TANYA PLIBERSEK MP
SHADOW MINISTER FOR EDUCATION
SHADOW MINISTER FOR WOMEN
MEMBER FOR SYDNEY
E&OE TRANSCRIPT
TELEVISION INTERVIEW
ABC RADIO SYDNEY DRIVE WITH RICHARD GLOVER
MONDAY, 18 OCTOBER 2021
SUBJECTS: Barnaby Joyce, Scott Morrison’s failure on renewables; Borders reopening; National anti-corruption commission; Teachers.
RICHARD GLOVER, HOST: Tanya Plibersek, the Shadow Minister for Education and Shadow Minister for Women, she's with us on the Monday political forum. Tanya, good afternoon.
TANYA PLIBERSEK, SHADOW MINISTER FOR EDUCATION, SHADOW MINISTER FOR WOMEN: Hi Richard, how are you?
GLOVER: Yeah good. Also with us, Justin Field, Independent MLC in New South Wales. He's based in regional New South Wales. Hey Justin, good afternoon to you.
JUSTIN FIELD, NEW SOUTH WALES MLC: G'day, Richard.
GLOVER: And also with us is Kate Carnell, Australia's Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman, and a board member for Beyond Blue, Kate, welcome to Drive. Thanks for talking to us.
KATE CARNELL, FORMER AUSTRALIAN SMALL BUSINESS AND FAMILY ENTERPRISE OMBUDSMAN: Thanks very much for having me.
GLOVER: Let's start with Barnaby Joyce. He says his Nationals party room is unlikely to support deeper cuts to greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. The PM today in Parliament has said he won't be announcing any 2030 target either. In terms of Mr Joyce, is it just a sign of good sales - of a good salesman who's trying to achieve the best price for his support? In other words, once he gets it he'll sign up, or will Scott Morrison be going to Glasgow with a pledge of emissions that will look inadequate to Australian allies such as the US and the UK, Tanya Plibersek?
PLIBERSEK: Well, I think it's the exact opposite. I think Barnaby Joyce is letting down regional communities and leaving them behind. We know that cheaper, cleaner energy gives us massive economic opportunities and at the moment, our competitors are getting the jump on us. Today, the Prime Minister was talking about steel manufacturing, aluminium manufacturing, fertilizer manufacturing - wanting to keep doing that in Australia. Well, so do we so, so does everybody want those jobs. Imagine if we could power them with green hydrogen, imagine the global market if we could be the first country that's producing these in a cost-effective way at scale with green hydrogen. This is a massive economic opportunity, and the problem with Barnaby Joyce and Scott Morrison is they both got their jobs promising to stop action on climate change, arguing against net zero by 2050. Frankly, giving Barnaby Joyce the right of veto on climate and energy policy is like putting in anti-vaxxer in charge of the COVID response.
GLOVER: You know, could it be that he's just basically - as he should be - trying to negotiate a deal whereby - for instance, if we do, as you say, produce green hydrogen - that we do it in the Hunter so the coal jobs are replaced by green hydrogen. I mean, that's essentially what Matt Kean has been proposing in New South Wales. It seems reasonable probably to most voters?
PLIBERSEK: Every state and territory, the National Farmers' Federation, big businesses - including big energy producers - they are all behind this target of net zero. I don't know why the Nationals won't get behind the target. And as for doing it in the regions, honestly where else are we proposing to do it? Like, we're not going to be making the green steel in Ultimo, Richard.
GLOVER: We could give it a go!
PLIBERSEK: This is an opportunity for regional Australia. Carbon farming is an opportunity for regional Australia. This is a great opportunity, and this dragging the feet, the intransigence is just a betrayal of those communities.
GLOVER: Kate Carnell, it does seem as if Australia's national climate change policy is deep being dictated not by the government, not even by the Nationals, but by a small section within a section of the Government.
CARNELL: Look, Richard, I think things have moved quite significantly recently, because now the argument is not about net zero by 2050, it's about what happens in 2030. Now, I think that shows that the Prime Minister has moved the National party, at least at some level, and that's a huge step in the right direction. Remember - look, there's no doubt that Scott Morrison will promise net zero by 2050 when he when he goes to [Glasgow]. That's what will happen. Now, if you're going to do net zero by 2050, you're going to have to move on 2030 as well. Just to achieve the plan in place.
