TRANSCRIPT - RADIO INTERVIEW - TASMANIA TALKS WITH MIKE O’LOUGHLIN - THURSDAY, 3 FEBRUARY 2022

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
RADIO INTERVIEW
TASMANIA TALKS WITH MIKE O’LOUGHLIN
THURSDAY, 3 FEBRUARY 2022

SUBJECTS: Secure work, arts workers, federal election, cost of living

MIKE O’LOUGHLIN, HOST: More and more federal politicians as I mentioned are hitting the unofficial campaign trail, one of which is Federal Shadow Industrial Relations Minister and Federal Shadow Arts Minister Tony Burke. He’s in Tassie at the moment for a couple of days to talk with Tasmanians about Labor's election policies. Shadow Minister Burke joins me live on the line now. Tony. Good morning. Thanks for your time and welcome to Tassie.

TONY BURKE, SHADOW MINISTER FOR INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS: G’day Mike, it's great to be back. It hasn’t been waiting for the campaign, it’s been waiting for permission to get in that’s been holding us back.

O’LOUGHLIN: Good point. So you’re paying visits to Launie, Devonport and Burnie while you’re here. Is that right? And if that's the case, what do you hope to achieve? And what did you get up to yesterday?

BURKE: Yesterday I was in Launie. So what I'm doing these two days is talking to people about secure jobs. So our main industrial relations policy across the country is about trying to get people back into secure jobs so that we stop replacing permanent jobs with casual ones. That's our main thrust. But of course, Tasmania has got the highest rate of casualisation in the country. You’ve got 20,000 people working more than one job. And while it's always been the case, I've worked as a casual when I was a student, so it's always been the case there's been some people who want casual jobs. But they're not just in retail and hospitality anymore. You go to an aged care centre, or you look at the people working in the National Disability Insurance Scheme, look at security guards. A whole lot of people now who used to have a secure job have been going into insecure jobs.

O’LOUGHLIN: Yeah, look, and I was grateful, even when I was doing a bit of uni, I was grateful for the casual employment. It's necessary I think. But I'm quite gobsmacked that there's 26.6% of all employees in Tasmania are casual, which is, as I mentioned earlier, almost 5% higher than the national average.

BURKE: Yeah, and like if you're a student wanting full flexibility it's one thing. But if you're trying to run a household - it's hard to find rent that's casual, or a mortgage that's casual, or a car where putting petrol in it is on a casual base. Or your grocery bills. So all the liabilities that you've got, when you're trying to hold a household budget together, they're all permanent. They don't go away. And you need, if your income’s going to be as reliable as your bills then you need to be able to have secure work. And insecure jobs aren't just casuals anymore. It's also, there's this new gig economy, with people working off of apps on their phones. You've got people working for labour hire, where labour hire is not just used for surge workforce anymore - it's now sometimes used to undercut the conditions at a workplace. So you've got all these different ways, sham contracting, different ways that were you used to have a secure job these loopholes have opened up. And the government for eight years haven't shut down one of these loopholes.

O’LOUGHLIN: Tony, if I quote The Australian newspaper this morning it said ongoing job and economic insecurity is taking a cumulative toll on Australian workers with significantly more reporting they are burnt out now, more so than after the first year of the pandemic. This is a brand new study. And while Australia has largely avoided a US-style “great resignation” so far it might not be far away, with more than two in five Australian workers planning to actively search for a new job in 2022. And as the latest employment sentiment study by software company, Elmo, with a survey I think it was more than 1000 workers I believe around the nation, showing high numbers of workers admitted burnout now than at the start of last year. Elevated feelings, being overwhelmed with workloads. Is that what you’re finding as well?

BURKE: Yeah. I mean, one of the stories that came out yesterday meeting with workers in Launceston was people were talking about where you've got insecure work, so therefore you've got no annual leave, you got no sick leave. And one bloke said he went for 14 years without taking a holiday. But there were a lot of stories around the table yesterday, where people had had to time and put off when they were getting vaccinated because they were worried that if they had any side effects over the two or three days that followed and needed time off they didn't want to trash their income for the week because they wouldn't have had sick leave available to them. So this is where you start thinking of it in terms of well, security for what that means for the workers, for the individual. But there's a community knock-on impact that happens here. Whether it's people being able to time themselves to volunteer for kids sport, or whether it's simply just having the confidence to spend. And it's where for any individual business, there might be moments where they think, oh, maybe we shouldn’t lock into secure employment. But when that happens across the whole economy, you've got people wary of spending, and all of the leave entitlements that give us the opportunity to participate as a community, all that falls away as well.

