TRANSCRIPT: TV INTERVIEW- ABC AFTERNOON BRIEFING - 27 AUGUST, 2020

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
TELEVISION INTERVIEW
ABC AFTERNOON BRIEFING WITH PATRICIA KARVELAS
THURSDAY, 27 AUGUST 2020
 
SUBJECT: Aged care; JobKeeper; paid pandemic leave; foreign agreements; Christchurch killer. 
 
PATRICIA KARVELAS, HOST: Tony Burke is the Shadow Minister for Industrial Relations and the Manager of Opposition Business. Tony Burke, welcome. Do you believe the biggest problem in aged care is that facilities are being run for profit?
 
TONY BURKE, SHADOW MINISTER FOR INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS: Look, right now the biggest problem in aged care is infection control. That's where we're seeing the most additional deaths right now. The for-profit issue though is something that is huge. And Anthony Albanese went to that in a whole lot of detail today.

KARVELAS: How do you make sure that for-profit providers don't simply pocket any increase in aged care funding?
 
BURKE: Look, the 8-point plan that Anthony went through today I think takes you a fair bit of the way there. It was put forward as a series of constructive recommendations. Something as simple as making sure that you have minimum staffing levels. One of the ways you can get cost-cutting is by there simply being not enough people working there. You need to make sure the PPE supplies are adequate. You've got a whole lot of different areas which cost money where you simply have to have minimum standards that have to be met.
 
KARVELAS: The Prime Minister said today that there have been failings in state-run and not-for-profit aged care. What else is going wrong?
 
BURKE: Well, as I said, when you asked the first question, the biggest challenge right now, particularly in your state of Victoria, has been infection control. The Prime Minister during the course of this week started off wanting to sort of deflect to Victoria with a claim that when there's a pandemic it wasn't entirely his responsibility. But as the week wore on, it became very clear, that months ago when he was waving around a document for the plan for who was in charge of what, the Commonwealth is in charge of infection control in aged care. They put it in their own document as their own responsibility. And infection control is exactly what we're seeing as a challenge where we'd look now at more than 300 deaths, more than 360 deaths, and in the last week we're talking about 70 people who have lost their lives. So we need the Prime Minister to be taking responsibility for that area of infection control. And the fact that's part of what's got so horrifically out of hand, in an aged care sector that was already vulnerable going into this crisis, shows that you won't get it fixed unless you've got a government taking clear responsibility.
 
KARVELAS: You're the Manager of Opposition Business. You focused on this very much exclusively this week. This has been your Question Time strategy and your parliamentary strategy. Are the gloves off? Is bipartisanship now dead on COVID-19?
 
BURKE: This is a time when people want the government to succeed in saving people's lives and in combatting the virus, and in making sure that people are able to stay in jobs. We want the government to succeed, and the tone of the parliament is still very much in that frame. The problem we've had with aged care is the Prime Minister started the week by saying, "When there's a pandemic it's Victoria's responsibility." He started in complete denial of his own document, and I've got to say in terms of getting him to take this seriously, I'm not sure how we did. You get to the end of Question Time today and the two final answers that he gave to questions from the Opposition? On the second last one he was trying to get his backbench to laugh. And on the final question, he was trying to act like he was the victim. And the whole issue was how mean to him personally had the Leader of the Opposition been and could that please stop? So, yes we're still making the case but I've got to say in terms of part of the job being to try to get through to the Prime Minister that he needs to take responsibility here, at the end of the week I don't think we've got there. If the Prime Minister still sees it as an area where making the backbench laugh as part of the job and then treating himself as the victim is the conclusion to Question Time.
 
KARVELAS: Doesn't Labor run the risk, though, of looking partisan when you're not applying the same blowtorch on the Andrews Government that allowed this situation to start in the first place? I know you can't ask Daniel Andrews questions in Question Time, so I'll help you with that answer part already, but you do need to hold all levels of government to account. And clearly hotel quarantining and contact tracing did fail in Victoria which led to the outbreak?
 
