TRANSCRIPT: TV INTERVIEW - SKY NEWS - THURSDAY, 19 AUGUST 2021

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
TELEVISION INTERVIEW
SKY NEWS WITH LAURA JAYES
THURSDAY, 19 AUGUST 2021

SUBJECTS: Western Sydney COVID outbreak, NSW Police Minister’s comment’s, Qantas, Afghanistan.

LAURA JAYES, HOST: Tony Burke, thanks so much for your time. We had the NSW Police Minister on Pete Stefanovic’s program this morning saying that people just need to follow the rules. Is it that simple?

TONY BURKE, SHADOW MINISTER FOR INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS: I’ve got to say I was pretty frustrated when I heard some aspects of that interview this morning. When the Minister was boasting about how good things are going in the Hills District and claiming there was some sort of lawlessness in the areas that are doing it tough. We are the home of essential workers. I don’t know who he thinks does the aged care work, fills the shopping shelves, drives the heavy vehicles into the Hills District but most of those people don’t live in his part of Sydney. And what we have in my part of Sydney is an area disproportionately full of essential workers who can't do their jobs from a laptop. And they are going into harm's way every day. Yes, we do need to make sure that the rules are kept to. But that's an issue throughout the whole of Sydney, and the singling out of the wealthiest suburbs, as somehow there's a merit to them that's not present in the rest of Sydney, I just thought was appalling this morning.

JAYES: So the message there from the Police Minister is very different. So these essential workers are going to work, they're putting themselves at risk. In some cases, they're getting the virus and then they're transferring it to the household. Are you saying they're not breaking the rules at all?

BURKE: Well, if they are essential workers and they are going to work then they're not breaking the rules. We've got larger households in my part of Sydney, they're more likely to be to be intergenerational as well. You know, and one of the problems here is they have put in different rules for different local government areas. And so we see the images from beachside suburbs every weekend, of people wandering around with no masks acting like there's not a problem in the world. Knowing that Bondi is where this all started. You've got a situation where local government boundaries are actually not that clear in Sydney. I was having a look this morning at the boundaries in Ashbury in Croydon Park of Canterbury Bankstown LGA. There's not even a road - you just go from one house to the next house and you're in a different local government area. To have rules that have changed so often, and to have rules that differ according to boundaries, some of which were only changed recently in amalgamations, some of which are impossible for people to hold in their memory as to when you're in one council area versus another, has just made keeping the rules more difficult. And you just add the layer of that as to how poor the communication was for a long time in different languages. English is my only language and I've had trouble keeping up with the changes in the rules. So yes, I want everyone to obey the rules. But I do not want people from state or federal government to be blaming the people who are doing it the toughest.

JAYES: Indeed. And, look, it's eight weeks in now. We saw 633 cases yesterday. The premier says the right settings are in place. The settings change every fortnight. Are the right settings in place now, Tony Burke, or do we need a curfew?

BURKE: I don't know whether it's a curfew or what the rules are. My simple request is decide what the toughest restrictions need to be and just apply them uniformly over areas. Stop picking one part of Sydney against another. That that is how we've seen the spread go. I know it all needs to be based on health advice, I get that. At the same time, it needs to be simple enough that people can follow it. Not everybody is watching every news conference every day, as rules change. It just needs to be simple. People want to do the right thing. It will always be harder in areas with more essential workers. If you've got the luxury of being able to work from home on a laptop - when I say luxury, people would still rather be going to their work normally, it's still tough for people - but for essential workers it's just of a different order. And we need language that speaks to people with simple rules, not language that blames some parts of Sydney.

JAYES: Yeah, we do see the rules change day by day. One of the problems and it might seem really small for some people, but is childcare. So a lot of these essential workers must send their children to childcare. Childcare centres are becoming really transmission sites are to be frank. What is the solution there?

BURKE: I don't know the answer to that I've got to say. And I'm really worried about it. One of the biggest shifts we've seen is seeing the age profile change. One of my local schools, we lost a 15-year-old, Osama. He had COVID, he also had meningitis. The fact that he had COVID putting limits around family being able to be with him as well. Like it's just really tough as we watch the profile change. Obviously, people at any age receiving COVID there's a huge challenge there. But when we start to see at childcare centres and schools, it is of a different order. Now for some of these age groups we may well find a vaccination pathway. For some of these age groups we might not. And this is where we get once it gets out of hand. None of these are challenges that we would be facing now if Bondi had been locked down at the start, if we had fit-for-purpose quarantine, or if we had a proper vaccination rollout. And I know we always need to look at quite properly, what's next. But we also can't look away from the fact that on all three, it's been too little too late.

JAYES: Why not make vaccines mandatory when we finally do have enough?

BURKE: Well where we're a long way from that part of the conversation because we at the moment the whole challenge is one of supply.

JAYES: Well Qantas is doing it though. It’s a different kettle of fish, they are frontline workers, essentially, when travel does get back up and running. It was perhaps a risky move from Alan Joyce. Is it one you support?

BURKE: I would prefer a situation if it's to apply for aviation, for example, I would prefer they just put health orders in place and it applied to aviation across the board. I think the simpler the rules are, then the better we get with this. I don't want to end up with a situation where you've got some airlines where they're taking unvaccinated, other airlines where you have to be vaccinated. We have enough variations at the moment. Wherever they can make a simple rule and do these things with health orders - I just think it makes it easier across the board. The complexity and the constant rule-changing is one of the reasons - it's not the only reason but it is one of the big problems that we have in Sydney at the moment.

JAYES: Indeed, just one final question on Afghanistan, because many of your constituents do have family in Afghanistan still and there'll be watching on with news day by day hoping for some better news. When it comes to resettlement of anyone out of Afghanistan. We know there's going to be an election in the next six months. What will Labor do? Will Labor give permanent resettlement to anyone we’ve evacuated out of Afghanistan that worked with the Aussies?

BURKE: We've been calling for the people who worked and helped our efforts there to be brought to Australia and settled in Australia for a long time. The first time, I was going back through the records and the first time I found we asked about this in Parliament was in 2018. And I appreciate when the government says well this has collapsed faster than they thought it would. We've been calling for this since way back then. We called for it in earnest in recent months. And I don't want this to be yet another example of too little too late. But we are we are seeing it across the board. We have a national interest in sending a message to the world that if you help Australia, we won't abandon you. It's part of our national security to send that message to the world. And it's important that the government does that.

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

ENDS