O’LOUGHLIN: Will you be having a chat to those that McCain, because I remember the dispute, I believe I was reading about it September last year. Workers hoping to get a 3.8% pay increase in the first year, plus inflation, first year, then inflation plus 1% each year for the next two years. And the union actually shut it down, they said for safety reasons of course. The union dubbed a bit of a lockout there. Are you having a chat to them and see what the update is on that?

BURKE: I'm going out and talking to some of them today. So I'll sort of, I'll hold my fire until I've had the meeting to make sure that I've got latest information. And that's one of the things, why it’s so good to be back out here on the ground in the Northwest. Because you try to keep in touch just with conversations here and there, you try to keep in touch with what you read. But ultimately, nothing matches a worker sitting with you in a room and saying, “This is what I've been through. This is what it's meant for my life.” And if you're basing your policy on that, then we can get to a situation again, where we've got that security around Australia.

O’LOUGHLIN: Isn't it amazing, stats though, and I go through a lot of stats, a lot of data is something I enjoy looking at. And I mentioned before, we're 26.6% of all employees, highest level of casual work. But Tasmanian workers also earn 13% less than the Australian median weekly wage. Around one in three employed people in Tasmania are on insecure non-standard work arrangements, including casual, independent contracts, or fixed-term contracts. And over 20,000 workers in Tasmania work more than one job. And finally, interesting, women working in Tasmania are more likely to be in part time work - 58.4% - than the national average, which is 46%, a major contributor to a growing gap in earnings between women and men.

BURKE: And this is where there is a direct line between lack of job security and lower wages. Because if you don't have the confidence that you're even going to get the next shift what position are you in to argue that you should be paid more? The two completely hand in hand. So when Tasmania is short-changed on security of work, it means Tasmania is also short-changed on the income that people receive.

O’LOUGHLIN: We've been discussing this in this program a lot. Growers, I believe have three months to adjust before the new hourly minimum pay rate for seasonal workers comes into effect. April 28. I mean, that's got to be of benefit for those pickers.

BURKE: A huge benefit. There are lots of growers who have played by the rules and been completely responsible. But I'll tell you some of the rorts that have been out there on the way people have been exploited have been horrific. I met with some fruit pickers. They've been brought over from overseas. And one of them, she’d come from Taiwan, and she was taking me through photographs that she had, where she’d been showing people what time of day you turn up to the back of the local supermarket to be able to get the food from the dumpster. Because they were not earning enough to be able to even eat. Now, you know, we don't want to be that sort of country. And I feel for growers who play by the rules, when they're competing with businesses that are getting a cheaper bottom line because they're exploiting people. It's not what Australia is meant to be about. It can be fixed but you need to have, and this is why Anthony Albanese with the Labor policy has been so adamant, that you need to be able to start shutting down the loopholes so that we stop replacing permanent jobs with casual ones.

O’LOUGHLIN: What impact are the higher casual workforce stats having on the community that you've seen?

BURKE: Yesterday, Ross Hart was raising with me the impact. The point I made earlier actually came from Ross, about the volunteering in communities. So for example, if you want to do something as simple as coaching a kid’s sporting team – if you don't know your roster, you can't commit to be there for training or games. If you find out every couple of days, or some people find out during the day what their shift will do that very day. All that volunteering, which is so important to the different communities throughout Tasmania, it becomes a nightmare trying to organise that. And that's where that, I hadn't really thought about it in those terms until yesterday. And Chris Lynch will be with me today. And I'm sure we'll hear similar stories in the Northwest. But ultimately, like I started on this issue very much from an individual perspective. I remembered meeting with someone very late at night at a shopping center and the following morning, that same person served me a cup of coffee. And I realised all the rights we talk about, about overtime or whatever, it means nothing if you're juggling multiple jobs. And it means that you can't organise a holiday, and it just means a whole lot of things that we've built up as part of what it is to work in Australia. You know, we're not meant to be a country like America, where you have to get tips to be able to get by. The concept of having regular work, of knowing where you stand, and then returning you know that security with loyalty and hard work to your employer, that really simple compact is starting to fall apart in a big way. And it's falling apart fast at the moment because a lot of a permanent jobs that disappeared during the pandemic are starting to come back as insecure jobs. So if we don't get it right at this exact moment, whatever problem we're describing now is going to get worse at a rate of knots over the next couple of years.

