E&OE…
RAF EPSTEIN
Gentlemen and our regular lady as well, Anna Burke, joins us. She is the former Speaker, you’ll remember her. She’s the ALP member for Chisholm, she’s a humble backbencher, but she knows what’s going on in Canberra. Anna Burke, welcome.
ANNA BURKE
I’m not sure anybody knows what’s going on in Canberra, but thank you for that introduction.
EPSTEIN
I’m glad you feel like that, because it’s not just everyone else who feels like that. Scott Ryan knows what’s going on in Canberra; he’s a shaker and a mover. I could ask him nefarious questions about whether or not people with glasses and who aren’t of the Tony Abbott end of the fitness scale, just like David Feeney, is there something about that and machinations about people becoming prime minister? But I won’t go down that path. He is the Assistant Cabinet Minister and he’s also a Liberal Senator here in Victoria. Scott, good afternoon.
SCOTT RYAN
G’day, Raf.
EPSTEIN
Now, you’re the Assistant Cabinet Secretary?
RYAN
I am.
EPSTEIN
Forgive me. New job, new role.
RYAN
I work with Arthur, who’s the Cabinet Secretary.
EPSTEIN
So you design the Cabinet agenda, but you don’t sit in Cabinet?
RYAN
No, I do attend. But I work with Arthur and work on several Cabinet committees, and I work on some of the back-end policy processes.
EPSTEIN
Look, a quick bit of administration. $1.5 billion dollars that was for East West Link was in a locked box. It’s been unlocked for what?
RYAN
Well an agreement hasn’t been reached yet between the Commonwealth and the state. What the Commonwealth, I understand, is offering is that this money was in both sets of accounts, Commonwealth and state, and the Commonwealth is willing to release this for projects which the Commonwealth has already approved. I don’t have the list handy, but it’s projects like building a bridge or the duplication of the Princes Highway towards Sale or out past Colac; those sorts of regular infrastructure land-transport projects. And for future projects that the Commonwealth and the states will agree upon, so the state government about a month ago submitted the Western Distributor case for assessment, and we’ve been asking for a case on Metro but we haven’t got a business case or a submission on that yet.
EPSTEIN
Ok. Anna Burke, you’d be happy presumably? Unlock the money, spend where they agree. Good idea?
BURKE
Yeah, it’s vitally important; Victoria’s missing out on its infrastructure spend without that money being unlocked. Victoria gets the least amount of infrastructure money from the feds. We’ve got the growing population, we need it now. All of you on the roads know how frustrating it is, of course we’d like to see it, and we welcome the Prime Minister now saying: yeah, they’ll also let it go towards public transport.
RYAN
And that’s why we’ve flagged the Monash Freeway upgrade as part of this discussion.
EPSTEIN
It’s a whole new world. It’s twenty four minutes to five on 774 ABC Melbourne. Scott Ryan, Tony Abbott is basically telling Europe, I suppose like Donald Trump; Donald trump wants to build a beautiful wall with a door through to Mexico and South America. Tony Abbott is essentially saying that what we did here, stopping the boats, could be done in Europe. Do you think he’s right?
RYAN
To be fair, I think you’re…I mean I haven’t read all the speech, we’re being reported excerpts of it. I think it’s entirely fair and reasonable for Tony Abbott to point out that the Coalition Government has done what, I can’t think of any other government around the world has successfully done, which is stop a substantial pattern of people smuggling and unlawful migration. It’s a problem in many parts of the world; it started over the previous Labor Government…
(Interrupted)
EPSTEIN
But it’s not practical in Europe.
RYAN
Well except for the point that the former prime minister was making, which was that you can make the situation worse. We do actually have to look at when people transit through multiple countries, where should their assessment for a refugee claim be made? Turkey’s now bearing an extraordinary burden at the moment; we should be doing everything we can, and Jordan, to support those countries. But it is fair to say that when people transit through four or five countries, they are seeking an immigration outcome that, they are not immediately fleeing persecution. He has also made the point that when you use your Border Force, coats guards, and military forces appropriately you can reduce this problem. Now, we used to have the situation in Australia where…
(Interrupted)
EPSTEIN
Thirty-one thousand people made their way to Greece. You can’t stop that many people.
