SUBJECTS: Federal Budget 2021; Housing Australia Future Fund; social housing; Joel Fitzgibbon; wage theft; cashless welfare cards; Multicultural Engagement Taskforce.
 
MARCUS PAUL, HOST: Anthony Albanese, Leader of the Federal Opposition. Good morning to you, Anthony.
 
ANTHONY ALBANESE, LEADER OF THE AUSTRALIAN LABOR PARTY: Good morning, Marcus. Good to be with you.
 
PAUL: Thank you, mate. Look, I'm sorry, I have no red carpet.
 
ALBANESE: That was quite an extraordinary performance, wasn't it, for the Prime Minister at Williamtown Airbase to have the red carpet rolled out?
 
PAUL: I thought it was fake. I thought it was the Betoota Advocate or I thought somebody doctored up the picture until it was confirmed by the Prime Minister's own office. Apparently, it happens with dignitaries, including defence ministers and others. But I've never seen it before.
 
ALBANESE: I've been on the Prime Minister's plane with Prime Minister Gillard and Prime Minister Rudd, I've never seen that before. I just found it extraordinary. And the Prime Minister needs to explain why it occurred. Just like the previous visit, we had the whole Top Gun soundtrack. A whole lot of money spent on visuals for the Prime Minister. We are the sort of country that doesn't really go in for pomp and ceremony normally, it's one of the great things about Australia. People often say to me, 'Where's your security? Where's your minders?' when I'm at the local Woolies or what have you. And we can go about our business without that, I think.
 
PAUL: Well, something that I think is a bit of a distraction, and maybe some explaining needs to be done, this is a question without notice, Anthony, and I do apologise, it has popped up this morning. I am just going to play a tiny bit of audio that appeared on Sky News on the past day or so. And then I will ask you a question about Joel Fitzgibbon.
 
ALAN JONES, SKY NEWS: You can’t escape the conclusion that if the Labor Party was smart enough to make Joel Fitzgibbon the Leader, the whole political scene in Australia would change, because Fitzgibbon has seen the light. He is now arguing correctly that the Labor Party is bleeding votes. It is not the only Party. The Coalition Budget suggests that they are not sure what they stand for.
 
PAUL: I won’t play anymore. It follows an article produced by Mr Fitzgibbon over the weekend. Anthony, as far as I can see, there is no I in team. But Joel Fitzgibbon seems to be, in my opinion and many others, continually undermining you. He either needs to stand aside as an independent or run for the other mob and pick a side. 
 
ALBANESE: I don’t comment on Joel, I think that if you do that, you're just drawing more attention to it. Joel is a backbencher. He's entitled to express views not bound by Shadow Cabinet. 
 
PAUL: Surely, it is frustrating, Anthony. With all due respect, it's like an elephant in the room. Surely, it's frustrating when now it's reaching the realms of Sky After Dark and others and he's writing these articles in major newspapers, including The Australian and other, Albo. I mean, come on. If I was you, it would really piss me off, to be honest.
 
ALBANESE: But we don't take our advice from, with due respect to Alan Jones, from him about political direction. Alan Jones’ political views are well-known, to be fair to him. He doesn't hide it. But I think that the Labor Party direction is very clear. My team is actually very united in terms of Shadow Cabinet and our Caucus, overwhelmingly. And we have a very clear direction for the country, particularly after the Budget, that we want a country with a vision for the future. And what we didn't see last week was any vision from the Government beyond getting through the next election, beyond throwing money at problems that itself had created.
 
PAUL: Look, your Budget in Reply speech, some called underwhelming. I thought it was, to be perfectly honest, one for the ages in that it focused on a lot of social issues, social housing, the $10 billion dollar package that you announced. It has been a long time coming, I think. And finally, someone has decided that, well, some of the underprivileged and some of those a little less well off in our country will be looked after, single mothers, people fleeing domestic violent relationships. So congratulations on that because it's a good step forward, I think. Affordable housing is a major issue in particular in our big metropolitan cities, Anthony.
 
ALBANESE: Well, this is good policy development, it's one that won't cost the taxpayer any money. By establishing an investment vehicle to have an Australia Future Fund, what we'll do is have $10 billion in that fund. And it will make investments that will produce a return that will then be invested into social and community housing. 20,000 new additional social housing dwellings, 10,000 new affordable housing dwellings. What we'll do is provide support, as well, for our veterans, as well as for women and children fleeing domestic violence. There were 10,000 women and kids turned away from shelter last year. 10,000 who had to sleep in their car, or sleep in a park or go back to a situation that wasn't safe for them. One in 10 of the people who slept homeless last night in Sydney was a veteran. We can do better than that. And we need to do better than that. And this was good policy development. It follows child care being the centrepiece of our announcement last year. But we had a range of other initiatives as well, including making wage theft a crime.
 
