TRANSCRIPT: RADIO INTERVIEW - ABC RADIO NATIONAL - FRIDAY, 29 MAY 2020

E&OE TRANSCRIPT 
RADIO INTERVIEW
ABC RADIO NATIONAL WITH HAMISH MACDONALD
FRIDAY, 29 MAY 2020

SUBJECTS: Arts and entertainment industry; industrial relations.
 
HAMISH MACDONALD, HOST: Labor is today renewing its call for a rescue package to support Australia’s beleaguered arts and entertainment sector. The COVID-19 lockdowns and social distancing restrictions have hit the creative industries particularly hard, threatening the livelihoods of some 50,000 professional artists and the 600,000 workers that support them. Tony Burke is Labor’s Shadow Minister for the Arts as well as Industrial Relations, a bit of which we’ll discuss as well this morning, he’s in Sydney, good morning to you.

TONY BURKE, SHADOW MINISTER FOR INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS: G’day Hamish.

MACDONALD: What are you actually proposing today?

BURKE: Look there’s a few different ways that the government could cut a rescue package, but they can’t continue to do nothing in this area. I’ve got to say I was probably a bit naïve at the start, thinking, well this is the first industry to be shut down, the government will have to do something. To this point, they largely haven’t, and when you’ve got so many workers, not just the person who’s in the spotlight, but the person who holds it, the person with a drill setting up sets, all the different people who make this industry work, right through to the road crew, they all work gig to gig, event to event, festival to festival. They were the first industry to be shut down and they’ll be one of the last to come out of this, and if you were going to design a support system that built a fence around these individuals and made sure they didn’t get support you would design JobKeeper exactly as they have. So at some point, and as I say, there are different ways of cutting it, but they cannot continue to just leave this entire sector of the economy without support.
 
MACDONALD: Is it true to say that the entire sector is missing out, or is it that in some circumstances people have some arrangements with some of their employers that are ongoing and they can get JobKeeper through that?
 
BURKE: Simple example, best example of what you’ve just described, would be Harry Potter in Melbourne. To my knowledge, that’s the only major production where the cast have been eligible for JobKeeper, because you’ve got a production that is very long term with long term contracts. So, you’re right, those individuals are on JobKeeper. If you go to most other production companies, the administrative staff, because they’re permanent, they might be on JobKeeper, but the technical support, and the artists themselves, because they come in show to show, they’re all ineligible. And for some of them, even if they get on to JobSeeker, because it’s an industry renowned for late payments, they’ll get a cheque coming through for voiceover work that they did four or five months earlier, and JobSeeker will – they’ll find themselves being bounced on and off over the time as well.  So, for an industry that does work differently to a whole lot of other industries, that has been affected, not because they weren’t commercial, they’ve been affected because of a government decision made for good health reasons, leaving them in the lurch like this is just extraordinary.
 
MACDONALD: To be fair you’ve slightly touched on it there, but the government does say, look if you are not captured by JobKeeper you do have the option of going for JobSeeker.

BURKE: That’s right, and as I say the nature of payments in this industry do make that very difficult, but there’s two extra layers to that. The first thing, and the Prime Minister sort of challenged this just the other day, “why are we saying JobKeeper’s the preferable program?”, and the answer to that’s really simple, it’s the way you keep a relationship with an employer. And that is better because on the other side of this if you’ve kept that relationship with the employer, getting straight back to work, is a much more effective thing for people to be able to do.

MACDONALD: Sure, but how, technically, would you redesign this so you would capture someone that may only do a single gig with a particular production company in a year?

BURKE: There’s a few different ways. They can do it based on forward contracts, they can do it based on whether people have more than 12 months in an industry, they can do it through their relationship with their agents, there’s a series of different ways and I’ve got to say one of the reasons we haven’t pinned down “you must do it x way” is because there’s a few different ways they can do it. I’m relaxed about which option they do. At the moment the option they have chosen is to do nothing. And the other issue with this is that it’s not only the artists themselves, we also need to make sure the venues still in fact exist on the other side of this.  So there’s a complexity to this industry where it does need a tailored approach and, as I say, there’s a few different ways the government can cut it, but given that they were the first to be shut down at that original announcement when the government said no gatherings more than 500 outdoors or 100 indoors, they’ll be one of the very last to come out of this, there needs to be a package, and what we don’t even have yet is a map. Like we’ve got stage one, stage two and stage three for the rest of the economy, we have no staged approach that businesses can plan for, for what it’s going to look like on the other side of this for arts and entertainment.
 
MACDONALD: Just on that point and I know you’re saying you’re not promoting one individual mechanism or way of doing this, but if you were to take the example you’ve just proposed whereby it might just be details of future bookings. If the government were to redesign JobKeeper or repurpose it specifically for one sector, whereby you only needed to have the intention of a booking or a commitment of a booking down the track, wouldn’t that then capture a whole range of other people in other sectors that we don’t necessarily need to?
 
BURKE: Well this is why, Hamish, I’m saying I’m not locking down on one particular method…

MACDONALD: Sure but it points to the difficulty in achieving something like what you’re describing.

BURKE: Well, if you take people for example at one of the major theatre companies who had an advance contracted booking for a six week season, for example, that doesn’t open up every single individual person throughout every other industry in the country, and there is a difference with arts and entertainment, and it’s that they were the first to be shut down and we know they’ll be one of the last to come out of this. That does put them in a categorically different situation, and the irony of it, that only months earlier  before all the shutdowns happened, these were the same people we were asking to work for free in bushfire relief, they did, and then the moment they hit their crisis, we just say it’s too difficult, I just don’t think that’s sustainable.

MACDONALD: Alright, let’s talk about industrial relations. At the National Press Club this week the Prime Minister has outlined his plan to get the economy out of the ICU principally industrial relations reform and a revamp of skills training as far as he’s articulating it, as part of that process unions and business have a seat at the table, Labor has not been included in that, is that just to be expected given that you’re in opposition or are you staking a claim in terms of wanting to be part of it?

BURKE: What they’re doing, they already had the Porter Review, so they already had a review of industrial relations and effectively they were conducting their meetings with the representatives of business and they didn’t have the representatives of workers at the table. So now they’ve opened it up for the unions to attend as well. That’s a good thing. The extraordinary thing is that for the last seven years they haven’t been doing it that way. For government in any other policy area it’s the job of a minister to consult and engage strongly with all the different groups and to think, if we get right back to the beginning of this, the mere fact that it was news that workers organisations would now be consulted on issues about workers rights, the fact that that’s considered news and a huge step for this government really says something about what the last seven years have been like.

MACDONALD: Do you see though that there is some mutual ground here, particularly over recent months interviewing the likes of Sally McManus and Jennifer Westacott from the Business Council, even Christian Porter, there does seems to be a fair amount of overlap in terms of some of their, even some of their definitions of things around secure work, for

BURKE: It’s in everyone’s interests now that we get job creation happening. We want to make sure that that happens in a way where people have security in their jobs and we’ve seen what the impact is during this crisis if you don’t have secure work, and the second thing is, after this, on the other side as the restrictions start lifting, Australia’s going to be more dependent than we’ve been possibly at any other point, on domestic demand, we’re going to need people to be spending money, because it will be sometime before you get international tourists and others spending their money here.  So when you’re reliant on domestic demand people need to be reasonably paid and they need to be able to afford to go out and spend money because that’s exactly what the economy is going to need.

MACDONALD: Tony Burke, thank you very much.

BURKE: Great to talk to you Hamish.

ENDS