RYAN
But in the same point, I don’t think the former prime minister was saying it can all be stopped. What he was saying is that you can make it a lot worse. We had boats that used to leave Indonesia with a GPS device and a satellite phone, they’d get out into international waters and they’d call for help and the Australian coast guard and the Australian security forces were being used as a delivery service; now, that has happened a bit in Europe. I think the point the former prime minister was making…
(Interrupted)
EPSTEIN
(Inaudible)… any Italian naval boats, they pick them up.
RYAN
And there is a strong argument to ask, has this made a difficult problem worse? I think that’s the point Tony Abbott was making, because underlying all this is the view that some activists have in Australia that we shouldn’t be seeking to control who comes to this country. Now, I actually think that we should and I’m happy to have the debate on those terms as well as on the terms that we know this saves lives.
EPSTEIN
Just to clarify Tony Abbott: turning around boats and denying entry at the border for people with no right to come. That’s what he recommends. It will require some force, it will gnaw out our consciences, yet the former prime minister says this is the only way to prevent the tide of humanity surging through Europe and quite possibly changing it forever. Anna Burke, does he have a point?
BURKE
No, he doesn’t have a point. And I actually went to the effort of finding the transcript to go through, and when he started saying: however desperate, by definition, they are economic migrants because they’ve already escaped persecution when they decided to move again. But they are sitting in desperate situations in countries that are impoverished and cannot deal with them. I’ve just come back from Europe; I was in Berlin when these people were coming, I went to Athens. Not a trickle, this is a flood, this is a tidal wave. And the only intelligent thing he says, at the end of the speech, where he says: it is striking how little has been done to address the problem at its source. The whole notion that boat turnbacks and offshore detention reduces the number of desperate people in need is ridiculous. It’s also an appalling situation that we’re still talking about illegals, and he’s trying to take a situation here and put it in Europe. You cannot equate the two, and we need to be having much more broad discussions on a humanitarian basis instead of demonising people; this speech was appalling and he should be condemned for it.
RYAN
I’ve been in parliament for seven years, Anna, and I remember sitting there while Kevin Rudd and Chris Evans and all these Labor people said there was no such thing as pull factors. Well, your own policy changes…
(Interrupted)
BURKE
Sorry, I’ve been in parliament for seventeen years and I sat through John Howard, and we’ve always talked about push and pull factors.
RYAN
Well, the Labor Party specifically said that pull factors didn’t matter. But we know that the policies you adopt at the border have a significant impact, not on whether there is a problem or not, but the degree of the problem…
(Interrupted)
EPSTEIN
But it only affects how the problem impacts on Australia. Surely whether or not we turn back boats makes zero difference to what’s going on in Syria?
(Inaudible)
RYAN
Agreed, this is not an argument necessarily about being able to solve the problems at their source. This is an argument about what we do to actually control access to our borders and what we can reasonably expect it to do. The Indonesian government, by the way, wanted us to do things like turnbacks because it stopped the flood of people they were having coming in and using Indonesia as a launching pad.
EPSTEIN
Can I just get to…I can see you’re both on different sides of it, and that’s clear. I’m not sure the conversation has shifted, which is fine. However, you can’t apply what Australia did to Greece if thirty-thousand people made their way to Greek islands in a week. You can’t stop thirty-thousand people; there aren’t enough naval ships in Europe to stop thirty-thousand people getting there. So I guess the question is, is that worth the extraordinary expense? Quite apart from…
(Inaudible)
RYAN
No, but those thirty-thousand have followed twelve months of policies in Europe that have actually encouraged people to make the journey. Now, you’ve got to ask yourself: what happened last month in Greece, would that have happened if the policies were different a year ago? Now we know that there is a time-lag in the impact of these policies, and we also know that the journey from Africa to Italy is a lot shorter and there are unique factors going on in the Middle East. But there are lessons that can be learnt from Australia, which is that the incentives you create through having a regime that encourages people to seek an immigration outcome will increase the numbers.
EPSTEIN
Has he got a point about, there’s more people coming because of the way they’ve dealt with it? With the flow previously?
