TRANSCRIPT: RADIO INTERVIEW - ABC NORTH TASMANIA - THURSDAY, 3 FEBRUARY 2022

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
RADIO INTERVIEW
ABC NORTH TASMANIA
THURSDAY, 3 FEBRUARY 2022

SUBJECTS: Labor’s plan for secure jobs; the arts.

BELINGS KING, HOST: I wonder what brings him joy. Being on the road ahead of a federal election perhaps? Tony Burke, good morning.

TONY BURKE, SHADOW MINISTER FOR INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS: G’day Belinda. Music!

KING: Music brings you joy?

BURKE: Oh yeah. I am the organiser of the relatively dodgy pub rock band that we have in Parliament so it’s very much making music and listening to music, I absolutely love it.

KING: Is this pub rock band along party lines? Or is it a bipartisan approach, no holds barred after we’ve all had three beers?

BURKE: Oh, we'd welcome bipartisanship. But we're yet to find … all the musicians on the other side of the aisle tend to be more of the classical ilk. Whereas we sort of go more for The Clash of Cold Chisel.

KING: Now you're talking, The Clash. In all seriousness, Tony Burke, welcome to Tasmania. Now you've come here with some really specific things in mind. In particular, you're quite keen I believe to talk to unions and employers and the community about getting Australia back to work. Now, according to the Reserve Bank our unemployment rate could fall to 3.75% by the end of 2023, which would be the lowest unemployment rate since the mid-70s. So clearly there is competition from employers to find good staff and many employers are unable to secure staff at the moment, or at least field a full team during the challenges presented by COVID. What can be done to improve the situation? What have you got in mind?

BURKE: Look, the key thing that that we're looking at, and I've been talking to people about yesterday in Launceston and today across the Northwest, is what sort of jobs will they be? Because my concern is, as new jobs are created, we seem to be replacing what used to be secure permanent jobs with casual ones. And if you look across the country now Tasmania has got the highest rate of casualisation of any state. And you know, your bills aren't casual. You can't find rent that's casual or a mortgage that's casual. And we used to have, we used to be a country where you could easily get a secure job. And increasingly now people are juggling more than one job. You’ve got 20,000 People in Tasmania with multiple jobs now. And so that's the conversation I've been having with people and some of the stories I've got to say that I heard yesterday - and I expect to hear some more of it today - have really shocked me about what insecure work has been meaning for people.

KING: So if employers are struggling for staff, and we certainly are hearing that at the moment, why aren't permanent positions on offer?

BURKE: I don't understand it to be honest. I'm not sure why the employers are making those decisions individually. And a lot of people who lost work during the pandemic as jobs start to come back and finding that the secure job they used to have is now coming back as a casual one. What I do know is that every time a new rort has come up that has sort of pushed the system towards insecure work the government's never tried to fix it. So someone comes up with a loophole in tax law, we’re pretty quick with legislation in the Parliament to try to shut down a whole lot of those loopholes. But when a loophole’s found through labour hire undercutting rates, or with the gig economy, there's been no action at all. And the gig economy, we often think of that in terms of Uber or the different apps you might have on a phone. People forget that a whole lot of the NDIS now, a whole lot of the care sector, where it used to be permanent jobs is now people working through apps where they don't know day-to-day what their shifts will be, they don't know day-to-day what their incomes are going to be. And that makes it really hard if you want to buy a car, if you want to get somewhere to live, if you just want to be confident you can make ends meet.

KING: Now, you mentioned the move from a permanent workforce to a casualised workforce. You're also Shadow Minister for the Arts. In the last two years with COVID we've seen many – in fact I daresay the majority - of workers in the arts area fall through the cracks because their work is mostly casual or it is a short-term freelance work and they simply didn't qualify meet the criteria for things like JobKeeper. What can be done to improve that situation because the pandemic isn't going to go away tomorrow.

BURKE: That's right. And we argued hard for there to be a wage subsidy. Because originally the government wasn't going to do one at all. But once they did it - if you were going to design a wage subsidy to miss out on as many arts workers as possible, you'd probably design JobKeeper. Because it's exactly as you said - not just highly casualised, but casualised in terms of working for a different employer sometimes even week to week, is the way the sector can operate. I've spent a whole lot of time, like I've been in the arts portfolio, I was arts minister when we were last in government, I've been in the portfolio a long time. And I used to always think the key argument that we had to have in Australia was about the extra value that we get by making sure we've got people telling our stories, and that our own music is the soundtrack to life in Australia, and that our stories are being told on TV and local theatres, and the whole community nature of the arts is supported. But what I realised during the pandemic was the government didn't even consider art workers to be workers. People weren't being treated like they had real jobs. And there's a whole lot of policy that we've got to work through on this. But the starting point of all of it has to be: these are serious jobs. It's a serious industry. It's a major part of the tourism dollar as well, and an important part of regional economies. And during the pandemic, people have relied on the arts and our storytellers to get them through the pandemic period, more than we have at any other time in our lives. So every time there's a disaster for anyone else, like you know, when we've had bushfires or anything like that, we turn to our artists, and they get asked to perform for free. And they do. But this time, artists needed us to have their back. And I've got to say, the government just didn't deliver for them.

KING: Is it the time to take the bull by the horns and reframe the entire working situation for artists? Try something new, something bold?

BURKE: The starting point for it I think has to be to have a cultural policy again. Yeah, we had one when we were in government, it was announced when Simon Crean had the portfolio. And then a couple of days later, Simon had left and I was the minister who rolled it out. But when you’ve got to cultural policy, it basically means you get the significance of the arts to every portfolio: to employment, to health, to trade. It becomes part of the thinking of government. The moment we lost office, one of the first things Tony Abbott and George Brandis did was just abolish it. So they didn’t replace it with a bad policy, they replaced it with nothing. So we've gone for eight years now with no guiding framework that says this part of the Australian economy, this part of Australian society, is really important. It just hasn't been there. And my view is we're really going to need at a rate of knots to get a cultural policy established that reaches into all the different ways that the arts affects our community. The ways it enriches our society and the ways that’s essential to our economy. And I mean try having a tourism strategy if you take the performing arts and the different cultural institutions out of it. That's one of the main reasons people travel.

KING: Indeed. Well Tony Burke, welcome to Tasmania, I have no doubt you're going to have plenty of people knocking on your door and chewing your ear in the next day or two while you're here.

BURKE: Great to be back Belinda. Thank you.

KING: Thank you very much. Next time bring the band.

BURKE: Okay. You’re on.

ENDS