BURKE: We are here in the Federal Parliament asking the Federal Government questions for the issues they're responsible for. Daniel Andrews has stood up time and again and acknowledged the hotel quarantine area is something he takes responsibility for. What we started this week, though - as I say, I'm not sure we got all that far with the Prime Minister - was him denying that infection control in aged care is his responsibility. Even though his own Commonwealth so-called plan to deal with COVID said that it would be their responsibility. Once it turned this bad, he wanted to flick and blame Victoria. Everybody is answerable to the areas they are in charge of. So the border itself is a Commonwealth responsibility. Hotel quarantine was something that wouldn't have existed at all were it not for the Victorian Government and we would have been a worse situation. How that went is an issue for the Victorian Government. Aged care and infection control within it without a doubt, even in the Government's own words, up until the last couple of weeks, is a
Commonwealth responsibility.
 
KARVELAS: Do you agree with Penny Wong you wouldn't trust the care of your parents as Richard Colbeck as Minister?
 
BURKE: Leave my own parents out of it. With respect to that I've lost them relatively recently. But in terms of the comments that Penny made, Richard Colbeck's not up to it. He's just not. And we are right now facing the largest crisis in aged care that Australia has ever seen. And the Minister who on the face of it appears to be the most incompetent in the Government has been given the brief. And when asked whether he should have that job or if it should go to someone else on the backbench, the Prime Minister has joked about it.
 
KARVELAS: You have previously argued that Angus Taylor is the most incompetent minister in the Government. Are you saying now that Richard Colbeck I more imcompetent.
 
BURKE: I wouldn't want either of them in charge of our nursing homes right now. All I’m saying is he is not up to it. We have people dying. We have people still going from workplace to workplace at a time where there's infections - that still hasn't been fixed. We have a Minister who turned his back on the Senate today, walked out and not one Government senator defended him. Right now, you need to make sure you have the best possible person in that job. And there is no way it's him.

KARVELAS: Let's just talk about your portfolio if we can. Take me through the concerns about how the changes to IR exemptions for the JobKeeper extension will in your view hurt workers?

BURKE: So the extension of JobKeeper itself, we called for. The Government's doing it. We welcome that JobKeeper is being extended. We didn’t want it to end in September. There are certain flexibilities for employers where their workforce is still on JobKeeper. That's being extended. We support that. It's then being extended for the companies that the Government has decided they no longer support. We don't agree with that. And the thing that we think is just an absurd anomaly - that may well be an accident and us having raised it and hopefully the Government will fix this - is the way somebody can be rostered down and lose 40 per cent of their hours under these so-called flexibility arrangements. If you're on a really high income and you lose 40 per cent it will be a big dollar figure that you lose but you'll still be above the JobKeeper rate. If you're on the minimum wage, $753 a week. When JobKeeper was first introduced that meant you lost $3 a week. Under this flexibility, because your company is starting to recover you could lose $300 a week. Now our view is nobody should actually fall below the JobKeeper rate as a result of these provisions. You certainly shouldn't have a situation where because the business you work for is doing better, your pay gets cut.

KARVELAS: You're going to vote for the Government's amendments, for their bill, regardless. Why would they vote for your amendments?
 
BURKE: Previously, we've made constructive suggestions and a whole lot of them have been taken up. Can I remind you the fundamental one is we have a wage subsidy at all. Scott Morrison's view was the only way to deal with this was through the welfare system. It's happened on every single issue, Patricia. It happened on the extension. It's happened on every part of this. We've had the same story. Labor's now been calling for this since yesterday, on legislation that we received on Monday. I'm not on the second day of prosecuting the case going to say that we may as well give up because we're going to support the extension of JobKeeper anyway.

KARVELAS: Why not use your muscle in the parliament? If you're going to wave it through anyway, it doesn't give you a lot of leverage does it?

