TRANSCRIPT: TV INTERVIEW - ABC RN - 3 AUGUST 2021

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
RADIO INTERVIEW
ABC RADIO NATIONAL BREAKFAST WITH FRAN KELLY
TUESDAY, 3 AUGUST 2021

SUBJECTS: Vaccination incentives; Western Sydney lockdown; Parliament.

FRAN KELLY, HOST: Tony Burke, welcome back to Breakfast.

TONY BURKE, MANAGER OF OPPOSITION BUSINESS: Good morning Fran.

KELLY: So Labor wants to give 20 million adults I think it is $300 each to get vaccinated. Simon Birmingham says that’s an unnecessary thought bubble, it’s unlikely to work and it's insulting. Do people really need to be bought off to do the right thing?

BURKE: We need to do something like this because it is a race. And when I heard Simon Birmingham then, I just heard more of the complacency from this government, that's part of the reason why we were told we were at the front of the queue and we ended up at the back of the queue. Why the Prime Minister decided it wasn't a race and then pretended, oh maybe it was. There have been mixed messages from the government the whole way through. And it's part of the reason that we are so far behind on the vaccination rollout. We have a situation now where there is a race and we need to make sure people are vaccinated. The government has already acknowledged that incentives are meant to be part of the plan. Here's an incentive that will work.

KELLY: How do you know it will work? I mean, $6 billion is a lot of money. How do you know it will work? There's evidence that in in the US, where they did try financial incentives, in the sort of moderate term, they didn't really make much difference.

BURKE: Well throughout Europe and in different parts of the United States, incentives similar to this are being used. But it's also the case that it has two purposes. One, it does create stimulus in the economy. And the government, for roughly the same amount of money in March of last year, gave $750 stimulus payments completely untied, because getting extra money flowing through the economy was helpful for the economy. Here you've got something providing an almost identical level of stimulus. So it's good for small business, people spend it in their communities. But you also have something that creates an incentive. And for the government to be arguing that financial incentives are not part of something that influences people? Like if you stop and think about that, that's about as weird as an economic argument can get.

KELLY: Well, this is slightly different. It's a health paradigm we're talking about here. Offering people money - is there a danger this could actually increase hesitancy and people might think they have to be paid off to get immunised?

BURKE: Not for a minute. It's a reminder that what people do when they get vaccinated isn't only protecting their health, it also protects the health of the community. And the payment is the community acknowledging that benefit. Now, that's what it is. When government does that, it makes clear to people, this is not just protecting your own health, it's better for your loved ones. It's better for the whole Australian community if people get vaccinated.

KELLY: Simon Birmingham saying we're close to delivering some kind of vaccine passport. The Prime Minister has talked about special rules that will apply to people who are vaccinated. There'll be fewer restrictions, greater freedom of movement perhaps. Should people who have been vaccinated enjoy privileges not available to those who haven't? Would you be worried about any kind of, you know, damaged social cohesion with this? How do we do this to avoid that?

BURKE: Look, I suspect we'll get to a point where some of those sorts of incentives become completely consistent with good health advice. I suspect we will get to a point with those sorts of incentives. The challenge is those sorts of incentives, where it's about mobility, because if you're vaccinated you still can carry the virus, those sorts of incentives have to come much further down the track usually. Whereas a cash incentive, an immediate community acknowledgement of you doing the right thing in getting vaccinated, that can start now, that can happen now. And when we talk about the vaccine rollout, we are now in the final month of winter and we are still so far behind. We were told the full million doses figure by the by the end of March. We've been given milestone after milestone that hasn't been reached. They ended up stopping having targets and having horizons - which by definition, the horizon is the thing you never reach - we need something to acknowledge that there is a race and that's why Labor's put this forward today.

KELLY: Okay, just switching a little now to the issue of the 300 ADF personnel on the ground in Sydney, Western Sydney and South Western Sydney, which takes in your seat of Watson, which includes the Canterbury-Bankstown local government area. Are your constituents worried about this? About army personnel roaming the streets?

BURKE: The announcement couldn't have been made in a worse way. So now that it's happened, we want to find a way for it to work and I've been talking to Defence to try to get better community consultation, get some people involved in some of the community online meetings of that local Members of Parliament have been running. But effectively, they announced not in terms of just additional assistance to the police – it was rolled out in the initial announcement as “boots on the ground”, without any consultation with community leaders, the mayor, the state members, the federal members. It was a media strategy rather than a community strategy. And so if it's going to happen, we want to make sure that we can find a way for it to work. But the way it was announced at the start, you know the phone calls I was getting were pretty simple: they were saying so Mr Morrison wouldn’t lock down Bondi and then he'll send the troops in on us. That was how it was received. And what we now have to do is try to make up that ground, to try to make sure that it works cohesively on the ground.

KELLY: Okay. And just briefly, Parliament's back, it's been bent out of shape by the pandemic. Again, dozens of MPs and senators can't make it into Canberra because of lockdown restrictions. Labor's been pushing for it to return but are you worried that it could be a “superspreader” event?

BURKE: I have to say both the Speaker and the President of the Senate have done a good job in making sure we have much tougher restrictions in this building than apply anywhere else in the ACT. So they're doing everything possible to guard against exactly what you've described. It's essential that we sit for two reasons. One is there's legislation that we need to be able to get through the Parliament. But the other is scrutiny. We've seen previously when the going gets tough, Mr Morrison disappear for five days at a time and refuse to answer media questions. But when Parliament's on he has to front up every single day at question time. And question time, for all its imperfections, he has to be there, he has to front up and for the challenges that we've had with the vaccine failure, the quarantine failure and the government using taxpayer’s money as belongs to the Liberal Party, there's plenty to be asking about.

KELLY: Tony Burke, thank you very much for joining us.

ENDS