TRANSCRIPT: TV INTERVIEW - SKY NEWS - 27 MAY, 2021

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
TELEVISION INTERVIEW
SKY NEWS WITH LAURA JAYES
THURSDAY, 27 MAY 2021

SUBJECTS: Melbourne lockdown; Scott Morrison’s failure of quarantine and vaccines; tax cuts.

LAURA JAYES, HOST: Joining me now live is the Manager of Opposition Business, Tony Burke, who was sitting in that chamber yesterday and no doubt interjecting during that answer.

TONY BURKE, SHADOW MINISTER FOR INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS: I was.

JAYES: I thought you might have been. Now the Prime Minister accusing Labor of walking away from bipartisanship. Are you?

BURKE: We’re holding him to account and we're right to hold him to account. We've been arguing for a long time now that the government needed to act on quarantine and on the vaccination rollout. And look at how we've got to where we are. The case where the person from South Australia – the outbreak came from South Australia, that’s how it got into Victoria – this was somebody who had survived India and caught the virus in hotel quarantine. Then, we're now seeing the spread among the people who have not been vaccinated. The Prime Minister had two jobs: quarantine and vaccine rollout. His failure to deliver on those two jobs is directly connected to what we're seeing right now. And the Prime Minister became complacent. He had this view that it wasn't a race. Well, it is a race as the new variants come through. Getting this done in a timely manner matters. Having proper quarantine facilities that can deal with the new variants that are more airborne needs to occur. And we were given notice of this ages ago. What the Prime Minister hasn't liked is in the Parliament he's being held to account and that needed to happen.

JAYES: Well, you are the alternative government. We could be in an election within the next 12 months. What would Labor do? What is the alternative to the hotel quarantine system at the moment and the vaccine rollout as we see it?

BURKE: It's a combination of having national standards - because you need to have national standards to deal with the way that the virus is more airborne now in these new variants than it used to be. Mark Butler's been calling for that for a long time. The government hasn't moved at all. Haven’t taken responsibility, because if they leave it to the states then they can blame the states. And for the Prime Minister's claim in the clip that you aired about not blaming the states, well tell that to the people of Victoria or the people of Queensland or the people of WA. He actually went to the High Court with Clive Palmer to oppose measures they were taking to protect themselves.

JAYES: But there are national standards in national cabinet, aren't there, and some states have been slow to implement them.

BURKE: We need to have a federal system of quarantine -

JAYES: But it’s not enforceable is it?

BURKE: The federal government have powers with respect to quarantine because constitutionally, this is their responsibility. Like Anthony Albanese put the question directly to Mr Morrison just the other day about whether he acknowledges that quarantine is a Commonwealth responsibility. And the Prime Minister first said “yeah it is” but then he said “oh, no, but it's the states as well”. Well, sorry, since 1901 it's been in the constitution as a Commonwealth responsibility. To have this government now claiming that states are in charge of what crosses our borders is, frankly, bizarre, and the opposite of what has been the case for more than 100 years in this country. They have to take responsibility for quarantine, they deliberately haven't because they want to be able to blame the states. They need to roll out the vaccine. That was their job. We would be in a stronger position in Victoria right now if Mr Morrison spent less time on photo opportunities, hammering imaginary nails, and actually doing his job to protect Australians.

JAYES: Okay, so the question is, where would Labor build these hotel quarantine or national quarantine centres? And what would you do to improve the vaccine rollout? Would you buy new ones?

BURKE: Well, certainly in terms of quarantine, we'll be having a bit more to say about this before too long. But we've been referring to for a long time now the Halton report, which the government has been perilously slow to implement the recommendations and the findings from that. With respect to the vaccine rollout, right from the start, last year, we were making clear that the government was being slow to be signing contracts. They actually claimed they had some deals when they weren't even deals. But we were saying best practice around the world was to have five or six contracts available.

JAYES: How do you fix it now?

BURKE: Well, the first thing to acknowledge is we are in a worse position because of their inaction. The second thing is you want to make sure that you have more than two vaccines available. You want to make sure that you're able to deal with the boosters. The rest of the world is likely to be dealing with booster shots on new variants before Australians have even been vaccinated.

JAYES: Okay, well, we're looking at Victoria, we're monitoring this situation very closely. Should vaccinated people in Victoria be subjected to this looming lockdown?

BURKE: That would depend entirely on the health advice, you've got to work off the back of the health advice, but the health advice would be well informed by people who have been, who have received the vaccine. We need to remember in an area like disability care, 99 per cent of people haven't been vaccinated. And what the government often does, is just refers to the first shot as though that's job done. Well, sorry, with both Pfizer and with AstraZeneca, you're not vaccinated until you've had the second shot.