GLOVER: Kate, there's nothing like a target though - a hard target to concentrate the mind.
CARNELL: That's absolutely true, and we will have a hard target in my view, and it will be net zero by 2050 in line with a very large number of other countries around the world; and, you know, a whole lot of stuff Australia is doing at the moment, as Tanya said, is really fantastic - lots of really good things happening and we should focus on making them happen. Right at the moment, Barnaby Joyce is trying to do a deal for the for the Nats. He's trying to get the most out of the Government in terms of jobs for rural and regional Australia. You can't blame him for that. But I have to say, at the end of the day, they're going to have to agree to net zero by 2050 because that's what the Prime Minister's got to promise. He's even said, let's be fair, that now net zero by 2050 is part of being part of the international community, and it is.
GLOVER: Well, it's just that it's a bare - or some people say, it's the bare minimum price of admission to Glasgow and that really to be meaningful about this, you've got to do what the US has done, and the UK has done, and lots of other people have done, and say what you're going to achieve - you're going to achieve something meaningful by 2030 and name your figure.
PLIBERSEK: Well, what New South Wales has done, Richard.
GLOVER: Well, yeah, that's right. Which New South Wales has done.
CARNELL: New South Wales has done a great job on this. It is a challenge for Scott Morrison to move his whole cabinet, or at least the majority of his cabinet on this, but I think he's got a long way down the track. The fact that, they're now saying net zero by 2050 is the way to go - Josh Frydenberg's saying it, the Prime Minister's saying it. It's going to happen. It's slower than I would like, but it's happening.
GLOVER: Kate Carnell is here, Tanya Plibersek and Justin Field. Justin, Kate's got a good point, doesn't she? You've got to cheer off the fact that the Prime Minister has managed to move, in the last little bit, to 2050 being, he has announced that quite yet, but being the target that Australia will take to Glasgow. That's some achievement, isn't it?
FIELD: Last to the party, Richard, I think. I wouldn't give much credit for that. And to Barnaby Joyce in the National Party, well he's really just making his party less relevant in this discussion actually. Because all of his key stakeholder groups in the regions, the farming groups, even the resource sector, are calling for this certainty, and he's undermining that certainty yet again, and I think it really points to a problem with our democracy when a small party, a minor party really, about ten per cent of the vote and representatives in Parliament, can hold the Parliament to ransom. I mean, Tanya would know better than me, but I'd suspect that there's a majority of parliamentarians who would legislate a target like this and actually put in place a target plan, a carbon plan, but the Nationals are able to hold our parliamentary system to ransom like this-
GLOVER: Yeah the Greens, of which you have been a part, they've had a few good goes at that too haven't they?
FIELD: Oh well, they weren't in the Coalition agreement where they were able to stagnate the entire Parliament over a Coalition deal. There were agreements, but every piece of legislation had to pass the Parliament. But that's not what we've got here, we've got effectively a minority within the Coalition being able to dictate to the Cabinet. You know, maybe we need a conscience vote on this sort of issue to actually legislate a target so we can start to direct the action, because remember the Nationals hold the Resource portfolio. So it's not enough that just Morrison, the Prime Minister, announces it in Glasgow. At the end of the day, if people like Keith Pitt have their hands on the levers here of policy that dictates our emissions, well, we're not going anywhere quickly.
GLOVER: Is it fair enough to observe that some of this is because coal is more important in our economy, as it happens, than it is in other countries' economies? It's all very well for, for the UK for instance, to turn away from coal. They've got that much left there, they mainly use other forms of power. That's not true for us. It's a big export, I think, is it number two, or number three? And we use a lot of it in our electricity generation still.
FIELD: We do, because we've made those choices and it's probably been convenient and easy. I mean, I come from central Queensland. I come from Gladstone and I know it very much firsthand, but we also have a huge renewable resource in this country. And that's why we're seeing the attention given to hydrogen now as well, but we will miss the boat here and we run the risk of making ourselves global pariahs while we do it.
GLOVER: Well, it is interesting isn't it that we've signed this big security deal with the UK and the US and in a way, you know, Mr Morrison enjoyed being pictured with Boris Johnson and the US President and yet they would both regard not having a target for 2030 is very inadequate, I would have thought.
