Transcript - Sky News with Tom Connell - Thursday, 25 March 2021

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
TELEVISION INTERVIEW

SKY NEWS NEWSDAY WITH TOM CONNELL

THURSDAY, 25 MARCH 2021

SUBJECTS: Falinski arriving late; JobKeeper; Prime Minister’s judgement; quotas; Liberal Party’s multi-decade failure at increasing female representation.

TOM CONNELL, HOST: Joining me live now, my panel, Liberal MP Jason Falinski from the Labor Party, Patrick Gorman, Jason's late, Patrick. 

GORMAN: He is. 

CONNELL: He's going to walk on. He's doing a walk on. 

GORMAN: He's arriving.

FALINSKI: Did you guys start without me again? 

CONNELL: Well, we were going to. You just made it. You were going to be particularly shamed. In the end it's just a partial shaming, perhaps we'll call it. Good to have you here. 

FALINSKI: Nice to be here. Nice to be in the studio with you, Patrick. 

GORMAN: Are you going to leave early too?

FALINSKI: It depends on what Tom says or you, for that matter. 

CONNELL: Normally when you're late you give a reason. Is there? 

FALINSKI: I thought we start at 11:40. 

CONNELL: Alright so we'll call it a communication breakdown. Let's get into what's happening on the political side of things today. Interesting from the Treasury's secretary, 150,000 jobs to go roughly when JobKeeper ends. Are you comfortable with that figure? 

FALINSKI: Of course, no one's comfortable with that, of course, I am not comfortable with that. No one’s comfortable with people losing jobs. But we can't continue to have a situation in which, by the way, I think it's really unfair you threw the first question to me as I'm still catching my breath, However, I think it's we can't continue with a situation where half of Australia is paying for the other half to be in work. We need to get back to normal. We need to be generating new jobs and we need to be expanding our economy as we know it.

CONNELL: But it’s not half to keep the other half, 150,000 to a tiny percentage. We've got, what, today another $130 million to jobs in the Arts and Entertainment Sector, which a lot of them are saying won't be enough. The issue here is there will be jobs soon in events? 

FALINSKI: Tom, can I ask you a question? Has there ever been a government programme where the recipients have said, actually this is enough?

CONNELL: JobKeeper might have been one? 

FALINSKI: I don't think so. There were still people saying, oh, we need more than this. 

GORMAN: Yeah, the universities. 

FALINSKI: The universities, I rest my case. 

GORMAN: They got it pretty rough. 

CONNELL: There'll be businesses won't there? In events, in international tourism that could be there and thriving in a year. 

FALINSKI: Yes. 

CONNELL: But the gaps is when they will die off

FALINSKI: And that's where we need to move. So, we need to move from a general stimulus package that has broad based approach to now getting down to specific sectorial help. Events is one live entertainment is another. 

CONNELL: So this will save events?

FALINSKI: Travel Agents are a third. We will have to keep going back and making sure that…

CONNELL: Right so this is a watching brief. If businesses start falling over in Cairns, you'll intervene again?

FALINSKI: Well, that's not my decision but.

CONNELL: Government…

FALINSKI: But the Government, absolutely would look at that yeah. 

CONNELL: Patrick, we haven't had a firm alternative presented by Labor other than just keep just keep it going, whereas we know a lot of businesses are back on their feet. So, it seems too broad. 

GORMAN: Look, it is good news that some businesses are back on their feet, but 150,000 people losing their jobs in coming months is a pretty scary thing. We don't have access to the Treasury modelling that the Government has access to. We've been very constructive. 

FALINSKI: Would you understand it anyway?

GORMAN: And we've been we've been very constructive throughout this pandemic. I think our record shows that. It's not unreasonable to say that, as Jason said, there should be a package, a proper package for tourism operators who are suffering because of International Border Closures. There should be a package for the Arts sector, who are suffering because our economy is not as it was before COVID.

CONNELL: So, is that Labor's official stance on this. There should be sector specific assistance, more of it available from April 1? 

GORMAN: Well, the unfortunate thing is that we are now three days from the end of JobKeeper. So JobKeeper is going to end. 

CONNELL: But I'm just trying to mark here. 

GORMAN: We can't go back in time. We've been saying to the Government... 

CONNELL: Well sure, but I'm just trying to find out what Labor thinks would have been a good idea, because in three months, if this isn't going well, I want to be able to go back and say the specific suggestion you made. So you're talking about sectors, the ones that you named there should have more assistance than is being provided by the Government. 

GORMAN: The simplest thing to do would be for this Government to have either delivered sector specific packages before they wound down JobKeeper. And also, to acknowledge there end of JobKeeper was also tied to their promise around progress on the vaccine. The reality is the Government had said we're going to end JobKeeper at the end of March, by which time they expected about four million vaccine doses to have been delivered in the arms of Australians. That hasn't happened, so it's entirely reasonable to say don't cut these things off too early when you don't have a plan for what's next. And even what Jason just said, it's clear there isn't a plan for what happens to those 150,000 people. I've got 8,000 people in my electorate whose jobs still rely on JobKeeper. Now I hope they all a job over the next month, but I am very fearful. 

CONNELL: Alright. 

GORMAN: People are going to be knocking on my door, saying, I've lost my job, and the reason that has been given is the business... 

CONNELL: We'll know, we'll know soon enough on that. So perhaps we'll be talking in the real-world experience by then. Scott Morrison. 

FALINSKI: Yes.

CONNELL: How's his political judgment, reaction, empathy been for the past five weeks?