JAYES: That's right. And the research, you're right, does show that. But this lockdown is a test. If you are vaccinated, fully vaccinated with two shots of whatever vaccine you've had, and you can't even avoid a lockdown, what is the point of getting the vaccine?

BURKE: Well, this goes to the health advice will become stronger I presume the higher the percentage of the population is. Because when you're vaccinated you can still carry it but you're less likely to have symptoms, and therefore you'll be shedding it less but you can still be carrying it. The health advice has to take that into account. But if you have a very high proportion of the population that has been vaccinated, then the risk of high numbers of people having to turn up to emergency wards in hospital and intensive care units, you get a very different risk profile of that. The health advice will have to be informed by the slow pace of the vaccination rollout. And that is Mr Morrison's responsibility. And yesterday, he hated being held to account to it. But it's his job, and he's going to be held account to it.

JAYES: Okay, let's talk about stage three tax cuts. You won’t repeal them will you?

BURKE: Well, can I first off just say on this, as you know, we haven't made an announcement. But these tax cuts come in in 2024. And the government's furiously using question time and media conferences to try to make it the issue of the day. The impact of them is 2024. We have a serious outbreak right now. We have a job that the government needs to do right now. And if there was ever an example of a government saying, “oh, can you please look over there?” it's this. It's extraordinary that when you’ve got the impact on public health of their failure in quarantine and their failure in vaccine, their answer is to say “Can we please talk about what might happen in 2024”.

JAYES: Shouldn’t Labor’s response be it’ll be in 2024, for now they’ll stay. We’ll make a decision later.

BURKE: We'll make an announcement well before the election, there's plenty of time for it. But for the government to think that this is the issue Australians should be talking about right now, with everything that's happening directly connected to their failures, I think says everything about the fact that we have a government that is entirely about messaging and marketing, and not about doing its job.

JAYES: Everyone wants a tax cut thought Tony Burke.

BURKE: We will make our announcement well before the election. There’s plenty of time, but really? 2024? And that's the issue the government wants to talk about today? I want to find it extraordinary. I want to find it surprising. But if we know anything about who Mr Morrison is. This is his style. He'll want to talk about anything about his own failure, and about the job that needs to be done. And how would you feel if you're in Victoria right now looking down the barrel of a lockdown. Knowing the quarantine systems at a national level weren't brought in place the way the government was meant to do, knowing that the vaccine rollout was so slow, and being told for everything you're going through right now, Scott Morrison wants you to talk about what might happen in 2024. I think it's a joke.

JAYES: I mean, your criticism today does look highly political given you're not really willing to put any of these criticism at the feet of the Victorian Government, which happens to be a Labor government.

BURKE: Well, I'm not sure how the Victorian government's responsible for an outbreak from South Australian quarantine. Now I haven't I haven't railed against South Australia in this. But that's where the outbreak came from. It came from an outbreak of hotel quarantine in South Australia. I'm not sure how the Victorian Government can be held responsible for what happened there. But I’ll tell you who can be held responsible. It's a federal government that had two jobs, has done neither of them well. To have a national system of quarantine and have a national rollout of a vaccine.

JAYES: Well, the Victorian contact tracers. And Victoria still does not have one QR code system.

BURKE: Yeah, and the Commonwealth, remember at the beginning of all of this, had a job to provide a COVID safe app. It cost in the order of $70 or $80 million. The whole concept of that was it was meant to be the contact tracer for us. Once again, the only reason we are relying on having to use QR codes is because the Commonwealth didn't do its job. They used to tell us three things. They used to tell us keep the social distancing, wash your hands and download the app. How long is it since we've had the Commonwealth talk about that? For the really simple reason, Mr Morrison failed on that one as well.

JAYES: So Victoria’s just unlucky aren’t they? Four lockdowns, more than any other state.

BURKE: Oh, it's horrific.

JAYES: Unlucky though?

BURKE: Well, I don't know how else you can describe this one when it's an outbreak from South Australian quarantine. I don't know how else you can describe that. And, of course, the nature of the variant here - because we're talking about the what's loosely referred to as the Indian variant - we're talking about a variant that spreads in a very different way to anything we were looking at last year. So the pace of the spread, the impact of the systems that we've had in place, we really need the quarantine system to be working here because everything is getting harder as a new variants arrive.

JAYES: All right, we'll see you in question time. Tony Burke. Thank you.

ENDS