FIELD: Well how do you get somewhere if you don't have a target? It just means that the decisions day-to-day that are made within government are directionless around this and we cannot afford it. It is the last decade. The target is only the very first step, as you say, the price of admission - what we do next, how we actually decarbonise, it needs a plan and the Coalition's heart is just not in it.
GLOVER: Mmm. Some people say in a way, whether this is a terrible thing or not, that the federal government has essentially been sidelined in this process. The states, most of them are doing quite a good job, they've set targets. And of course, private enterprise has set targets. You look at something like Twiggy Forrest's FMG and its commitments on even scope three emissions. They're pretty, they're pretty good.
FIELD: Well, there's financial incentives to do it because it's cheaper. It's also where the growth is going to be in the future. There's an economic consequence of not doing it, which is often visited to the states as well, which is part of why they're so attracted to acting, and yet possibly at the end of the day, we'll be able to get past all of this because of the actions of the states. It would be much easier if we had a clear set of policies in place federally, we'd get there quicker, we’d get there cheaper and would be able to take advantage of the economic opportunities that climate action presents.
GLOVER: Justin Field is here, Kate Carnell and Tanya Plibersek, the Monday Political Forum. The New South Wales Premier Dominic Perrottet is acting like the Prime Minister according to his critics after he announced that New South Wales would open up to foreign tourists as early as November 1, only to have the Prime Minister note that the only the feds could open the borders to citizens from other countries. States increasingly seem to be trying to go their own way when it comes to the supposed agreed roadmap, not only Mr Perrottet, the Queensland Premier for instance, today announced what I think a lot of people would think we're pretty tough quarantine rules that means that fully vaccinated will be allowed in without a quarantine period of 14 days, but only once we get to something like December 19. It will be just before Christmas, which is a long way away. Kate Carnell, how much of a problem is it that everyone seems to be going their own way on this, feds and various states.
CARNELL: Well, let's be fair the states have been going their own way, locking the borders, doing those sorts of things, the whole way through this. I think that one of the positives right now is that that date that Queensland is set is when they think they'll get to 80 per cent vaccination, and so what we're seeing now is most of the states agreeing that they will open their borders at 80 per cent. It just happens that New South Wales and the ACT are already there. Victoria and Tassie will be over the line in the not too far distant future, and the others hopefully will all be on track before Christmas. So it's heading in the right direction now which is positive, it would be nice if there was a more of a collegiate approach between the states on this stuff.
GLOVER: It's pretty tough on people who want to return home to Queensland at the moment. Well once they get to 70 per cent, which is still not until November 19, even then you'll have to be fully vaccinated, you'll need to arrive by air, you'll need to have a negative test just before you get there, you'll have to home quarantine for 14 days. I mean, it's a pretty high bar isn't it?
CARNELL: It is pretty tough and I hope they change before then. Look, I can understand what the Prime Minister's doing at the moment, though. The Prime Minister is saying, look it's great that New South Wales is opening up, but we've got to let us Australians come back before - the Australians that have been waiting for a long time to come back to Australia before we let the tourists take the seats on the aeroplanes. I think that's just, just reasonable. It's good politics, but it's also only fair. There won't be an awful lot of planes for a while I would imagine, simply because there won't be that many people travelling by air generally, and we've got to leave those seats available for those Australians, those long-suffering Australians who haven't been able to get back.
GLOVER: Mmm, Kate Carnell is here, so is Justin Field and Tanya Plibersek. Tanya, we had this situation where the tourists were sort of waved in by Dominic Perrottet, I think that was at about nine o'clock in the morning and by two o'clock the Prime Minister who saying, no that's not the idea at all. There does seem to be a very fractious mood between the states, the various states and the feds at the moment. Does it matter, or is it just sort of obvious, you know, almost inevitable?
PLIBERSEK: Look, I think it's fair enough to say Australians take priority over tourists or international students or workers. It's fair enough when Australians have been waiting, they were told that be home by last Christmas and they're still not back. But I think it's really instructive here that you've got the Prime Minister saying - when it's about letting tourists in, he wants to say, but when it was about the Ruby Princess or purpose-built quarantine facilities, it was nothing to do with Scott Morrison, it was all the responsibility of the states. The reason states and territories are going their own way is because there continues to be this vacuum of national leadership on these issues.
