for. It's meant to be a wage subsidy, not a balance sheet subsidy. And there are very simple amendments that can be made to what the Government's announced that will create a real improvement and avoid an abuse of that nature occurring.

So I just remind again: we want to see the JobKeeper program implemented. But there are a few ways in which it could be improved. I referred to casuals, I've referred to permanents with leave. There are similar issues that have been raised by others with respect to local government and respect to visa workers. There are improvements that can be done to make sure that people don't fall through the cracks and we will continue working both publicly and privately to try to make sure that a scheme that has been announced is going to be established for the right reasons also has outcomes that match those reasons.

JOURNALIST: So just on that you're talking about the anomalies with casuals. On that front there will Labor be insisting that their eligibility for the payment be widened to include some casuals.

BURKE: We still don't have the legislation so we don't know exactly how it can be amended. The point we're at at the moment is the point in advance of the legislation being finalised where we're calling on these changes to be made. We’ll obviously, as we did last time, use the Parliament in the forms of the Parliament to try to improve what it is presented. The Minister made some noises today that there may be some amendments along those lines. We hope they are because at the moment there are some pretty extraordinary inequities that can be fixed.

JOURNALIST: And if you're not happy would you be prepared to vote the legislation down?

BURKE: We want to see this legislation get through. We are turning up on Wednesday. Let's not forget Parliament is only sitting because of the cooperation with the opposition and the job subsidy, the wage subsidy program is a program that we called for. And for weeks when we were calling for it the government was saying “no way”. So we are pleased that it's there. For the vast majority of workers it will be a good thing. But we reserve the right to use the Parliament to improve it if what the government presents to us has some particular challenges within it.

JOURNALIST: And if you can't improve it though, how far do you go, are you not prepared to vote it down?

BURKE: As I said we want to see it get through. We want to see it get through in the best possible form.

JOURNALIST: The other issue that I just want to ask about was, so you think the government will make amendments to its existing legislation?

BURKE: At the moment there is no existing legislation. They haven't finished it. We certainly haven't been presented with anything. And I don't think the government's playing a game there. This is genuinely complex legislation to try to deal with every circumstance as to how this would unfold in any workplace. So it is complex. Once we see it, they may have already made some of the amendments from the original announcement. If they haven't we'll look at how we can use the Parliament to be able to deal with that. But the complexity goes to the exact point I started with. There will be, if you try to, normally with legislation you'll have a Senate inquiry, you have a committee process, you'll have debates going through both houses and a chance to make sure we get everything right. This is $130 billion to go out in six months. I don't think anyone can pretend that we'll be confident on Wednesday we've got everything right. And to have regular sittings of the Parliament scheduled will give the Australian people confidence that if this starts to unfold in the wrong way we've got a system ready to go to make sure that it's fixed. I’ll go to the phone now.

JOURNALIST: The idea of mobile phone data being handed over to help the government to help track and stop the spread of COVID-19, are you familiar with that?

BURKE: Look I've seen some articles about it. It's not an issue that I’d pretend to be well across and I’d have to refer that to – 

JOURNALIST: Do you have any concerns? Are you confident there are strong enough measures to protect people?

BURKE: You always need to make sure that you get the balance right on these issues. You should never give away privacy easily. And these are issues that are serious issues and serious enough that they should be dealt with by the communications spokesperson and shadow attorney general, Michelle Rowland and Mark Dreyfus. It's not something that I'm going to on a whim throw an answer to. How we doing on the phone? Any luck?

JOURNALIST: Can you hear me?

BURKE: Yes we can hear you now.

JOURNALIST: This is Tom McIlroy at the Financial Review.

BURKE: Welcome.

JOURNALIST: Thank you. Thanks for taking our questions remotely. Is there a concern that wage entitlements, is part of the concern that wage entitlements could be cut down to the $1500 payment. We're just trying to work out exactly what the changes that are necessary to the Fair Work Act will be.

BURKE: Look can I give an example of something that you would want to find flexibility on and something that you would not want to find flexibility on. Something that you would want to find flexibility is, you can't reduce someone's hourly rate but there may be circumstances where the employer can't afford because of the circumstances to be able to pay the full rate but there's a chance of a job because of the job subsidy at a reduced rate, and in those circumstances you'd want to find a way that you could negotiate to reduce hours so that the person was still on the correct hourly rate. Now those circumstances are something that you want to be able to do. Something you would not want to be able to do, for example, is having an employer who ran a restaurant shut down the restaurant and then be able to say, well having shut down the restaurant I'm going to use the wage subsidy so that the people who used to work in my restaurant can now do the cooking and cleaning for me and my family at home. You wouldn't want to allow that. And I don't think either side of politics would want to allow that. The challenge is how do you get changes like that that work for every workplace. Now the government believes that they can do that in one hit through an amendment to the Fair Work Act. Our view is – and they say the challenge is you've got so many awards and so many agreements - 122 awards, in the order of 11,000 agreements. That of course is also why something is very likely to go wrong if you do a sledgehammer approach through legislation. All of those awards and all of those agreements are different. Yes some of them will have even different definitions of what full-time work is. And if you use a sledgehammer approach through the Fair Work Act, it is highly likely you end up with outcomes that were unforeseen, unintended and bad. And that's why we have said the Commission is the way to do it, and to take advantage of the fact that at the moment you've got a level of cooperation between business and the union movement that you have rarely seen. So there is goodwill there, and it makes sense to take advantage of that. That said it's hard to offer more than those sort of two examples because what we don't have is the legislation. And from the minister's comments a couple of hours ago, he doesn't have the legislation yet either. The reason it's taken them so long to draft is because of the exact problem I've just described. And you know a fast-track in the Commission would certainly avoid getting things wrong and ending up with rules that simply didn’t work for a large number of Australian workplaces.