O’LOUGHLIN: I'm talking with Tony Burke, the federal Shadow Industrial Relations Minister and Shadow Arts Minister. Speaking of that, in the art space there's no doubt our arts sector has been hit really hard throughout the pandemic. What did you hear from the locals there? And how do you plan to help with that?

BURKE: Yeah, one of the challenges is every few months, the arts sector has had a different challenge. And the starting point, and I don't think this is unfair to say, in terms of how Mr Morrison's government's handled the arts - they basically haven't even started with the principle that we're talking about workers. You know, JobKeeper, it was really important to have a wage subsidy. I was one of the people out there arguing for it right at the start when the government wasn't going to deliver one. But if you were then going to design a wage subsidy to cut out as many people from the arts sector as possible you’d design it the way they did. Because the rules they put around casuals knocked out a very large number of people. So the ones that got it, it was needed. But a whole lot of people in the sector now have been running down their savings, running down whatever capital they might have had, and are dealing with the uncertainty. So that one of the things that should happen right away, is there should be a system for people in the arts sector to be able to get insurance. Now the government have done the right thing for the film industry. So if it's a Hollywood film being filmed in Australia, there is a government backed insurance scheme. So if it all gets shut down because of COVID unexpectedly, then they can draw back on the insurance. Could you imagine what that would mean for festivals being organised in different communities, if they had an option of just being able to insure against this one risk that they’ve got no control over.

O’LOUGHLIN: We've had way too many closed down. I mean, that's been such a disappointment, not just for the organisers but for the people attending and for those that wish to be part of those festivals. We've had it, that's been quite a quite an issue here. And of course, you've got to put it down to not just insurance but to the pandemic overall.

BURKE: Yeah but the thing is you can insure against a whole lot of risk. And you used to be able to insure against a pandemic. So some festivals, actually two years ago had pandemic insurance. But now, you can only insure against a future pandemic. It's like you can't get bushfire insurance once a fire has started. So, the government have recognised this problem and they've done the right thing, but only for the Hollywood productions, the big money in the movie industry. Now, if you had a system like that extended to the festivals here – you know, they'd make a decision as to whether they wanted to buy the insurance and if you don't pay for the insurance and I guess it's on you. But at the moment, the system doesn't even exist, and it won't exist unless the government acts.

O’LOUGHLIN: Listen, I've got a call from Patrick asking what exactly is Labor going to do to change things and improve employment from casual to more permanent roles?

BURKE: I can give you the changes that you make. You make secure work an objective of the Fair Work Act. You allow the Fair Work Act to be able to reach people in the gig economy - at the moment they’re classed as small business people and so all their rights fall off a cliff in one go. You have a system where you have same job, same pay rule which means labour hire can still be there, but it can't be used to undercut the rate that's being paid at a worksite. And you also have a proper definition of a casual. Like it's possible at the moment for someone to be on a six-month, eight-month, 10 month roster, all fixed hours. But if the boss says they're a casual, they're casual. They don't get any of the entitlements, even though the employer is getting all the benefits of a reliable workforce. So those sorts of changes make a huge difference. These are all ways of shutting down the loopholes that have turned up.

O’LOUGHLIN: I thought it was just quite disgusting on Tuesday at the National Press Club. I mean, you've got the Prime Minister announcing what I considered something quite important, a $2 billion plan to make Australia stronger and less dependent on countries such as China, helping inventors, entrepreneurs develop their ideas rather than sell them overseas. But journalists, not one of them asked him one question about this. Instead, they demanded to know if Morrison knew the price of milk or bread. I mean, what's happened? As far as I'm concerned, it's just turning into dirty politics. And you've got to say, you've got to admit, Anthony Albanese, he's having a fair relatively free ride when it comes to scrutiny that was applied even to Bill Shorten. He's doing a lot better off and being able to travel, he's traveling all over the place, and it's good to see he comes to Tasmania a lot as well. But it just appears to me, and then you've got this “psycho” issue and the rest of it. It's turning into something that I believe is really dirty politics. And it's had its dirty moments, but I'm finding this time it's really quite disgusting.

