TRANSCRIPT: TV INTERVIEW - SKY NEWS - JULY 1, 2021

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
TV INTERVIEW
SKY NEWS AFTERNOON AGENDA
THURSDAY, 1 JULY 2021

SUBJECTS: Vaccinations; Quarantine.

KIERAN GILBERT, HOST: Joining me now is Tony Burke, Opposition frontbencher and Manager of Opposition Business. We’ve got this National Cabinet meeting tomorrow, you would hope that the states and the Commonwealth can get a bit of clarity when it comes to the vaccine rollout. Would you urge the states to try and work with the government on that?

TONY BURKE, MANAGER OF OPPOSITION BUSINESS: Well, I hope it’s better than Monday’s meeting. Monday’s meeting it was clear from the reaction and from the fallout of the Prime Minister’s late night media conference that a whole lot of what he intended to announce hadn’t been discussed at the meeting. And you know, we’ve seen the fallout of that happen for the rest of the week. So hopefully it’s a more constructive meeting, but I’ve got to say that will also involve the Prime Minister letting people know what’s happening. Because you look at how this week unravelled, and it’s pretty clear that most of what he was announcing off the back of the meeting hadn’t been discussed at the meeting itself.

GILBERT: Despite the confusion around the AstraZeneca vaccine – admittedly, that is there – the numbers have still been climbing. Today’s a record. More than 160,000 vaccinations today. So there is a silver lining to these outbreaks because it’s shocked people out of their complacency.

BURKE: Yeah but we can’t blame people’s complacency for how slow this has happened. We are now in the second half of the year. Less than 10 per cent of Australians are fully vaccinated. The second half of the year, less than 10 per cent are fully vaccinated. You know, you’ve heard me say it before, but all of these problems come back to the two jobs that the Prime Minister had to do. He’s in charge of having a national system of quarantine, and in charge of the vaccine rollout. He has bungled both. And bungled them badly. And every story, and every lockdown, every fight state-federal at the moment, it all comes right back to him not doing those two jobs. If he’d done those two jobs – I mean we’ve had what is it 26 break outs now from hotel quarantine? We’ve now got a highly contagious strain of the virus, and we’re containing people in facilities that were built for tourism in the most populated parts of our country.

GILBERT: Isn’t the situation though, it goes back to the success we’ve had in terms of COVID-19, there’s been a comparison to other OECD nations that we’re the last on vaccine rollout but we’re also the lowest, if not the second-lowest in front of New Zealand in terms of the number of fatalities through this crisis. So that marker is a very very positive one for the nation.

BURKE: Oh completely, and last year – every Australian should be proud of what we achieved last year. And I’m from Sydney, what people in Sydney are going through now, it’s not like the protracted lockdowns that Victorians went through. Not just to keep each other safe but to stop it from reaching the rest of the country. So Australians achieved a lot last year. But in terms of those social distancing rules, the lockdown rules, they were rules that were put in place by the state premiers, many of which were fought by Mr Morrison. So it’s a bit much for Mr Morrison to be claiming credit for the success last year, when he was railing against Queensland for their restrictions, when he joined up with Clive Palmer to oppose the WA restrictions and then to say that he wants to take credit for how well the restrictions went. So, what happened last year – yes. But that should have been a chance for Mr Morrison to get to work on his two jobs. Instead, it was like he took a victory lap at half-time. And so when he should have been signing up to make sure we had a range of vaccines – five or six was world’s best practice – he just signed up with two, thought that would be enough, and that’s why we’re in the situation now where there’s doubt about..

GILBERT: We’ve got more than two though, there’s Moderna coming, Novavax, Pfizer..

BURKE: Coming, coming. But we’re in July. How many have we had for the first half of the year? The answer is two?

GILBERT: Yeah well that’s true, but AstraZeneca – if you look at the United Kingdom where they, they’re Brendan Murphy’s own words, he said they were on a burning platform, so they used AstraZeneca with no questions. We have been able to look at that, they’ve required that be given to different parts of the population as opposed to everyone receiving it like in the United Kingdom. Hence they’ve been able to roll it out much more quickly. That again goes to the success we’ve had as a nation in terms of the low numbers of COVID. People haven’t been willing to take those risks.

BURKE: What you’ve described though doesn’t explain why we’ve ended up with only two deals. With two contracts. Why the government was telling us we were at the front of the queue and it’s taken until today for Simon Birmingham to acknowledge that we’re at the back of the queue. You know, if you want to use the chance that we had last year wisely, you would spread the risk across five or six vaccines. Because when you say, oh we’re just going to put the risk on to two, that’s not a commercial risk, that’s a health risk for every Australian. Spreading it across five or six vaccines would have meant that we weren’t in a situation now where if there’s a problem for some age groups with one of the vaccines, that we then say oh we don’t have enough supply of the other.

GILBERT: Do you agree with Daniel Andrews that once we get to 70 or 80 per cent of the population, everyone’s been offered a vaccine, that there are no more lockdowns? People can’t be locking down to save others who won’t save themselves.

BURKE: The best way I can respond to that, because the decision has to be made on the health advice. Once you get to 70 or 80 per cent, the health advice will change, it will change pretty suddenly. But here’s the risk – we are still going through the first round of vaccine. But the virus as it spreads, we’re not too far behind the rest of the world in getting the new variants. We will find other countries moving to their booster shots before Australians have even finished the first round of the vaccine. Now if we end up with variants that aren’t properly covered and you’ve got to wait for boosters, then we’re going to have this lockdown problem for a lot longer than anyone thinks.

GILBERT: Is it unhelpful for some of the states to be talking down the vaccines as well in terms of their safety?

BURKE: I know the debate that you’re talking about that’s happened over the last few days. I think all of this can be traced back to Mr Morrison overreaching on Monday night, not following the ATAGI advice, not explaining the advice in the same terms as everyone else.

GILBERT: They say the advice has not changed.

BURKE: That’s right.

GILBERT: They’re only highlighting one part of it.

BURKE: Yeah. He used the word encouraged. Like, I don’t want to repeat his words, because I don’t want to add to the problems that Mr Morrison has created. But I think with all of this, we should let the doctors be the doctors. Politicians – our job is on implementation and on the two things that had to be implemented, quarantine and vaccine, Mr Morrison simply hasn’t done it.

GILBERT: Tony Burke, thanks for your time.

BURKE: Great to be back.

ENDS