TRANSCRIPT: TV INTERVIEW - SKY NEWS - THURSDAY, 10 FEBRUARY, 2022

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
TELEVISION INTERVIEW
SKY NEWS WITH LAURA JAYES
THURSDAY, 10 FEBRUARY 2022

SUBJECT: Religious discrimination legislation.

LAURA JAYES, HOST: Tony Burke joins me know on a few hours sleep and a lot of coffee I’d say. Thanks so much for joining us Tony Burke. It was a big night in the chamber, what actually happened?

TONY BURKE, MANAGER OF OPPOSITION BUSINESS: Okay, so because the government insisted on dealing with an entire bill that night, and the government's position had only been given to us at 5.30 the day before, people wanted to speak. And so the speeches themselves went all the way through to well after midnight, and then we got at around two or three o'clock to starting to work our way through amendments. Now, some amendments were moved by us, some by the crossbench, some by the government. And as we worked through all of those, very few amendments had been carried. And then at around 4.30 in the morning we got to an amendment, we’d circulated a version and Rebekha Sharkie had circulated the same amendment. Rebekha’s was the one that got moved, and this was to deal with the issue that you were talking about in your program yesterday, with respect to whether or not children can be discriminated against. It didn’t matter to us that Rebekha’s one got the call first, rather than the one we’d circulated. So she moved the amendment, there was a short debate and at that point we had a vote where you had the 55 Labor members, you had all but two of the crossbench and you had five Liberal members all vote in the same way. And that meant the amendment was carried. So the amendment had to be voted on twice. It was then carried, and then something that I've never seen before in the House of Representatives: the government then voted against agreeing to its own bill. But those crossbenchers and the Liberals I referred to all voted with us to support the bill. But the government and the Prime Minister was now voting against his own legislation. So we ended up with a situation now where that key issue that was being referred to in respect to the treatment of children has now been amended in the House of Representatives and that'll go to the Senate. There are other amendments we were pursuing the weren’t successful. There was a long debate about whether or not you should have protection from vilification based on your faith. The Prime Minister in his speech, when he introduced the bill claimed it was already there - it's not. And yet when we tried to put that in the government voted against that. So there'll be more amendments to get voted on. But the one on children, if that passes the Senate in the same form it did in the House of Representatives, that gets settled immediately.

JAYES: Okay, so it comes down to this protection of kids. Yes, there are other issues that are not resolved. But that amendment got up, as you say crossbench legislation, it might all come down to Andrew Bragg in the Senate. His private and public statements, he's very sympathetic to this. He's told me this morning that he says this is the most important part of the bill. The government, though, is warning about unintended consequences for single-sex schools. Do you have any concerns about that?

BURKE: Well, here's the thing, the government's now raising this argument. But last year, the Prime Minister wrote to Anthony Albanese and put in writing that the government was willing to make this change to the bill. So if the Prime Minister was willing to put in writing that he supported the bill, that he supported this change, was willing to make sure that no children can be discriminated against - why on earth would he do that if two months later he's got a new argument that says “Oh, no, now it's a problem”. Like surely before he wrote the letter, he checked whether or not this was going to be a problem.

JAYES: But do you think there might be unintended consequences? Is that something you might have to sort out later?

BURKE: I think there's politics coming from the Prime Minister, to be honest. I think he doesn't see this is an issue about children. He sees this as an issue about politics, about his authority, about his control, and whether he can get everybody to do what he says. He might have a different argument if not for the fact that he put in writing that he wanted to do this. It was a formal offer that he put on the table. And now the politics is going a different way and he's making a different political calculation. I think we're all getting a bit used to the fact that that’s how Mr. Morrison works.

JAYES: Alright. There's a political calculations of course made by Labor too in all of this. The last election, your own review, said that there perhaps may have been a view amongst voters that you were abandoning people with religious beliefs. As the Member for Watson, what do you say to constituents, your constituents, about religious protection?

BURKE: Yeah, and I'm really glad you’ve asked that Laura because this issue, a lot of people have said “why isn’t Labor just opposing the bills outright?” Can I tell you there are some protections that are in this legislation that we do need to have. For example, at the moment, if someone's trying to rent a home and the real estate agent knocks them back up based on their race, they have legal protection. But if they're knocked back and not allowed to rent a place because they're Muslim, or because they're Christian Orthodox, or because they're Buddhist or Hindu, or for whatever reason, they have no legal protection at federal law. I know a lot of the focus understandably goes to the loudest voices and to some of the biggest churches. But for many of these smaller faiths in Australia, discrimination is a day to day reality. And we do need to protect those people as well. So this is where 90 per cent of what's in these bills hasn't been spoken about much, and is important to get through. And that's why we were making sure that the bills themselves that, as well as trying to amend them we didn't want to just wreck them. Because we want to make sure that we protect the child from discrimination and the issues we've been talking about in the last 24 hours - we also want to make sure that the Muslim family, the Maronite family, the Greek Orthodox family, the Buddhist family, whatever they might be, don't suffer discrimination in the provision of services simply because of what they believe.

JAYES: Okay, so long story short, is the balance right with these amendments?

BURKE: I don't think we're there yet. I do think that the statement of belief clause, there’s reworking to do that with that, and we'll have another go with that. And I really do believe the vilification issue needs to be fixed. How is it that like a woman in my electorate who chooses to wear a hijab - she's abused at any stage and being intimidated on the basis that she's Arabic, she's got legal protection. But I'll tell you, it's more likely to be because she's Muslim. And at the moment she's got no legal protection. The Prime Minister claims that will be fixed. It needs to be fixed today.

JAYES: Okay. Well, today, it's about protecting children, demonstrably, and we'll see what happens in the Senate. Tony Burke, thanks so much.

ENDS