BURKE: Yeah, look, I can't be responsible for what for what the media say. And so for us, it's very much – and this interview I hope has been an example of it - of what Anthony Albanese’s doing, what his team’s doing, we're keeping to the issues. We're talking about how we can start manufacturing here in Australia again and have a future Made in Australia, how we can deliver secure jobs and how we can have a better deal for working families. And what we're doing is just keeping really strictly to that.

O’LOUGHLIN: Yeah, well, and I appreciate that. And because I believe in accuracy and balance, I mean, that's what this program should be about. So the listener can actually make their decision. I mean, it hasn't been any positivity around the Prime Minister recently. But I mean, Labor then must feel very, very confident going into this election.

BURKE: No, we take nothing for granted. Absolutely nothing. There's only been something like three times since World War Two that we've won from opposition. It's always hard. It's always a challenge. And we are taking absolutely nothing, nothing for granted here. This is a mountain in front of us. I'll tell you, we're competitive. And we're determined. And the policies that we're putting forward will make a real difference to the different areas where Australia's direction needs to be turned around for the better for people. But this election will be tough. It'll be close. We're competitive. And anyone who thinks they know the outcome at the moment, they're doing better than me because I certainly don't.

O’LOUGHLIN: What about independents? Are we going to see more independents voted in in this election? We know Clive Palmer seems to have an open checkbook with how many advertisements what he's been putting in the paper for months, on the phone for months, some of the ridiculous things they've been saying on text. The money being spent is gobsmacking. But I'm quite sure that I don't know that many will go for United Australia Party myself. But do you see many independents getting in?

BURKE: I think there'll be a lot of media discussion about the independents before the election. But I don't know how many seats they’ll win? At the moment you've got, depending on how you count, six or seven there on the crossbench in the House of Representatives at the moment. The number might go up a little bit. But ultimately, my expectation is one side of politics or the other or have a majority. And then you’ve still got to deal respectfully with independents if they're elected Members of Parliament, and you know, they're speaking for the community that they've been elected by. But most of the time in Australia you get majority governments. And that’s certainly what we’re campaigning for.

O’LOUGHLIN: Does Labor have any plans to side with the Greens?

BURKE: No, no, no. And Anthony's made that absolutely clear. Previously there were written agreements and formal deals and things like that. We are campaigning for a majority. There will be no deals like that.

O’LOUGHLIN: If I was a bit cheeky, do you know the price of milk and break at the moment?

BURKE: It's more expensive for me because I’m celiac. So I'm up above the $5 mark for a loaf of bread when I buy one. And, for milk we get the A2 stuff, so we get the two litres for about $3.50.

O’LOUGHLIN: I go shopping quite a bit, I sometimes grab it, I think I grab what I want and hope for and sometimes you see the yellow tag, some special I'll go for some of those - but it'd be difficult to even say sometimes exactly how much they cost. I've got a question here, Ian from East Devonport's called in to ask Tony: instead of saying they're competitive, be leaders, stop bagging the other parties, he says, and just tell us what you're going to do and why we should vote for you, says Ian.

BURKE: Oh, I think that's basically what I've done during this interview.

O’LOUGHLIN: I think you've been very good, but then maybe just Ian came in at a part of it. But that's his question anyway. So basically, it can be black and white.

BURKE: Well, what I'll say there, I do think there is scope, and we haven't done much today, but there is scope is when people are making a choice between two sides for some of the discussion to be about why you don't think the other side's good enough. I think that's a reasonable thing for it to be part of it. It just can't be all of it. You've got to make sure that you're explaining what your changes are, what your vision is, what your core beliefs are that you want to fix. And that's one of the things I've really appreciated with the conversation we've been having this morning is that not only is that how I've answered, but it's also been what you've been trying to get from me.

O’LOUGHLIN: Well, exactly. And I think if people can make the right decision, and you'll always get and as this program gets some that are really one sided and will bag the heck out of me thinking I'm favouring that side or the other, when in actual fact I'm not. But we get that anyway, that's our job. But I wish you well Tony and I'm glad to see more politicians coming to Tassie, looking around, talking to people and getting the message over that you know what they are about so that people will have a choice.

BURKE: Every time I come here I learn. And it’s those conversation with people, where someone tells you what's really going on. If your policies are based on those sorts of conversations, you get things right.

ENDS