BURKE
No, because you’re not looking at the situation like it actually is. If you look at Lemnos and Kos where they’re actually coming in Greece at the moment, they’re coming direct from Syria as we speak. Where are you turning them back to? Where are you actually forcing them back to? So you’ve actually got to force them back to a situation that is diabolical; so you can’t equate it, you can’t marry it up, you can’t leave thirty-thousand people sitting on an island in the middle of an economic crisis in Greece. You can’t just quantify it with three-word slogans; it’s too complex and difficult to treat people this way. That’s why this speech is so bad.
EPSTEIN
Let’s just go to a few callers. Ann has called from North Balwyn, what did you want to say?
CALLER
Well I listened to the whole speech, I watched it on YouTube, and I was horrified. It was the first time I actually knew what terrible vision that Tony Abbott man had for military solutions. Things that even he said gnawed at people’s consciences; camps, spending more money, militarising borders, fighting to kill and destroy on the ground in Syria, ISIS.
EPSTEIN
Ann, I just want to leave it there. I just want to give Ewan a chance in Box Hill; I think you’ve got a question, Ewan. What is it?
CALLER
Yeah. Hello Raf, and Anna and Scott. Well look, Senator, I just want to know: what type of people do you want to allow into the country when you say ‘we will decide who comes here’ as John Howard did in 2001? I mean, what type of people are you talking about? I’m sort of in a quandary here, I’m a bit worried about your message because it sounded like it was bordering on racism.
RYAN
Well, there’s the go-to point there, Ewan, that makes a lot of people just turn off when that accusation is made.
(Inaudible)
I’m a very big believer in a significant immigration program. I think one of the great successes of the Howard era was the size and scale of the immigration program. I’m a big believer in a refugee resettlement program. But what underpins public trust in Australia’s large-scale immigration, family reunion and resettlement program, what underpins public trust is the fact that it is controlled by the government. And so we do take people and resettle them, and we provide them with services, but it’s not a self-selecting model. And I believe you have to have that control in order to have public trust in the program.
CALLER
Now I know for a fact that in 2001, the way that the Howard Government was able to control the backlash was to say to the community: if we take migrants from a certain area, it means cutting back the family reunion area. Isn’t that right?
RYAN
What we did, the policy for many years…
(Inaudible)
There used to be a rule where the numbers that came unlawfully came off the resettlement program. The family reunion program was a component of what I’ll call the larger immigration program, and the numbers between that and skilled migrants and others are balanced and changed over time.
CALLER
So, basically every time there was an asylum seeker that arrived here by boat, those numbers for family reunion were cut back?
RYAN
Not the family reunion, the resettlement program.
CALLER
From what I understand, people that were from Cambodia, and from Vietnam and Laos, and I worked with these people, they supported the government’s policy. Because, if they didn’t it meant the family reunion programs were going to be cut.
EPSTEIN
So is your point here is that under the Coalition, they’ve engineered the program to not accept people who are a particular ethnicity? Is that what you’re saying?
CALLER
(Inaudible)
RYAN
I don’t think anything we’ve said here refers to any place of origin or race or ethnicity of a person…
(Interrupted)
BURKE
Just one thing: never in Labor Party policies have we said everybody who gets here stays. There is an issue about being a genuine refugee, and everybody needs to be assessed on their merits. I’m not going with this ‘we’ve got open borders and we’re letting everybody in’. Most refugee advocates, some are on the fringes who are out there, but most refugee advocates are advocating for genuine refugees. And that’s what we’re dealing with here, people who are in desperate situations. And the tone and tenor of this speech that Abbott gave, implying that Europe will change forever, again sends out that dog whistle about them and us; and it is really dangerous for us in a world where refugees are something we can’t stop, and we need to deal with.
EPSTEIN
Look, I want to move on to other issues. I will take more calls on 1300 222 774. I want to read a text: Anna Burke’s advocating the transfer of the entire population of Africa and the Middle East to Europe, it’s a catastrophe, you’re destroyed as a coherent entity, it is a disaster. Anna Burke, I do want to ask you about a few numbers. Firstly, you have for Bill Shorten, as opposition leader, disastrous approval ratings; which are not the be all and end all, but it’s not good to have record disapproval ratings. You’ve also got a starkly lower primary vote measured in the polls. There are many people who are fans of Labor, who are just waiting for you to switch leaders.
