TRANSCRIPT - DOORSTOP, SYDNEY - SUNDAY, 26 NOVEMBER 2023

E&OE TRANSCRIPT

DOORSTOP, SYDNEY

SUNDAY, 26 NOVEMBER 2023

Subjects: The week ahead in Parliament, upcoming legislation in the House and Senate, new citizenship laws to clean up the mess from the previous government, Peter Dutton’s record.

TONY BURKE, MINISTER FOR EMPLOYMENT AND WORKPLACE RELATIONS, MINISTER FOR THE ARTS, LEADER OF THE HOUSE: Thanks for coming out. I’m about to about to head to Canberra, and we've got sittings coming up where the Government will continue to be doing the work that we've been doing.

In the House of Representatives, we've got the Closing Loopholes Bill to get wages moving. We'll be dealing with the Hate Symbols legislation. We'll also be dealing with Paid Parental Leave, and importantly, we now have to introduce further legislation to clean up the mess left by Peter Dutton.

When the citizenship laws went through, under Peter Dutton’s watch, he was warned that that legislation was likely to be unconstitutional. He did what Peter Dutton always does, which is to talk tough, shout at the world, and ultimately be incompetent. As a result, once again, we'll have to clean up his mess this week.

Over in the Senate, we'll be dealing with the Restoring Our Rivers bill, which is about implementing the Murray Darling Basin Plan – a plan that they said they supported and then did nothing about for nearly a decade during government.

All this ends up having an impact on people's lives. When wages were a deliberate design feature under the previous government, to keep them low, the impact hit everybody's pockets.

They deliberately kept wages low for a decade. Now that we're getting wages moving again Peter Dutton will do what Peter Dutton always says – he’ll say “No” and he'll get angry. But a whole lot of noise, a whole lot of shouting at the world doesn't fix a thing.

We're cleaning up a mess in citizenship and immigration that was left by Peter Dutton. We are cleaning up a mess in cost of living because of what they did with wages in keeping them low. And once again, we'll be doing the work in Canberra next week, while the Opposition will do as we expect, with nothing positive to offer for the future, simply saying no.

JOURNALIST: Just in terms of this immigration legislation, is this another pre-emptive because of the High Court this month, and are you going to try and rush this one through now in this final – both houses are sitting this week, but then the Senate next week too?

BURKE: We're introducing legislation because we want to get it through, and we want to get it through quickly, because there is a massive problem that has been left by Peter Dutton’s neglect.

This isn't something where he wasn't warned. This isn't an issue – on the citizenship issue – it’s not something where he didn't have reason to know. Peter Dutton was told in debate at the time by the Labor Party, by the now Attorney General of Australia, that there was a high risk of this being unconstitutional. Peter Dutton decided to go all tough guy and say that doesn't matter, somehow anyone who disagrees with him is soft.

Ultimately, what Peter Dutton did was incompetent. Peter Dutton was told the risk and decided to roll the dice on national security anyway.

JOURNALIST: Why haven't you done something about this previously?

BURKE: We now have the High Court decision. We haven't been in government for a long time yet. We've had the High Court decision. I don't think anyone can say we haven't been going very hard with a reform agenda in the Parliament.

But now that we have the High Court decision, it is very clear that everything that we predicted and feared when Peter Dutton introduced these laws, has, in fact come true.

We need to be able to effectively make the change where up until now, a minister has made these decisions. The High Court made clear that decision would need to be made by the court, so we need to change the law to make that happen.

JOURNALIST: Are you frustrated that in the past sort of two weeks that all seems to be what's talked about is immigration and border security.

BURKE: I'm frustrated by the mess we were left with. Regardless of what's being talked about in the media, there is nothing more important than what's happening in all the homes around us right now with cost of living.

That's why for myself, the determination to get wages moving is so important. Wages are already now going up in ways that we had not seen for more than a decade. But there are still a whole lot of people being underpaid. We could have fixed that for them this year. Yet once again, the Opposition have pushed off in the Senate the Closing Loopholes legislation because they don't even want to consider whether we can stop people's underpayments this year.

They say they can put it off until next year, even though when we get to next year, they've already said they're going to vote no. At every single turn the political divide in Australia is really simple: we have a Government trying to get wages moving and help with cost of living and an Opposition “No” to everything.

JOURNALIST: You must though make a concession that, you know the Opposition has really hijacked the political agenda, and all you are talking about is immigration and border security.

BURKE: The Opposition is doing what the Opposition likes to do, which is to shout at the world and talk tough. Talking tough doesn't keep Australia safe, strong laws do. We’ll be introducing strong laws on citizenship in the exact way that we advised Peter Dutton years ago, he could have done. He chose not to, chose to take chances with people's security, and has left it for us to clean up.

JOURNALIST: Is Labor prepared to have a debate this week about boat turning back and refugees arriving by boat.

BURKE: We have Question Time, and I think there's no doubt that debates will happen on a full range of issues. The one issue, as I say, that Peter Dutton never wants to raise is talk publicly about the fact that at every turn, he keeps wages low and makes the cost of living harder for people.

JOURNALIST: Quick question about Sam Ibrahim. Another of a bit more of a fallout I guess from the High Court’s decision. Just your reaction to that?

BURKE: The people who've been released are all people the Government did not want released. We have a situation now where we have introduced in advance of the reasons being given for the court decisions.

We’ve made sure that we have the strongest conditions that are legally available to us. Ankle bracelets, electronic monitoring, and a situation where if someone breaches their conditions, it's not simply cancellation of visa, it's a criminal offence.

JOURNALIST: A rare circumstance here where he pretty well is Australian, has been here since he was only a couple of years old, but never claimed citizenship.

BURKE: You're either an Australian citizen or you're not, and the laws that we've put in place are laws that apply to people who are not citizens.

ENDS