BURKE: There's no way we'll vote against the extension of JobKeeper payments. But we certainly will be moving amendments to improve the legislation. And right now no one in the Government, when they were making speeches in the parliament, stood up and defended this aspect of the legislation. So I'm not convinced they've even put it in there deliberately. I don't know how anyone can argue that a low award rate worker should lose $300 or more a week and find themselves below even the new JobKeeper rate.

KARVELAS: Labor doesn't support the changes to the JobKeeper rate. Do you think the payment should taper at some point and when?

BURKE: There's a few different ways of tapering. You could have them tapering as businesses improve. You could have them tapering in the way Government is doing it. The problem with the way the Government is doing it now is principally because of what's happened in Victoria, where we now have a situation where people are going through a worse time than what they were confronting when JobKeeper was first introduced. As the period has got worse for them, the payments are in fact going down. And the first principle behind having a wage subsidy is this: on the other side of the pandemic, the best chance the economy will have to start moving back again will be if people are still attached to their employer. That's what we want to see.

KARVELAS: Labor is backing union calls for paid pandemic leave. Take me through how you think that scheme should work?

BURKE: Well, the first principle is it has to be national. So what it means is if someone is told by a doctor they have to isolate, sometimes will be for 48 hours waiting for a test result to come back, sometimes it will be for two weeks. We need everybody who was told to isolate to be able to afford to isolate. That's the principle that we need. At the moment the Government's set up a regime where they're effectively blaming the states where it doesn't exist. It means you have this situation where it doesn't exist in New South Wales but it does exist in Tasmania, even though in New South Wales we're still going through a period of community transmission that's not happening in Tasmania. The key thing, you look at the number of times that there's been new clusters and it's been spread by somebody who was turning up for work when they might otherwise have been isolating. And we can't have people just put in an impossible position where the question as to whether or not you isolate involves weighing up whether or not you can afford to. Paid pandemic leave fixes that and that's why we need a nationwide scheme and we can't wait until the horse has bolted each time before we start to introduce it.

KARVELAS: Just a couple of brief ones. We talked about this announcement today at the beginning of the program in relation to foreign agreements and the Federal Government being able to override these agreements that have been made by universities or the state governments or whoever it is. I know Labor has said you need to see the detail but the principle is the question. I'm pre-empting your answer. I want you to talk about the principle. Don't tell me you'll wait for the detail. Should the Federal Government be able to veto foreign agreements like the belt and road MOU Victoria signed?

BURKE: The first principle is the relationship with other countries is principally the job of the Australian Government.

KARVELAS: So it is a federal issue? They should be able to override based on that principle?

BURKE: You want high level, I'm giving you high level. The relationship with
other countries is principally the responsibility of the Federal Government. How they then deal with states is something where there should be direct discussions with the states. Even the Prime Minister won't answer the question that you've just put. And he has seen something closer to the legislation than what I've seen. Even the Prime Minister was asked exactly what you've just put to me. And he wasn't going further than I've gone. So having not seen the legislation and he's the one developing it, I reckon I have probably given a reasonable answer.
 
KARVELAS: Finally, New Zealand's Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters says the Christchurch shooter should be returned to Australia to serve his life sentence here. What do you think about that?

BURKE: I hear the technical argument from the Attorney-General about extradition agreements. Can I just say, the fact that he is an Australian is something that I presume we all feel appalling about. That we wish that were not the case. And that does create a level of responsibility. I would expect that Australia will be constructive in any requests that comes from New Zealand. I don't know whether those requests have formally come or not.

KARVELAS: But we should be open to this and take responsibility for our citizen?

BURKE: We have for a long time now, much to the annoyance of New Zealand, been sending people who have committed crimes back to New Zealand on the basis that they're New Zealanders. I can understand exactly why New Zealand might make a request to Australia. I'll leave it for New Zealand to make that official request.

KARVELAS: Fair enough. Tony Burke thanks so much for talking to me.

BURKE: Great to be back.

ENDS