BURKE
Just going back to the text, I’m not advocating everybody from Africa comes across; I’m actually advocating that we take a sensible approach, and actually deal with the issue at the source. But the majority of those people fleeing would rather stay at home, the majority of those people travelling to Europe eventually want to go home, that’s what you need to remember. Look, polls, I can use the politician’s line: polls come and go. We all look at them, we get terrified, we all think about what’s coming. You look at my margin, I’d be terrified. But we’ve made a decision within the Labor Party that we can’t have this seesawing of leaders. I mean, I just think it’s hysterical that the Liberal Party changed prime ministers and they haven’t had the backlash that we did about changing leaders. I mean, Joe Hockey left with his valedictory speech saying: we’ve got to stop this destabilisation. We’ve introduced a system within the Labor Party that you’ve got to have the majority of people saying…
(Interrupted)
EPSTEIN
But it’s not good, as a party that wants to win government; you all have to be worried by the poll numbers? The two major newspaper polls have the government romping it in any given Saturday.
BURKE
Look, they’re back to where they were when they won the last election…
(Interrupted)
EPSTEIN
Well, not quite that high but they’re close.
BURKE
They’re close. Most elections are fifty-one, forty-nine. So we’re actually around the margins you would expect to be twelve months out.
EPSTEIN
So, not so worried?
BURKE
I don’t think they’re devastating numbers, I think there’s a sigh of relief that Tony Abbott’s gone and they’re being reflected in the numbers. Yes, Labor has to sell its message and we need to get away from this issue that somehow we have a presidential-style election system; we don’t.
EPSTEIN
We do, and parties run campaigns as if we do.
BURKE
But when they go into the ballot box, I don’t ask them to actually vote for Bill Shorten, I actually ask them to vote for me, and the Labor Party. And that’s what we should be advocating, and we should be looking at policies and differentiating; because they may have changed leaders, but the government hasn’t changed stance about where they’re going on issues.
EPSTEIN
We might get into that with Cole. I will bring people some bushfire information and traffic information. But just briefly Anna Burke, I’ll ask you about this too Scott Ryan: union membership lower than it has ever been. You’ve got about one in eight workers, twenty-five years ago it was one in two; that’s a pretty steep drop. Is that an issue for the Labor Party, Anna Burke? They’ve got a lot of influence, whether or not you believe they have undue influence, should they not now have less because union membership continues to drop?
BURKE
Look, I think it’s a state of what the workforce is at as opposed to the state of where the union’s at. You’ve got more and more people who are self-employed, more and more people who provide ABNs, more and more people who don’t understand the conditions they’ve got. They’ve got the hard work of unions and individuals…
(Interrupted)
EPSTEIN
But that’s not winning people over to membership.
BURKE
No it’s not, but it’s collective action beforehand. We’ve got unions that have decimated and put blight on what is a terrific movement; so all those things add up. I think over time that the unions have had differential impacts upon on our movement, you only needed to look at national conference to understand that’s changing and how we set up our party, is a very open and inclusive party where people can have a say from unions and from the grass-roots.
EPSTEIN
Scott Ryan, briefly, does it make a difference to the Labor Party if union membership drops?
RYAN
Well I think you’ve got a situation where union membership in the private sector is below one in eight, and it’s disproportionate in the public sector. And I think that, as has been the case for most of the last twenty years, when the Labor Party’s effectively controlled with an ownership share by the unions, it was always set up to be the party of the labour movement, and they’ve never walked away from that. That’s when we’re looking at things that mean unions should be regulated like companies and have the same burdens of disclosure and honesty and ethics, and that’s when we have things like what happened on building sites in this state, it’s just out of control. The Labor Party’s unable to step away from that very narrow percentage of people in certain sectors that are union members.
EPSTEIN
Let me give you some bushfire information and some traffic details.
(Traffic and bushfire information)
Scott Ryan is with me, he is the Assistant Cabinet Secretary, part of Malcolm Turnbull’s Government and Anna Burke is with me, former Speaker and the Member for Chisholm. Scott Ryan, how much of a future does coal have here? Because clearly if we dug up all of the coal we had, we would breach the carbon budget that UN scientists say we shouldn’t breach. So how much of a future does it have and do we need to open more mines?