FALINSKI: I assume, we’re referring to women's rights issues. And I think that everyone in this place has been taken by surprise, not at the issue, but at the ... how broad the issue is. And I think it's been a wake-up call for a lot of people in this place, not for others, but certainly for a lot of us. I think the Prime Minister would, as he has apologised and would admit that he has used, I think the term he used was clunky language from time to time in this. And he's obviously apologised and he regrets any pain that he's caused. He wants to make the situation better, not worse.  

CONNELL: A bit of a situation when your apology goes awry. What about just specifically on quotas and that push?

FALINSKI: For the Liberal Party?

CONNELL: For the Liberal Party. 

FALINSKI: Look, I don't think quotas work for the Liberal Party or for centre right parties generally. There's a whole bunch of reasons which I'm happy to bore your viewers with. But we definitely need a mechanism that promotes better candidates, more competition in our preselection processes and in some parts of the country that's working. So, in South Australia, for example, James Stephens told me this morning that they've finalised their elections for state elections that are coming up in March next year. 80 per cent of the candidates in winnable Liberal seats are women for that. So, the Liberal Party can achieve this. It's a matter of us actually getting on with the job. 

CONNELL: So,there's multiple ways to do things. If the Liberal Party went about quotas or targets for quotas within candidate lists and let that filter through ultimately to Federal Parliament would Labor say, fair enough, you're taking action? 

GORMAN: Well, I think, we just look at what Labor does. We do have an affirmative action system that has been a great success for Labor. I think it's been a good thing for the Federal Parliament. If Labor didn't have that affirmative action process, I think we would have fewer women in the Parliament today, Parliament would look even less like Australia. So, I've previously written that I think the Prime Minister should look at having some sort of affirmative action system. Labor has been on a 30-year journey on this, we started this in the early 90's, so it's not something that I think they can fix overnight. The challenges of, frankly, misrepresentation that the Liberal Party has in this place. It doesn't represent…

FALINSKI: Can I just say that's completely and utterly unfair. I mean, the Labor Party's diversity problems in terms of work backgrounds that sit on the other side. I mean, diversity for the Labor Party in work backgrounds is a class action lawyer. I mean, it's just absurd, the situation. You can't say that on our side of the Parliament. And frankly, if we replicate...

CONNELL: Would you like to see more occupations represented by Labor?

GORMAN: I think diversity in all its forms, in terms of people's backgrounds, in terms of their experience and…

CONNELL: What's being done on that at the moment?

GORMAN: In terms of their policy views. You do need diversity. That's a good thing. 

HOST: What's happening on that front at the moment for Labor, then - if you're talking about diversity of occupation?

GORMAN: Well, I mean, look at the sort of people we've got. I mean I look at the Western Australian Parliament and the people we've just elected. We've elected teachers, we've elected doctors, we've elected a sparkie. You look at the people we elect and Jason used the example in South Australia, I'll throw back the example of Western Australia. We have diversity of the community in the candidates that we preselect and we elect. And I think the reality is we can talk about all those things, but the Liberal Party is still tied up on this quotas question. The Prime Minister said he's open to it and now you've got people saying even the modern Liberals like you Jason are saying, I'm very modern. 

FALINSKI: I am - it's true. 

GORMAN: But I'm not modern enough to have some form of sort of some affirmative action or positive preselection process that gets more women into this Parliament. 

FALINSKI: Because I come from a philosophical tradition that believes competition works better than quotas. So, so equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome.  

GORMAN: So why does the Government have targets of women on government boards? 

FALINSKI: Why? 

GORMAN: Yeah. It's your Government. Why do you have it in the public sector and you don't have it in the Parliament? 

FALINSKI: Absolutely, absolutely. And that's a really great question. Why do we have that? Shouldn't we actually be having... 

GORMAN: You want to get rid of targets in the public sector? 

FALINSKI: No, I didn't say that, but I said, 

CONNELL: Should they stay? 

FALINSKI: Well, what I would argue very strongly for, is the fact that we should be actually having programs where we're trying to identify and develop talent, rather than solving it at the back end of saying, oh, well, we haven't done anything at the right place in terms of encouraging people. 

CONNELL: You would replace the current approach then?

FALINSKI: I wouldn't say I'd replace it, but I think there should be more emphasis on training, identification, development and promotion of talent. 

CONNELL: What about keeping in place the quota?

FALINSKI: I think the quota system is frankly an admission of failure that you didn't do all the hard work up front. 

GORMAN: But you have failed.

CONNELL: All right. 

FALINSKI: But we haven't failed. If you look at the class of 2019 - the intake... in twelve months. 

GORMAN: This is a multi-decade failure. 

FALINSKI: That is unfair. The Howard Government in 1996, 36 per cent of that parliamentary party room was...

CONNELL: There's a failure somewhere if you're now at 25 per cent. 

FALINSKI: Our Senate... Hang on, hang on a second. With respect, our Senate party room is 50 per cent women. The class of 2019... 

GORMAN: What about your House of Reps party room?

FALINSKI: The failure was that in 2010, 2013 and 2016, we did not preselect enough women in winnable seats. So that by the time we got to this point... this is not a failure. Our failure happened ten years ago. It's not happening now. 

CONNELL: Got to go.

GORMAN: So, it's Tony Abbott's fault?

FALINSKI: *Laughs*

CONNELL: Jason, Patrick, thanks as ever. I see you've got a watch on there, I'm sure it'll be working next time. Talk again soon.

ENDS