TRANSCRIPT: TV INTERVIEW - SKY NEWS - JUNE 24, 2021

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
TELEVISION INTERVIEW
SKY NEWS WITH LAURA JAYES
THURSDAY, 24 JUNE 2021

SUBJECTS: Sydney COVID outbreak; vaccine rollout.

LAURA JAYES, HOST: Tony Burke joins me live now from Canberra. Before we get to the vaccine rollout, Sydney is a very different place to what it was just a week ago. The budget was handed down on Tuesday in New South Wales, Tony Burke, and that was predicated on no more lockdowns. What is your sense of the situation?

TONY BURKE, SHADOW MINISTER FOR INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS: We're seeing the lived outcome of the Prime Minister viewing the vaccine rollout as “not a race”. This is what it means. What we're seeing right now, the Delta strain spreads in a very different way than the other strains, and the complacency from the government on the vaccine rollout, thinking they had all the time in the world, is like directly connected to what people in Sydney are going through right now. If the vaccine, and the premier’s made this clear, if the vaccine had been rolled out at the pace that it had originally been spoken about, we would be in a very different situation right now in Sydney. There is a direct link between what's going to happen to people's jobs, what's going to happen to businesses, what's going to happen to people's lives – and a prime minister who decided the vaccine rollout wasn't a race. The complacency is going to cause immense pain, cost a whole lot of people a lot of money, because a whole lot of people shifts at work. And there is a direct line between the Prime Minister's go-slow on the vaccine rollout and the pain that's going to be felt throughout Sydney.

JAYES: We have just seen more information, a bit more transparency, of what the next couple of months is going to look like with the vaccine rollout. I mean, Pfizer will ramp up in October, we're promised a minimum 1.7 million doses a week, and AstraZeneca phased out altogether.

BURKE: That’s right and this is where right back last year, Labor was arguing that world's best practice was to be contracting with five or six different companies. So that you had a series of different vaccines available to your population. The government bet the house on AstraZeneca. And as a result, you now have a situation where the health advice has changed with respect to that. We respect the health advice, and health advice will change, I'm not critical of that. What I am critical of is the fact that we've had nowhere else to go. And so the reason we're only just now trying to get moving on Moderna is directly linked to decisions that were taken by the government last year. If you only give yourself two options then you're playing with fire. That's what Mr Morrison did to the Australian population. And even now, when you look at the transparency they provide, they describe them as horizons. A horizon is something that you never reach. And whether what's been published overnight is going to be any different to the targets, of the 4 million by the end of March we were told. Every set of numbers that we see, we fall way behind on. On these, I have no idea whether or not we'll reach what's been published this time but certainly the record says we won’t. And if you have to phase out AstraZeneza, then you have to phase it out. I got my first dose and I’ll certainly get my second. But we would have Moderna or other options available right now, to be able to make sure that we didn't miss a beat in the pace of getting Australians vaccinated, were it not for lazy decisions last year to bet the house on two vaccines.

JAYES: Should those who have been fully vaccinated then have greater freedoms from lockdown, from travel bans?

BURKE: I'm not going to pretend to be the medical expert. But there's a whole lot that I've heard different experts say with respect of herd immunity, that you need to get to a particular percentage of the population. Given that people who have been vaccinated can still carry the virus, they're less likely to shed it at the same rate, but there's particular percentages you need to be able to get to, to be able to have those different sets of rules. And we are nowhere near those percentages. I think the Premier put it pretty plainly yesterday about the need for a sense of urgency. That’s the Premier of NSW. And similarly, I think Jane Halton’s comments this morning where she's gone through issues where she briefed people about what needed to be done. And there’s just been a complacent attitude from the government on this. I don't know why. The words “global pandemic” should be a hint that there's a sense of urgency. How you are in the midst of a global pandemic, you get to the situation where the state's did some really tough work last year that ended up resulting in no community transmission. And then for the government to have two jobs – vaccine rollout and purpose-built quarantine – to fail at both of those? I don't know how the Australian public can get past that.

JAYES: So okay, there's a few things here. Just quickly want to get your read on two situations. One is the PM backing in Gladys Berejiklian’s strategy this morning. Do you back it in too? How she has handled this latest outbreak, not going into lockdown, putting firm restrictions in place.

BURKE: Look, the Premier will deal with the health advice and will do responses based on that. And that's exactly what should be happening. I'm not going to second guess that.

JAYES: Okay, there's another case of a man by the name of Mark Kilian who's been on this program, his father is dying of pancreatic cancer. He is going to be with him today. But it is a week too late. Should the Queensland Premier have recognised that this should have been done a week ago?

BURKE: Wherever people can show compassion without putting health at risk they should do so. I actually had conversation with the Prime Minister early on in the pandemic. We both lost our fathers just before the pandemic hit. And while neither of us felt lucky at the time, that was back in a world where we could be with people during their final weeks, there were no problems, as many people as wanting to be at a funeral could be there. And I think one of the toughest things that people have gone through over the last year and a bit, has been not being able to have that complete freedom when people are dying or when you're with somebody. So I've got a huge amount of compassion here and certainly hope and trust that Premiers around the country, they'll have to take account of health advice, but wherever compassion can be shown it should be shown.

JAYES: Okay, Tony Burke, thanks so much for your time this morning.

ENDS