TRANSCRIPT: TV INTERVIEW - SKY NEWS - THURSDAY, 23 SEPTEMBER 2021

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
TELEVISION INTERVIEW
SKY NEWS WITH LAURA JAYES
THURSDAY, 23 SEPTEMBER 2021

SUBJECTS: NSW reopening plan; Victorian protests; vaccine rollout; TWU strike action.

LAURA JAYES, HOST: Tony Burke, I'd love to start on a positive note. And it is this: it could be three weeks away to New South Wales businesses opening up. Do you welcome that?

TONY BURKE, SHADOW MINISTER FOR INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS: The moment we can safely open up people want to. The absolute moment we can. We've been doing everything we can to boost the vaccination rate and to get it moving through the local community. You know, I've spoken many times about the frustration of how long it took. But I think we're now getting closer to the end of a lockdown that we never should have had, that could have been avoided in so many ways if different things had been done earlier. But to get close to the end of it, we'll just feel a sense of real relief. It's not just people wanting to get out to the shops, wanting to get to work, wanting to be able to - you know people have got newborn relatives they haven't seen. People have had family members pass away and they haven't been able to see other family members to grieve together. There's a whole lot of reasons that people are desperate to be able to see each other again.

JAYES: Yeah, desperate is the right word. Indeed, it is a very different situation in Victoria. Victoria now recording 766 new cases today. The highest ever. What is going on? I mean, the state government’s approached things very differently. New South Wales now seems to be on top of it. Victoria is still on the wrong trajectory. And we're seeing those protests are almost daily now, the fourth day in a row. So is this something that's going on at a leadership level, perhaps?

BURKE: Look, when NSW is recording numbers 300 more each day - I get what you're saying about the trajectory but when New South Wales was having 700 a day, the trajectory was still going up and we got to in the order of 1500 before it started going down again. So I'm not sure that the comparison you're putting works in that way. But what I will say in terms of those protests, you certainly can't blame any side of politics or a government for people who go out protesting in breach of health orders and behave in a violent and appalling way. There have been backbench members of the government who have fed some of the arguments for those protesters and they should be condemned for that. We should be on absolute unity ticket on backing the health advice. I have no sympathy at all for people who are in breach of health orders at the exact time that we need to stick together and look after each other.

JAYES: Nurses and teachers joining this protest today. What does that tell you?

BURKE: Well you can pick any occupation. It's like, I'm sure some of the people are Catholics but it doesn't tell you anything about my faith that they're there. There'll be people of individual occupations. Just as common sense hits every profession and every industry, every race and every faith, conspiracy theories find their way all over the place as well. So I don't think you can draw too much from that. I don't think we should try to normalise what is a fringe. We are talking about a violent fringe. I've seen attempts from some in the Liberal Party to, when there were protests being held against a trade union, to somehow say that all this was an example of militant unionism. Like there is some stupid political point-scoring going on with this. When people are behaving like thugs they should be called out as thugs. And that should be the end of it.

JAYES: That's a really good point. But you also can't ignore, I guess, the simmering tension under all these protests. There are people that share the anger but might not be going to the streets because they feel like they have a responsibility to uphold the public health orders. Do we need to look a little deeper and see where this anger is coming from? Or do you believe it is just this small fringe group?

BURKE: In terms of the underlying anger, you can't be in lockdown for a long time without feeling frustrated and angry. Like that's part of being locked down. When there are specific decisions of government, like early vaccination, proper quarantine or a very early lockdown when we were dealing with one case in Bondi, then there is a frustration that boils over in that way. And I'm not denying that. But when that turns into violent protests, when that turns into people desecrating a site in honour of people who have given their lives for our country, I don't think you try to normalise it. I think you just call it out, you acknowledge it’s extreme. You acknowledge that it's not representative. If you want to know what the people of Victoria or New South Wales are really thinking, look at the vaccination rate. That will tell you more than any opinion poll will tell you. Certainly a lot of people wish we weren't in a world of mandating. Labor put forward the proposal that we go down an incentives path. We would we would be in a different world with probably higher vaccination rates, as long as supply was there, had we gone down that path of incentives.

JAYES: Well, how can you say that? Because we just didn't have the vaccines, so doesn't this at least prove that we didn't need to spend $6 billion on incentives?

BURKE: I don't accept that at all. We had terrible communication on AstraZeneca and we did have vaccine hesitancy on AstraZeneca for quite some time. We had in my part of Sydney -

JAYES: What about the Queensland Chief Medical Officer saying she didn't want 18 year-olds to die. I mean, that was a problem wasn't it?

BURKE: I’m okay with you being launching a criticism of the Queensland Chief Medical Officer, if you also add Greg Hunt and Scott Morrison to it for their late night press conference where they scared people, absolutely. So if we're going to blame public figures for what they said about the health advice at the time, we can go down that path. But I don't see how you do that without the first two names being the people who started the huge hesitancy campaign at a senior level, and they’re the Prime Minister and the Health Minister.

JAYES: We are going over old ground, we've been here before. Finally, before I let you go Tony Burke, let me ask you about not the protest today. But there is strike action in the delivery services industry. What is going on there?

BURKE: I don't see that the transport workers have much choice here. Effectively, all they're asking for is to have an agreement where, at the end of the agreement, the employer can't just suddenly outsource the jobs at a lower rate of pay. Now, as long as you leave a loophole like that in place, effectively there's no agreement. So you know. The thing that frustrates me, I mean, you and I have been talking for a long time about Labor's “same job, same pay” policy, ever since Anthony Albanese launched it. Workers would not have to engage in strike action if that was law. If it was simply law that if you're doing the same job it's the same pay, you can't just outsource it at a cheaper rate to labour hire, then workers would not be in a situation where they have to strike to try to achieve something that's pretty fundamental and pretty clear to most people that it's fair.

JAYES: Okay, Tony Burke, you've just opened another Pandora's box, which we don't have time to go over this morning, but we will soon. Thanks so much for your time as always.

ENDS