TRANSCRIPT: TV INTERVIEW - SKY NEWS - 13 MAY, 2021

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
TELEVISION INTERVIEW
SKY NEWS WITH LAURA JAYES
THURSDAY, 13 MAY 2021

SUBJECTS: Wages; budget reply; skills.

LAURA JAYES, HOST: Joining me now live is the Shadow Industrial Relations Minister Tony Burke. We heard from Jim Chalmers this morning, Tony Burke, and he said that this budget reply will have vision that the government’s didn't. Sound big. What's in it?

TONY BURKE, SHADOW MINISTER FOR INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS: We’ll leave you some suspense for tonight. But the big shift is for all the expenditure that the government unveiled in the budget, they still never provided anything that lets you see that Australia gets built back better. Any structural problem we had before the pandemic is still there after the pandemic, and some of them get worse. And I don't think there's any problem that gets worse than wages.

JAYES: So will you embark on structural reform?

BURKE: Well with respect to wages, as an example, you and I on this program have been talking for a couple of months about policies we've already put forward that would have a real impact on wages.

JAYES: Remind me.

BURKE: Can I just get to what the government's revealed first because we've had eight years of wage stagnation. And what the budget makes clear is for the next four years wages go backwards. So you get eight years where they don't move much at all. And then we have four years where - they're asking for 12 years all together at the next election – for the next four years your bills go up faster than your pay. In response to that the issues that we've been talking about are policies like “same job, same pay”, like acting on the gig economy. Policies that drive wages back up again. And the government is doing the exact opposite. So on same job, same pay, it's not just they don't have a policy on it. They're currently spending $300,000 in the courts trying to drive wages down and to make sure that labour hire can be used to undercut people's pay. They're in fact spending money to make sure wages go down.

JAYES: I'm not aware of that case. What is it?

BURKE: It’s the Skene case. Skene and Rossato. They’re the two cases that deal with this and the government is participating in the appeal. It's for coal miners, and it's for coal miners where the labour hire wages are being used to undercut the rate of pay at the site. And the government is funding the case on the side of the labour hire fire companies to drive wages down.

JAYES: Just on the budget assumptions, it's not four years is it, that wages growth is expected to go backwards? It’s the first two years, and it's the year 2022 which is the problem, but then wages are expected to get a little better in line with inflation.

BURKE: When you add it up over the four years over that period, prices go up faster than wages go up. So when you look at it over four years, that's what happens.

JAYES: Wages growth is hard because look at the last 10 years, obviously. Growing the economy is essentially the way to do it. But without that, it's really an artificial mechanism. For example, the unions have suggested giving everyone in the public service a pay rise, and therefore corporate Australia would follow. Do you subscribe to that?

BURKE: Certainly, there's a whole things that are done within the public service that drive down wages. Things like consecutive back to back contracts for people who are employees but never, in fact, get a secure, permanent job. So there is bad behaviour in terms of how the public service operates, how the government treats its workers there –

JAYES: But giving the public service a pay rise, is that really going to translate to corporate Australia?

BURKE: Well, if you look from corporate Australia's perspective. I’ll put it in these terms: every individual employer will say they don't particularly want to give a pay rise for their workers but they all want their customers to have more money. Now, the only way you can get all of that to add up as if you have policies across the board that makes sure that a bigger part of the profit share goes to wages. And I know, from the last time we spoke, you've got a different view to me as to what Mathias Cormann meant when you interviewed him those years go about low wages being a deliberate design feature. But regardless of what he meant it is what they've delivered. They have delivered low wages as a design feature, and the next four years are going to be even worse than the last eight.

JAYES: Do you really think the government wants to see people on stagnant wages?

BURKE: Yes.

JAYES: Why?

BURKE: Because it's what they've delivered the whole way through.

JAYES: But what’s their motivation for that? It wouldn't help them politically.

BURKE: It’s what they’ve done. I think that's a question that could only be directed to them. I'm not going to psycho-analyse why the government's mean to workers, but it's what they've delivered the whole way through. And every time there has been a policy decision, they have backed the wage cut side of the argument. So when the omnibus bill was introduced, they produce that with a specific provision that allowed every penalty rate to be cut. You've got the court case I referred to before, they intervened in the case on the side of cutting wages. When asked in Parliament whether or not people should at least be paid the minimum wage – this should not have been a difficult, complicated question for the government but their response was “that’s complicated”. Every time it's put to them they opt for the side of the argument that drives wages down.

JAYES: Alright, let's talk about the budget reply more broadly. Big vision we’re expecting. Jim Chalmers set it up this morning. So what is the big vision tonight? I mean the skills shortages, there's a few openings here for Labor, would you consider something like a special visa category to fill those skills shortages in places like aged care?

BURKE: Well, the starting priority has to be the training agenda within Australia. For a long time Australia’s just said let's flick the switch to immigration, use temporary migration without providing the investment and providing the opportunities for skilling up in Australia. So when we’ve spoken about Jobs and Skills Australia, there's some issues that we've already spoken about there. There's also today's announcement to make sure that when people are trained and are skilled, that we get the opportunities there for Australian Research to be commercialised here. Effectively we treat our research the way we treat so many of our minerals. The idea comes from here but then we send most of the jobs overseas.

JAYES: How is that different to the government's patent box? In the budget, it was if you have a business idea or invention you can patent it here and essentially get a lower tax, you can pay 17 per cent tax.

BURKE: What we're talking about with the announcement that will be made tonight that's in the papers today is making sure that when you've got graduates and students that there's a direct process for them to be hooked up with the business incubators and for their ideas based on the academic research to be commercialised here. It's quite a different model than that one.

JAYES: We don't have any of the details of the budget reply but are we expecting fireworks? Are we going to be excited, is it going to knock our socks off Tony Burke?

BURKE: What you'll get tonight is the opposite of Tuesday night. In the sense that Tuesday night had a whole lot of announcements but no narrative as to how Australia could be better. No narrative as to how Australia could be a place of better wages look, of secure work, how Australia could be a country that would act on climate change, and how as a nation, we can be driving jobs here in Australia.

JAYES: Okay, we will say we'll follow that up.

ENDS