GLOVER: Justin Field, what do you think about the fact that everyone's going their own way at the moment?
FIELD: Well, they've all got slightly different incentives, Richard, and I can - there's been a bit of push-pull here on all of the key decisions, whether it's been schools closing or opening, day care closing or opening, when we let people cross borders, and that's because states have been at different positions, they've had to wear different risks, you know might be the cost or whatever. And I can imagine that the Premier's thinking well we want to see a return of international students as soon as possible so let's start pushing now for borders to be open because that's, he's facing an election in 15 months’ time and that's a big economic factor in New South Wales. So they've got different incentives. It makes sense that they'd be pushing, and a lot of this is being played out in the media, a lot of the, sort of, the campaigning on the direction we should take and when we should open or what policy should be in place is happening between Premiers in the media. It's a strange situation for Australians to see, but I can sort of understand how we've gotten here.
GLOVER: Yeah, well some of it grows out of the fact that the states control the hospital system and therefore are responsible for its collapse, if that happened, if there were so many cases, it got really hairy in there, that's a state problem. When it comes to supporting business it's federal, it's an issue for Josh Frydenberg - so in other words, there is a sense in which the basic antipathy between the states and the feds is rooted in their different areas of responsibility.
FIELD: Yeah, that's right, and I understand Queensland has already got challenges within the hospital network up there and that's before they've got a large caseload of COVID so that's probably part of what we're seeing play out here. And of course when the JobSeeker was on, and JobKeeper was on and then it was off, that put some financial burdens on the state as well, and so there's a bit of cost shifting going on here too.
GLOVER: Yeah. It is 10 to 6, the Monday Political Forum here on ABC Radio Sydney. Tanya Plibersek, Shadow Minister for Education and Shadow Minister for Women. Justin Field, Independent MLC in New South Wales, and Kate Carnell, who's from the Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise, she's Ombudsman and a board member for Beyond Blue. Now, the ICAC hearings into Gladys Berejiklian began today. Hearings which, depending on who you talk to, prove either the need for a federal version of ICAC or the dangers of a federal version of. ICAC. The current model for a federal ICAC, the one that's been proposed by the Morrison Government, would see, among other things, private rather than public hearings. Is it fair enough that hearings remain private until proof of wrongdoing is found as is in the federal, the new federal model but obviously is not the case with our own ICAC here in Sydney, Tanya Plibersek?
PLIBERSEK: Look, I think you need a balance between public and private hearings. And I think the New South Wales ICAC certainly does a lot of its hearings in private, but for there to be public confidence that anti-corruption bodies are doing their work, doing the right job, you do need to have the ability to have public hearings. And, of course, at a federal level we've got nothing. It's been more than a thousand days since the Government promised a national anti-corruption body, and the one that they're proposing at the moment wouldn't be able to investigate anything that occurred before it was established. It means that every day of delays is another day that people can be getting away with dodgy conduct. It couldn't investigate referrals from whistleblowers. It couldn't initiate its own investigations. It won't be having public hearings. It wouldn't even be able to make findings of corruption. So it's a very, very weak excuse for an anti-corruption commission, that's being proposed.
GLOVER: I mean some people look at the New South Wales situation, and I know there are slight differences with each story, but they say that we've ended up losing three good Premiers, in most cases over either small matters, I know the Berejiklian matter isn't settled yet, but in the case of Barry O'Farrell it was over of a small matter, and in the face of Greiner it was over a matter which he ended up getting an appeal decision in his favour over. So, you know for the big picture, three people that most people thought were pretty good Premiers all hit the dust because of ICAC.
PLIBERSEK: Yeah, I think it's very, very important that we keep restating that people are innocent till proven guilty. And one of the other concerns I have is, if you're say a public servant called before the ICAC and there's big fanfare about the fact you've been called and then six months later you're exonerated, it turns up on page 16 of a newspaper, one tiny little paragraph. So we do need to make sure that we give people procedural fairness and natural justice. But I don't think doing things in secret, I don't think the really weak model that the Federal government is proposing - that's not good enough either.
GLOVER: Justin Field, none of the three people I mentioned are Robert Askin, are they? You know, whatever you think of them individually, and yet they’ve all hit the dust.
