SUBJECTS: Failures of the Morrison Government during COVID-19; Labor’s policy agenda; Federal election; Better Future for Queensland visit; Novak Djokovic; rapid antigen tests.
 
RAY HADLEY, HOST: The Federal Opposition Leader, Anthony Albanese, has considered to talk to me first day up in 2022. He's on the line. Anthony, g'day.
 
ANTHONY ALBANESE, LEADER OF THE AUSTRALIAN LABOR PARTY: Good morning, Ray. Thanks for having me on the program.
 
HADLEY: A pleasure. I think the most important question is, had you been Prime Minister, as opposed to what I just spoke about domestically in New South Wales, what do you think you would have done differently that Morrison hasn't done?
 
ALBANESE: Well, I would have listened to the health advice and I wouldn't have had the Grand Slam of failures. Remember the tracing app, COVIDSafe, that was going to be like sunscreen, that no one has used? It's been a massive failure. I would have put in place testing regimes, including rapid antigen tests. It was predicted way back, many months ago, in September, the approval of rapid antigen tests occurred. And we just didn't get a supply. We committed the same mistakes that occurred with the vaccines, where Pfizer approached the Government and said, ‘We want to give you some, we want to do a deal'. And the Government ignored that and said it wasn't a race. And then they said on these rapid antigen tests, 'Australian companies, no, sell them overseas, because we don't want to do a deal with you'. It's been tracing, testing, vaccine and quarantine are the Grand Slam of failures under this Government. I would have listened to advice and I would have prepared. Throughout this pandemic, the Prime Minister has been characterised by saying, 'It's not a race'. It always was a race for leadership to put in place measures that would keep Australians safe.
 
HADLEY: You see, I've got a few emails, when I had announced earlier that I'd be talking to you, and they're saying, 'Look, I was at the club the other night, there's a few Labor voters here, a few go the other way, LNP, but what we're looking for Anthony Albanese, between now and when they call the election sometime later this year, is the sort of things you're talking about. We don't want criticism, we want answers'. Now, in relation to rapid antigen, Anthony, I spoke to a mate of mine, Keith Todd, who just happened to be in the UK. And I was having a yarn to him. He's over there to see his daughter who’s just given birth, when he was allowed to go. And he said, 'I'll tell you what's working over here', even though Omicron hadn't been thought of at the time, he said, 'These rapid antigen tests'. I said, 'What's that?' He said, 'Well, the NHS give you as many as you want. They're free'. And he said, 'Before we have dinner with family, we all take one to make sure we're okay'. And so it goes on. Now, that was September, early September, that conversation, 15 minute interview with Keith Todd. And I then started talking about it. And I started to talk to the Health Minister in New South Wales and his Federal counterpart. And it was like I was coming from outer space.
 
ALBANESE: It's as if they're being so determined to say, 'Let life go back to normal', which we all want. No one wants any restrictions. No one wants this disease to have come here. But you've got to have a bit of common sense. You've got to plan ahead. Because if you fail to plan, you're planning to fail, as the old saying goes. And here we have rapid antigen tests being produced in Australia that we're exporting overseas when we're desperate for them here. I mean, our supermarket shelves are empty in so many places. I've been travelling from Queensland. We drove from Cairns right down to Maryborough. We visited Townsville, Mackay, Bundaberg, Rockhampton, all of the towns along that route. And so many of them, there's no rapid antigen tests, there's no food on supermarket shelves. I spoke to health professionals and we visited medical centres where they can't even get rapid antigen tests for their staff. We have the queues outside to get PCR tests, people waiting five, six hours, and then waiting a long time for a result. We have circumstances whereby, during all of that, at the height of that, the Prime Minister went to the cricket and good on him, that's fine. But don't go there and say, 'It is good we're taking wickets with COVID', which is what he said. It just showed a real tin ear for what people are going through. People are having their booster appointments deferred because there isn't the supply. There are parents worried about their kids going back to school because they haven't been able to make appointments for them to be vaccinated. There are real issues. And they all come down to that failure to plan in advance and a 'she'll be right, mate' attitude that Scott Morrison and Dom Perrottet here in New South Wales seem to have had. And it's beyond my comprehension how you could, after the stuff-ups with the supply the vaccine, how you can have exactly the same problems with the booster and with rapid antigen tests.
 
