TRANSCRIPT - SKY NEWS WITH KIERAN GILBERT - WEDNESDAY, 14 FEBRUARY 2024

E&OE TRANSCRIPT

TELEVISION INTERVIEW, SKY NEWS

NEWSDAY WITH KIERAN GILBERT

WEDNESDAY, 14 FEBRUARY 2024

SUBJECTS: Closing Loopholes laws, right to disconnect, NZYQ.

KIERAN GILBERT, HOST: Joining me live in the studio is the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, the Leader of the Government in the House, Tony Burke. Thanks for your time. I'll ask you about those immigration detainees and the controversy around that in a moment.

I want to ask you, though, first of all, your area of responsibility, the right to disconnect, as it's known, the Police Federation of Australia endorsing it. I'm just wondering why can't it be left to enterprise agreements alone. I know Victoria Police have a right to disconnect as part of an agreement. Why don't you just leave it to those sort of workplace based solutions as opposed to a legislative approach?

TONY BURKE MP, MINISTER FOR EMPLOYMENT AND WORKPLACE RELATIONS, MINISTER FOR THE ARTS: As an example, NSW and South Australia at the moment don't. Lots of police do, some don't. But the challenge is not all workers are going to be covered by an agreement. So, the concept is for people who are not covered. Surely there is a point at which we say unpaid work becomes unreasonable. Surely. Because ultimately this whole argument is about something that at one level I'm surprised it's even controversial, which is, should you be paid when you're working?

All workplaces, people will have a bit of give and take, and that's fine, and that won't change. The challenge has been when it gets out of hand, and with a minority of employers, it can get quite out of hand. And the police have some terrible examples of calls in the middle of the night for issues that could just as easily have waited ‘til their next shift. People want to know that they've got the right to be able to just say that email can wait ‘til I get back to work.

GILBERT: When you say you're surprised that it's generated controversy, isn't it because people would say this should be common sense, as opposed to, as the business groups have been saying, this is common sense, we shouldn't have more red tape around it.

BURKE: Can I say, it's interesting, the gap between some of the conversation that's happened in this building and you look at some of the research that's been out there and even the polling that's happened as to what the community thinks on this issue.

The community support for this change is overwhelming. I think it's partly because in a building like this, or even the people who work for the peak business groups, a lot of our world, and the terms and conditions of our employment does involve late night calls, does involve messages back and forth.

That's the deal we've signed up to. It's part of our job. It's a very different world if you're someone who’s paid from nine to three and you're expected to constantly be monitoring your emails out of hours. The way we've structured it is: yes, the employer can still reach out to you, but you can't be punished because you were deciding when it was time off, you were going to have your time off.

GILBERT: This was the idea of the Greens, though, wasn't it. So, why didn't you have it as part of the original plan?

BURKE: This is a policy that's come through two parliamentary inquiries. We adopted it as our policy at our national conference. And I'd been quite public of my interest in it. It was something that, in the context of this bill, the Green Party made the reasonable argument that if this Bill is about closing loopholes, the concept of unpaid work is a loophole, we should consider dealing with that now as well. Given that it was something we agreed with, given that it was something that had been part of two inquiries, one of which was the inquiry into this Bill, it was an amendment that the government was happy to support.

GILBERT: Do you and the Prime Minister have confidence in Andrew Giles as Immigration Minister?

BURKE: Of course. This whole debate at the moment, let's not dodge why this has become the only topic that the Opposition wants to talk about in Question Time. At the moment, you ask any Australian as to what the biggest issues are in their lives, the answer is cost of living. The Opposition doesn't want to talk about the fact that at the exact same time that the Government is making sure that people earn more and keep more of what they earn in tax reform, that the Opposition's position is they want people to work longer for less. So they've decided, let's try to create a different issue about someone. You look at this simple issue, simple comparison, they're saying, "But this legislation was passed less than three months ago. How come you haven't already made applications to the court?"

In an almost identical framework that exists for our high-risk terror offenders Peter Dutton took three years to make a single application. Now they know that the reason that applications haven't been made yet is for the same argument that Senator James Paterson's put, which is to say that you need to make sure you get this right and don't fall foul of the High Court.

GILBERT: The Minister didn't attend meetings with the Department. This was wargaming, an adverse judgement by the High Court. Did he drop the ball in the lead up to this, he seemed flat footed when the judgement was handed down by the High Court.

BURKE: He attended plenty of meetings on this issue. Obviously, when meetings are held and you're not in the same place as the meeting, then your staff will attend and you'll make sure you find out about it.

GILBERT: Is he distracted?

BURKE: We have in Andrew Giles someone who in his career was a serious immigration lawyer. If the Liberal Party had put somebody up as a serious immigration lawyer looking after these issues instead of putting up someone as incompetent as Peter Dutton, then we might not have ended up with the High Court problem that we ended up with. But the releases that happened, happened because of an order of the High Court. The reason this is the only issue that Peter wants to talk about at the moment is because he's embarrassed about the Coalition's position on cost of living.

GILBERT: Tony Burke, thanks for your time.

BURKE: Great to talk.

ENDS