TRANSCRIPT: TV INTERVIEW - SKY NEWS - MONDAY, 14 FEBRUARY 2022

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
TELEVISION INTERVIEW
SKY NEWS WITH KIERAN GILBERT
MONDAY, 14 FEBRUARY 2022

SUBJECTS: Parliament; Anthony Albanese; Liberal leadership tensions; Newspoll; NSW byelections.

KIERAN GILBERT, HOST: Thanks for your time. The Opposition Leader trying to mock the government's questioning of him, trying to table his university essay from the 80s. Interesting tactic in response to Josh Frydenberg. But I guess, the government is trying to characterise the Labor leader - before he can - in the minds of voters. That's essentially what they're trying to do?

TONY BURKE, MANAGER OF OPPOSITION BUSINESS: What the government's doing is completely dishonest. I mean, they've pulled out a speech that Anthony gave in 1991. And they're quoting a section where he was quoting somebody else. Like that's what this has come to. So sometimes it's humour that just cuts through and shows how absurd an attack is. And I think that's what Anthony did today. Like seeking to table your handwritten university assignment, which showed a few things. It showed how ridiculous it is to go back that far. But it also reminded people that Anthony does, in fact, have a qualification in economics. Apparently, he got a distinction for that particular assignment. But you know, it made the point that what Josh Frydenberg is doing is absurd. Like, it's just ridiculous. And Josh is playing to two audiences. One, he's trying to prove that he can be the mud thrower, to try to cause some damage he thinks to Anthony. And the other thing, it's a competition between him and Peter Dutton at the moment. They're playing off against each other all the time trying to show the backbench who's tougher. You know why they're doing that.

GILBERT: Sure. When you say it's ridiculous. It is important for a leader to reconcile everything they've believed or said, and Anthony Albanese certainly had a journey hasn’t he from the left, far left of the Labor Party, to where he is at the moment, which is right in the centre in terms of, well that's where he wants to be anyway, the centre of economic and security policy.

BURKE: He is very much in the centre and has been his whole time as a minister. You look at the role that Anthony's played over that time. During the time that he was Leader of the House and running the parliament, he has always been somebody who's been able to navigate with the crossbench, bring people together, have majorities. I remember people thinking it was going to be impossible –

GILBERT: So he’s not some left wing ideologue?

BURKE: Oh, look. We've all got our values that we have when we’re at uni and things like that. Peter Costello had some pretty extraordinary essays that he'd written back in the day. But what matters here is Anthony was also saying look, if you're spending your time as treasurer just running a dirt unit, he’d save them some time, table it. That way they’d already have a copy.

GILBERT: The other person who you mentioned has been targeting the Labor leader is Peter Dutton. And it was an interesting ruling by the Speaker today. Did you welcome that ruling by Speaker Wallace, where he says comments made by the defence minister last week were out of order.

BURKE: It was an important ruling that came from the Speaker today. I don't need to go through standing order by standing order. But section nine is pretty clear about reflections on members. And it has always been the case that not only because it's just an absurd thing to do to be questioning people's loyalty but also - it's against the national interest. We’ve let politics become something that implies to nations overseas that we are divided on national security issues when we are not. That is bad for Australia. So the ruling that the Speaker made wasn't just good for the Parliament. It was good for national security to pull Peter Dutton back into line.

GILBERT: The government driving hard though on the broader issues of national security today. Mr Dutton targeting Labor's record on boats, and he got interrupted because his answer finished, but listing the number of boats that arrived under your watch. Is that another vulnerability that Labor has to manage over coming weeks?

BURKE: Well, no, towards the towards the end of our time in government we had a 90 per cent reduction. They never like to talk about where it ended up by the end when Kevin came back, I became immigration minister and some policies were fundamentally changed. The next step that was taken was taken by the current government, which dealt with the final 10 per cent which was the turn backs policy, where the came up with a different way of doing it to how it had ever been done before – and that’s bipartisan. So once again they’re wanting to pretend –

GILBERT: So there’s not a crack of light now between you and the government on boats?

BURKE: No, no, no. If people were to seek to come, if they were to put their lives at risk on the high seas, then how that is dealt with is the same by Labor or the government. But can I say, for both Peter Dutton and Josh Frydenberg, see what they're doing. Because they're not only trying to have a go at Anthony, they're actually having a go at each other here. So Peter Dutton is wanting to say if you haven't had a national security portfolio, you can't ever be leader. That's about Josh. And Josh Frydenberg saying, if you haven’t spent time with the Treasury portfolio, then you can never be leader. That's him having a go at Peter Dutton. And so, let's not pretend that this is just some positioning of them arguing against Anthony. This is also the internals of the Liberal Party on display in question time.

GILBERT: Obviously, when you look back to 2019, you're cautious when you look at the opinion polls today. But you must be encouraged seeing a primary vote up over 40 per cent.

BURKE: No. Can I just say, after what happened last time we are taking absolutely nothing for granted. Federal elections in Australia are always close, regardless of what the polls say beforehand. In what was released today, there was still 7 per cent of people not giving their view yet. And so we will take nothing for granted. We'll be working every day. And at 6pm on election night, which we presume will be sometime in May, they'll start counting the votes. And that will be the first time that we'll know where this is at. No one's going to get ahead of ourselves. But we are determined to spend every day doing our job and earning the respect to the Australian people. If the government was doing its job question time today would have been very different.

GILBERT: I know you were in Strathfield on Saturday nights. You spoke to our colleague Andrea Crothers on our program. But it wasn't the sort of swing you may have hoped for in Strathfield. For Labor at the New South Wales level, is that a concern for the prospect of picking up Reid, which overlaps with Strathfield at the federal level?

BURKE: Look Reid will be tight, but we're competitive. And Sally Sitou, our candidate, is fantastic. But the thing to note. There are a couple of things to note with the Strathfield byelection. The first is that you had Elizabeth Farrelly running as an independent, who had publicly said she wanted to be the Labor candidate. So you end up getting some of the Labor vote going to that independent, where she's identified herself in those terms. She then didn’t preference Labor. So you've got to play all of that into it. But the one thing I'll tell you from the polling booths, which I think is really interesting for what this means for Western Sydney, is people, even though it hadn't been part of the campaign, people were still talking about how unfairly the local area had been treated last year. The double standard as to some people in Sydney being able to live at the beach with no restrictions. And from my area, right through Western Sydney, people having helicopters flying overhead, curfews that weren't based on the medical advice, and people losing money, businesses losing money - that was being raised without prompting on the polling booths.

GILBERT: That reflects NSW government policy as opposed to federal.

BURKE: Yeah, but they also remember when New South Wales did that, JobKeeper wasn't brought back. Like it has all mixed in together. And during that time, some people have thought, you know, it's a new year will people forget? Can I tell you, those feelings are still real and they are still raw.

GILBERT: Manager of Opposition Business Tony Burke. Thanks.

ENDS