HADLEY: See, I said to Dominic Perrottet, before I went on leave on December 10, about a week before, I said, 'You can open up on the 15th'. I said, 'You can elax some restrictions, but you can't open up'. And he was intent, absolutely intent, on giving anti-vaxxers the green light. So, when I went on leave, it was 93.1, I come back and it's 93.8 - 0.7 per cent in five weeks we went up. We got Lismore Base Hospital full of anti-vaxxers, ICU full of it. And just in relation to, you mentioned your trip through Queensland, if I can just divert, I came back from Queensland yesterday, or Saturday, actually, and we went shopping. I thought I was in Afghanistan. You can't buy toilet paper.
 
ALBANESE: You can't buy meat. You can't buy fruit. And the Transport Workers' Union wrote to the Government months ago and said there are supply chain issues, please put in place a system so that it can be avoided. The trucking industry. I was the Transport Minister, Ray, as you know, for six years. I've got truckies telling me, and most of them, of course, are self-employed. They're individual operators or they might have one or two or three people who work for them, a few trucks, just trying to get by. And here they have a circumstance whereby they can't continue to operate. The mistake that has been made is that if you think that it's health or the economy, that's the wrong question. You have to get the health outcomes right otherwise there's an impact on the economy. And I got back on the weekend from Queensland as well. And one of the things that I noticed yesterday is that there just aren't as many cars on the streets. And small business people tell me, who operate venues, be it restaurants or bars, that so many of them have either had to close or restrict hours because they don't have the staff or because people are just cancelling bookings and they're not going out. Because at a time when you have 100,000 infections a day, most days, and you have dozens of deaths being reported, then people are quite rightly concerned about mixing. So, that's having that impact on the economy that is occurring. Our spending, according to the ANZ survey, is as low or perhaps lower than it was at the height of the pandemic. At the height. It's reached the bottom. And that is because the complacency when it comes to health has meant that there is an economic impact, there is an impact on jobs, there is an impact particularly on small business.
 
HADLEY: You've got a job in front of you. Because the problem for you is Morrison has done a pretty good job over the first couple of years. Yes, there have been some giant missteps, I think, more recently. And he's been aided and abetted by Dominic Perrottet. But just a tip for you from an old bloke, right. You said you've been through Queensland. If you're going back through Queensland on the election trail, don't take Kristina Keneally with you. It didn't work out well for Bill. Leave her in Canberra.
 
ALBANESE: Well, Kristina is an important part of my team. We've got a great team.
 
HADLEY: How did I know you were going to say all this, Anthony. It's like Souths winning the comp in 2022.
 
ALBANESE: Oh, mate, I am going for the double this year. So, it is a big year for me. And I don't know how we'll go without Reynolds. Bit worried about who we will be playing at half. But we'll have a good year. I think we're still a top four side.
 
HADLEY: Well, Reynolds has gone to Queensland. Don't take Kristina with you to Queensland. It didn't work out for Bill.
 
ALBANESE: Well, I think that Kristina is out there today running on the Djokovic issue, which has been again an example. How did he get a visa in the first place? We could have avoided this whole circus that's gone on if a bit of common sense had of applied. It's not like they didn't know that was coming either. It's been the biggest story in sport for months. And yo’du think that no one knew about it until he arrived here?
 
HADLEY: Anyway, Craig Tiley has got a few questions to answer in relation to that, and so does Tennis Australia. Thanks for your time. We'll talk again soon.
 
ALBANESE: Thanks very much, Ray.
 
HADLEY: Anthony Albanese, Federal Opposition Leader.
 
ENDS