RYAN
There is an old saying in economics: the Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones. It ended because we invented bronze and we came up with better technology.
EPSTEIN
I haven’t heard that saying, it’s old…(inaudible)…but I haven’t heard it.
RYAN
Coal, well yeah I spent too long at uni. But what the point Alan Finkel was making the other night and the other morning…
(Interrupted)
EPSTEIN
The Chief Scientist.
RYAN
Yeah, the new Chief Scientist, is that coal will eventually be displaced but it will be displaced by technology and not by regulation. We are not going to have a situation where the people and government of India, for example, allow other nations to say: you can’t aspire to the lifestyles we have. We are seeing decreases in emission intensity, and it is coming around because of technology. We don’t burn briquettes in our home fires anymore; you can go around Melbourne and see all the signs still painted on walls where you could buy briquettes.
EPSTEIN
But we set the conditions, don’t we, so you can help it down the path with things like either renewable energy targets, direct action, moratoriums on coal mining? Governments set the terms, don’t they?
RYAN
Well, a moratorium on coal mining does nothing to invent new technologies. The important point, and this was the point that Alan Finkel was making, is that our whole improvement in environmental regulations has been driven by increasing aspiration, increasing wealth, but also increasing technology. So, that is what is going to drive change in an energy mix, not necessarily a moratorium. If we did what those signatories to the letter the other day propose, and had either a unilateral or attempted global ban on expansion of coal mines; a global ban would not happen, the countries seeking to get out of energy poverty would not let it happen and in fact, we could see an increase in emissions because our cleaner coal, or our relatively environmentally efficient mines might be replaced by…
(Interrupted)
EPSTEIN
Might be replaced by American coal? They will be exporting more coal soon; it is as good as ours.
RYAN
It depends where it comes from, my point being that you might get more domestic mining in places where it is less pure. The key thing here is that it is technology that drives change, not regulation.
EPSTEIN
Okay. Anna Burke, the Prime Minister is right here isn’t he? I mean, you might disagree with how much you want to have, but we are going to have a lot of coal in the future. That is just a fact of life.
BURKE
I don’t think it is a fact of life, and I think Scott and I are probably going to agree on this with Alan Finkel, but technology will displace it. Agreeing to things like Adani without looking into the future – I mean the size of that – is that coal really needed into the future if we aren’t actually putting the lever to encourage the technological change. We are in that situation at the moment where we do need to drive that change or we won’t have an environment to live in.
EPSTEIN
Is there a moral case for coal, Anna Burke? Josh Frydenberg the Resources Minister says there is.
BURKE
I think the use of that terminology is ridiculous. Is there an economic need for coal? Yes there is. Can we stop mining coal overnight? No we can’t. So, there is an economic issue and there is an issue about energy sources around the world. But at the moment, providing coal into India has actually been undermined by the Prime Minister himself. The people who need energy in those places where they don’t have it aren’t on a grid and the best way to give energy to people who aren’t on a grid is to give them a solar panel.
EPSTEIN
And from my understanding of the situation is the big expansion in India is to already existing users.
RYAN
The idea that somehow is up to us to say: let’s not mine this Carmichael mine in Queensland. How many of the signatories of that letter went to Rocky, or went to Mackay and told the thousands of people, the small businesses and all of the other people who have jobs because of the income of the mine workers…
(Interrupted)
EPSTEIN
Tourism is bigger than coal jobs.
RYAN
But they don’t conflict, that has been going on for decades. But this idea that somehow we can unilaterally impact on the trajectory of the world’s emissions by stopping a coal mine is harmful to us and most importantly harmful to the people who don’t sign letters which appear full page in the Sydney Morning Herald probably because they can’t afford to and they want the job.
EPSTEIN
I am going to have to leave the last word with Scott Ryan, he is the Assistant Cabinet Secretary and part of the Coalition Government. Anna Burke is the former Speaker and the Member for Chisholm. Thanks for coming along, both of you.
RYAN
Thanks Raf.
BURKE
Thank you.
(ENDS)