THE HON TANYA PLIBERSEK MP
MINISTER FOR THE ENVIRONMENT AND WATER
E&OE TRANSCRIPT
TELEVISION INTERVIEW
SKY NEWS
THURSDAY, 22 FEBRUARY 2024
SUBJECTS: GETTING WAGES MOVE AGAIN; ASBESTOS; FASHION WASTE.
PETER STEFANOVIC: Back to Federal matters now. Joining us is the Environment and Water Minister, Tanya Plibersek. Tanya, we'll get to your portfolio in a minute. I just want to touch on wage growth finally inching above inflation yesterday. Good news no doubt. There are warnings though from big business that the rises can't be sustained and could even lead to a wage price spiral. So, is it still a dicey economic path that we're treading?
TANYA PLIBERSEK, MINISTER FOR THE ENVIRONMENT AND WATER: I think the good news is that wages have grown really substantially for the first time since 2009. We've seen three‑quarters now of wages growth. This is the equal highest wages growth since 2009, and families will really be appreciative of that. People have been struggling to make ends meet, inflation has been really taking a toll on family budgets, and ordinary working Australians are going to be thankful for the fact that their wages are going up. And add that to the fairer tax cuts that we're giving to more people, we hope that will make a little bit of a difference to the family budget.
STEFANOVIC: Yeah. Do you have concerns though that, you know, with higher wages, that means more money's flushing, or working through the system, which could lead to, you know, price increasing elsewhere? Do you have any concerns about that? That's that wage price spiral.
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: I think it's very clear that there's room for wages to be going up to ease the pressure on families at the moment, and I can tell you, sitting around the kitchen table, people are just going to be grateful for those extra dollars in their pockets, whether it's from their higher wages, or from the tax cut that they'll be getting.
STEFANOVIC: One more on this, Fair Work Commission now looking at working from home rights, particularly those with caring responsibilities, Tanya, very much a COVID era thing that business groups are currently still trying to wind back. Should awards include working from home?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Look, this is really something for the Fair Work Commission to make recommendations about, I'm not going to pass comment on what the Fair Work Commission should be recommending, but I would say that a lot of people have found that working from home helps them balance their work and caring responsibilities, and I think most employers who are in a tough, you know, competition for talent at the moment – because unemployment is quite low – most employers are happy to have highly‑skilled workers given that extra flexibility if it means getting them to come on board and keeping them.
And certainly what we've done as we've been hiring new people in the Environment Department, we've said if people are working from home, we're prepared to allow them to continue to stay in those locations because we want the talent; we want the best people for the job.
STEFANOVIC: Just as Environment Minister, Tanya, how concerned are you about this growing level of asbestos that is getting picked up in New South Wales. Again I just identify that breaking news of six new contaminated sites in New South Wales.
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Look, of course it's a real concern to have asbestos turning up, particularly in these parks. I think the New South Wales Government is managing this extraordinarily well. It's obviously something that was quite unexpected, and it's now very widespread. It shows why it's really important to have a tough Environmental Regulator that can deal with issues like this, and it's one of the reasons that we're establishing a National Environment Protection Agency in Australia. That will be the first time that there's been a national EPA in Australia. You know, you never know when you've got these sorts of issues, to protect human health, to protect the environment, where you actually need a tough cop on the beat.
STEFANOVIC: Yeah. You would expect that there would be more now though, given how many, you know, new sites are popping up.
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Yeah. Look, it's obviously a huge concern, and I know that there are a lot of parents out there in particular, a lot of this is turning up in parks and school playgrounds, and so on; there's a lot of parents who are following this very closely and very carefully, and the New South Wales Government, they're just doing an extraordinary job testing hundreds of sites, both to work out where the risk is and also to reassure parents and the broader community about the areas that are still safe.
STEFANOVIC: Okay. Just a final one, I dived into fashion waste last night, I have to admit that I've not done this before. But I was amazed by the sheer volume of it. Are you about to intervene and slap a levy on the clothing industry?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Look, I really made clear to the clothing industry, that if they don't get their own act into gear, then I will step in and regulate, just as we're doing with packaging at the moment. The amount of waste and the proportion of carbon pollution that comes from the fashion industry is extraordinary, it's about 10 per cent of global carbon emissions come from the fashion industry; it's more than international flights and maritime shipping together.
In Australia, the average Australian buys 56 items of clothing every year, and about a quarter of a million tonnes of fashion waste ends up in our landfill. It costs charities about $18 million a year just to deal with the waste. People donate, you know, they're trying to do the right thing; they want to see their garments get a second life, but ‑‑
STEFANOVIC: Yeah.
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: ‑‑ instead of being sold, some of the cheap stuff just ends up in landfill, and that's a disaster, it can take ‑‑
STEFANOVIC: Well, see, that's the thing ‑‑
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: ‑‑ 500 years for those synthetics to break down.
STEFANOVIC: Yeah. I was surprised by that, because people feel like they're doing the right thing by taking, you know, the clothes that they don't wear anymore, they send to the charity, I do that all the time ‑‑
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Yeah.
STEFANOVIC: But then I was surprised to learn that there's too much, and it has to get shipped off.
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Yeah. Look, it depends on the quality of the clothing and whether there's a market for it, right, so the charities are really grateful for the things that they can resell, and of course we really want to give our garments a second life. It's the right thing that Australians want to recycle, but the sheer volumes that we're talking about mean that charities are overwhelmed, and they're overwhelmed by some of that low‑quality stuff that then just, basically it goes straight to landfill, and it takes, as I say, hundreds of years to break down. When it's breaking down it's releasing micro‑plastics and poison into the environment.
So the message here, of course, is the fashion industry needs to do better, to be more environmentally conscious in the sort of fabrics it's choosing and making sure that they make things that can be repaired, reused, recycled, and as consumers we need to be a bit more careful about what we're choosing as well.
STEFANOVIC: Yeah. I found that interesting. Tanya, thank you.
END