JOURNALIST: Is there a risk of giving too much discretion to the Minister?

BURKE: Hard to answer that without seeing legislation. Is there a risk? Always a risk in these things but whether that risk is borne out I don't know. The risk that will be there no matter what is the variation of every award and agreement. And if you didn't have the cooperation that was going on between the business community and the union movement there'd be no way of using the Commission to do this. But where you have that level of cooperation to not take advantage of it and to adopt the sledgehammer approach I just think is unwise.

JOURNALIST: (Inaudible).

BURKE: Our view is that this should be done by the Commission. That's our view. In terms of how can I explain to you, how can I give you examples of how the sledgehammer approach won't work. Well I can't do that until I see the precise legislation, to see exactly how they've drafted it. And this is why for me the most important issues for us to deal with at the moment are with respect to casuals coming into the scheme, and with respect to permanents, not having this perverse situation where the government gives every employer not just an incentive but like a really serious financial benefit for getting everyone to run down their leave. There are impacts that we know what they are, we know they affect workers, we know what it means for household income, and for me they are the absolute focus, the biggest issues at the moment. Exactly what would go wrong with the government's proposed legislation is a difficult one to answer until we see it. The thing that we know for sure is the Commission is a smart way to deal with it.

JOURNALIST: (Inaudible).

BURKE: I don't want us to get ahead of ourselves. We are talking about legislation that neither me nor the government has seen. The government hasn't seen the legislation that you're wanting me to get three steps down the road on. And the reason they're having so much trouble drafting it is because of the exact challenge that I keep raising, which is there is such a vast range of differences workplace to workplace. What matters is we get this right. If you use the Commission, and you use the goodwill that's there, you are guaranteed to get this right. That's what the government should do. And the argument about how many awards and agreements that they offer up – and they say well that's why the commission's a problem. That's exactly why legislation carries very grave risks. But to point out to you exactly how those risks will unfold is a conversation that logically has to wait till we've got their legislation.

JOURNALIST: (Inaudible).

BURKE: I just think it's silly to try to have a detailed conversation about legislation that neither Labor nor the Australian Government has seen. I know there's wanting to find the conflict on the floor of the House. But at the moment we've got two issues with respect to casuals and permanents, where we know what the conflict is. We know exactly how that will impact people and we know what the problem is. With respect to amendments to the Fair Work Act, we know what a smart way to do it is and the government appears to be going down a different path. Exactly how they do it, they’re saying is really complex. That's because they're trying to go down that path. And you know exactly how that path leaves various people behind and doesn't work for specific workplaces is a conversation that is impossible to have until we see the legislation. Anything further on the phones before I return to the room?

JOURNALIST: (Inaudible)

BURKE: There's a whole lot of competing pressures and the challenge that we have at the moment obviously is you know almost every member of Parliament wants to be there. So the first people who we find don't come are people who because of where they live and where their electorate is regularly in contact with remote Indigenous communities. Anyone in those situations, it's important that they don't come. And that's why you've seen members of parliament like Warren Snowdon, Patrick Dodson, Malarndirri McCarthy not coming to sittings. So that's the first principle. And then anyone who is experiencing any symptoms, absolutely they must not come. And then beyond that you try to find the best representation you can within very limited flight restrictions, and you also make sure that the shadow ministers who have direct portfolio responsibility are there. So they're the things you weigh up. And at that point you still have more people wanting to come than we can have. But we need to observe social distancing. So the challenge at the moment is telling members of Parliament who want to be there that in the interests of public health they can't be. And you know if we get more regular sittings we'll be able to make sure that we effectively rotate through different members of Parliament so that various people get to be there and be asking questions of the government. But at the moment we're in the absurd situation where the government keeps pretending that the Parliament won't be back to August 11 which would be deeply irresponsible if that were to be true. I'm sorry your next question?

JOURNALIST: When they do go back to their electorates will they be required to self-isolate?

BURKE: It depends on each state. Certainly I know one of our South Australian members who had self-isolate immediately on return is only just now coming out of the self-isolation about to come back to Parliament and then at the moment will have to do it again. Whatever the rules are for each jurisdiction, we’re making sure we abide by them. Thanks very much.

ENDS