TRANSCRIPT: TV INTERVIEW - SKY NEWS - THURSDAY, 7 OCTOBER 2021

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
TELEVISION INTERVIEW
SKY NEWS WITH LAURA JAYES
THURSDAY, 7 OCTOBER 2021

SUBJECTS: NSW reopening, NSW Premier, IBAC, quarantine facilities.

LAURA JAYES, HOST: Joining me live now is the Shadow Minister for Industrial Relations, and a Sydney MP, the Member for Watson, Tony Burke. What do you think of the new roadmap?

TONY BURKE, SHADOW MINISTER FOR INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS: Oh, we're hopeful. We're really hopeful. People are wanting to get back to work, wanting to get back to their lives, wanting to see family members that they haven't seen. So every relaxation you want, it's welcome. You trust that it’s closely based on the health advice because we don't want to see our hospital system overwhelmed. That becomes the next risk. But certainly you'd be hard-pressed to find people in my part of Sydney who didn't have any reaction other than welcoming each extra way of opening up.

JAYES: It's being announced less than a week since Gladys Berejiklian departed. Now there's almost a complete departure from her roadmap but it has been signed off by the Chief Medical Officer. What does that tell you?

BURKE: Yeah I saw in the media conference questions being raised where people wanted to be able to ask questions of the Chief Medical Officer. And I think that's reasonable that that scrutiny be able to occur. There may be a reason why the Chief Medical Officer wasn't there, I don't know. But effectively in all of this, the elected members of parliament, the elected members of government have to be able to make a judgment call. It has to be informed by health advice. And it's quite reasonable for the media to be able to ask questions and provide some scrutiny of that health advice itself. Now, that wasn't available today. It's really important that that happened as well. Because if this is welcome news and closely based on health advice, then the scrutiny is only going to add to public confidence.

JAYES: Do you have reservations about Dominic Perrottet?

BURKE: In my part of Sydney he's not that well-known. He’s known a bit for the toll roads, he's known in particular as the person who reportedly was the one in cabinet arguing the strongest - the same as Scott Morrison was arguing - that they shouldn't do the early lockdown in Sydney when the virus was contained to Bondi. So for the little bits of information that are known they're not welcome. And certainly he, just like Scott Morrison, his actions right at the start of this particular outbreak have been part of that double standard where they weren't willing to put strict rules on coastal suburbs, but they were willing to go in really hard and set curfews and put helicopters overhead in Western and Southwestern Sydney.

JAYES: Well, let's look at what we're looking at now. The hospital admissions are coming down, the admissions to ICU, the daily case numbers are all coming down, the vaccination rates or daily rates are even surpassing what I guess the most cynical thought would be possible. We're in a pretty good position. So was now the right time to bring forward some of these freedoms? Expand weddings, those amount of people that you can have in your homes from Monday?

BURKE: The best way I can answer that without knowing the health advice it's based on Laura is to simply say, I hope so. I genuinely hope so. I don't want to see our hospitals overwhelmed and I hope that we're able to have this relaxation. One of the things that I think it's really important to acknowledge, is those high vaccination rates have been delivered through an incredible community effort. Right through from the people who work within the health system, the pharmacists, the doctors, the nurses, the allied health workers, through to all the different community organisations, GPs and local pharmacies that have been out there pushing for those vaccination rates. We started much, much later than we should have in Australia. But there has been a community effort in areas like mine, throughout Southwestern Sydney and all the way out through Western Sydney where the community has just gone in and worked unbelievably hard to get vaccination rates as fast as possible.

JAYES: All right, a few other things just quickly. You would have heard my interview with Tim Smith then, the shadow Attorney-General in Victoria. What do you make of what's going on down there with IBAC, their corruption body? Should Daniel Andrews stand aside?

BURKE: Look I think what was clear in that interview was even the person prosecuting the case just kept going through all the things that he didn't know.

JAYES: That’s part of the problem too isn’t it? The secrecy?

BURKE: These commissions function in secrecy for good reasons. ICAC does it the same way, in terms of there being a level of secrecy. That's how these anti-corruption bodies put their information together. Sadly, the ultimate secrecy is the Commonwealth anti-corruption body. There’s so much secrecy there that it still doesn’t exist. And we’re the only level of government in Australia without one.

JAYES: Okay, let me ask you about quarantine facilities just finally. I know that you're going to say they should have been made earlier. Absolutely. And we could probably agree with you on that.

BURKE: Yep.

JAYES: But given where we are in the pandemic, is it right that the federal government and indeed state governments push ahead in setting up and building these facilities that will come at, you know, a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars to the taxpayer? Who's going to go in them?

BURKE: Well, I wish we could say that Delta is going to be the last strain. The truth is with this pandemic, while our vaccination rates are starting to catch up within the OECD significantly for Australia, around the poorer nations of the world this virus is still bouncing around and mutating and doing so fast. Those different strains will continue to arise and they'll continue to come to Australia. With something like this going around the world, to have the extra security of having purpose-built quarantine facilities - I'd rather take the bet on the precaution rather than keep testing our luck, which has been part of a mess of 2021.

JAYES: Okay, but who's gonna go in them? Are we talking international students, those from poorer nations where these other yet-to-be-seen variants might develop?

BURKE: Well, I don't know the answer to that. But what I do know is when the Delta strain started to circulate in the world, if we had these systems in place Australia would have been a much safer place. And while we don't know what's coming we have seen with this pandemic, that there's a whole lot of structures that you can put in place and purpose-built quarantine is a classic, where yeah, there's an investment, yeah when you build it you don’t know exactly who is going to be required to go there. But I'll tell you what, the cost to the economy if you take the risk is horrific. And there's plenty of plenty of people locally, who had been out of work for this time, not able to go to work, not able to run their business. They just run down their savings in different ways. That money is not coming back, that cost is real. They would not have been complaining about waste, I tell you, if there'd been a bit more safety belts in place in terms of purpose-built quarantine.

JAYES: Okay, perhaps we see it as an insurance policy. Tony Burke, always appreciate your time. See you soon.

ENDS