PAUL: Yes, well, that was my next point. Wage theft. It is high time that legislation is put in place that punishes those who essentially are stealing from underneath workers. I mean, a lot of people are running around at the moment, Albo, saying, ‘Oh, Labor's forgotten about the blue-collar workers, they've forgotten about the worker’. This is exactly the kind of policy that would protect the worker.
 
ALBANESE: Well, that's exactly right. And the Federal Government could have fixed this. There was legislation before the Parliament. And they actually withdrew the section of their own legislation concerned with wage theft, even though it had overwhelming support of the Parliament. So they won't do it. But we will. We will fix this because it is rampant. It's particularly against vulnerable people, temporary visa holders, in some cases, there was an example of whereby an employer was paying people through their system, through their bank account, and then they had to, on the spot, go to the auto teller machine and take money out and give money back to the employer. How we can’t do something about that in 2021, when overwhelmingly employers do the right thing. If someone is behaving like that, then what they're doing is securing an unfair advantage over their competitors who are actually paying their workers properly. 
 
PAUL: And the gig economy, there's a lot of work that needs to be done on that. If I can just move quickly now to corporatised welfare. I've highlighted a story on this program in the last 24 hours, where a young woman, a single mother, three young children, including a 10-week-old baby, she's on the Indue card, this corporatised welfare. By the way, Indue is set the pocket another $26 million for two years to run this cashless debit card as they expand it. I mean, this poor woman, she cannot buy, and we have the evidence, she can't buy bread or milk. But she can go next door to a bottle shop and buy an alcoholic beverage. Albo, the question is, corporate welfare, where does Labor stand on it? And will you scrap this ridiculous idea of an Indue card where governments are dictating to people how to spend their benefits?
 
ALBANESE: We opposed to because it doesn't work. And all of the Government's own studies and reports showed that it doesn't work. There was a South Australian Senator went into the Northern Territory to conduct his own investigation and was able to buy grog with it, Rex Patrick. The truth is that for some communities, unlimited cashless card assists some communities, particularly women, in remote communities who requested it, effectively, and wanted this to happen for their communities so that they were making sure that they were buying essentials for themselves and their kids. But this expansion is all about ideology, rather than common sense. And for a political party that says it cares about individualism and of the rights of the individual, to seek to impose this on more and more people, just defies its own evidence.
 
PAUL: Why are we allowing a third party to dictate who is set to receive Australian taxpayer benefits? I mean, I've never come across anything in my life. I don't understand.
 
ALBANESE: Well, this is just a part of privatisation, of course. We know that. Remember, Marcus, the example of the company that had basically a shed on Kangaroo Island that were paid tens of millions of dollars to assist with offshore detention facilities. Some of this is just extraordinary, the connections with the Liberal Party. and it's just beyond belief, frankly. And it is one of the reasons why, frankly, we need a National Integrity Commission, which actually oversees all of this, which will act as a handbrake on this activity. And I suspect it is one of the reasons why Scott Morrison promised it way back in 2018, we still haven't seen the legislation. 
 
PAUL: So just to be clear, if elected, Labor would scrap the Indue card?
 
ALBANESE: Absolutely. We think there's a role if communities are requesting a government-run system in terms of cashless welfare. So I don't want to say that it never has a role because it did have a role. But the idea of a privatised organisation running the welfare system like this and doing it in a way in which they have an interest in its expansion, that's the thing. They introduced the profit motive above what is the public interest. It's the public interest that's got to count here. And under Labor, that is precisely what we would do.
 
PAUL: All right. Often people from migrant backgrounds aren't aware that government services even exist. You're trying to change that. We saw during the pandemic the Federal Government rely on google translate for important health information. That's not good enough, is it?
 
ALBANESE: No, it's not. And we had a report. I set up a taskforce into the engagement with our multicultural communities. And it handed down its report yesterday. I launched it in Melbourne. Anne Stanley and Peter Khalil did a fantastic job coordinating the work of the taskforce. And it found that during the pandemic, many communities just didn't get the information, or worse, still got the wrong information. It also found, of course, a migrant is two times more likely to establish a small business as another member of the community. The nature of these communities, they are entrepreneurial, they're people who have shown a great deal of initiative in order to come to Australia. And they are people who want to engage in business and set themselves up and set up their kids for a better life. And we need to provide appropriate assistance there. One of the recommendations of the report is for the enterprise assistance schemes, which are in place, that there should be something specific aimed at multicultural communities to provide them with that assistance, which will, of course, then help grow the economy. 
 
PAUL: All right. So that's where Labor's Multicultural Engagement Taskforce will come into play here.
 
ALBANESE: Absolutely. And it's a very good report. It's online if any of your listeners want to have a look at the report. If they go into any of my social media or onto my website.
 
PAUL: Alright. Good to have you on, Anthony. Thank you very much for your time. Appreciate it.
 
ALBANESE: Thanks very much, Marcus.
 
ENDS