FIELD: Well, in the case - and I've only been around in for the last two examples - but in the case of Barry O'Farrell and Premier Berejiklian, they left of their own accord. At the end of the day, they did do that. Yeah sure, there was a lot of public scrutiny and public hearings that they had to face. But at the end of the day, I guess they judged the risk to their own leadership and made, potentially made a judgment here - I don't want to prejudge what's happened, but potentially made a judgment that what was going to come out in future hearings was not something that their leadership was going to tolerate. Now, you're in a senior public office, you've got a lot of power and that should invite some scrutiny, that's in the public interest I think. There's always going to be a balance to be struck, but I'd really encourage people to go back and look at what we heard at the earlier hearings of ICAC, and I think that suggests that there is some questions to be answered here. And wouldn't we prefer to have that done in a public way to build public confidence, that whatever decision ultimately gets made is one where all the evidence is on the table and the public are aware of it, because there might be other people that have other bits of information that's relevant there. I think that's important. And I think that's good for our democracy, and I remember it wasn't so long ago that people were wearing I love ICAC t-shirts around New South Wales. It's got strong support in the community.
GLOVER: Kate Carnell, does the example of ICAC here in Sydney prove how badly you needed in Canberra or rather the opposite?
CARNELL: Somewhere in between to the tell you the truth. Yes, we need a national ICAC, but we shouldn't have an ICAC that has public hearings as a matter of course. Look, we've just lost a great Premier, and she rightly said once it became clear that they were going to investigate her she had no choice but to leave, because New South Wales needed a strong leader that was able to get on with the job. And she was going to be in a position where she was going to have to step aside, there would be an Acting Premier, it would detract from the direction that the Government needed to take. And it would've, there's no doubt about that. So she had nowhere to go. And ICAC has brought down more than 3 Premiers, you know, there have been a lot of people that have just been named in ICAC as a person of interest. In some cases they weren't even investigated at the end of the day, but they lost their jobs.
GLOVER: It's also, in Macdonald and Obeid, it's also got some seriously large scalps and to the great relief of everyone.
CARNELL: Absolutely, and that's why you need an ICAC. So I'm not arguing against that, but we've got to understand that having public hearings for people who have not been found guilty of anything, in fact in many cases, have not even been accused of doing anything that people would perceive to be corrupt. Remember that the former Premier Gladys is being accused of breaching public trust. She's not being accused of any of the sorts of things that some of the people, as you said, that have been brought down by ICAC have done at all. I think that what we've got to understand is going to be a balance here, making people guilty even before they've been even charged with anything. Let alone found guilty of anything is not justice.
GLOVER: On the other hand, the current federal model which sees the federal ICAC not able to even launch its own inquiries, that seemed ridiculous.
CARNELL: I think that's where it's underdone, there's no doubt. I think it should be able to have private hearings. Most things should be in private, particularly until somebody is, there is evidence enough to charge somebody, but a federal ICAC should be able to have their own inquiries. I can understand why not investigating things that happened in the past, you know, you've got to start somewhere in these sorts of things and I think that's probably pretty reasonable.
GLOVER: Let me squeeze in a last question. School is back, one lot starts today that the rest next Monday. What was the most precious thing you learned from schooling?
PLIBERSEK: Well, I was passionate about some of the subjects art, history, English and I still really enjoy learning about those things. But probably the most important thing I learned was persistence and that was from a maths teacher called Gail Gibson who wouldn't listen to me when I told her I couldn't do maths and kept pushing me, and sadly she died a couple of years ago much too young and is much missed by the many, many thousands of students she helped.
GLOVER: The maths teacher who said yes you can. Justin Field, what was it for you just quickly?
FIELD: I was an athlete, Richard. So I really enjoyed school sports and carnivals and you know, regionals and states, and yeah, that was something I guess that sort of set me on a certain path after school too.
GLOVER: Yeah, well all the applause from the stands, And Kate Carnell, tell just quickly, what was it for you?
CARNELL: Well, for me, it was having friends that came from very different backgrounds. So learning about how big the world was, and everybody has different views, and you should be empathetic and accepting of different people.
GLOVER: Yeah, you can't just hang with your own crowd. Well, you can to some extent, but not completely. That's the glory of the playground. Kate Carnell, the Australian small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman, Independent MLC Justin Field and Shadow Minister for Education, Tanya Plibersek. Thank you everyone.
ENDS
