SUBJECT: Budget Reply 2021.
 
LEIGH SALES, HOST:  Anthony Albanese joins us live now. Thank you for heading straight up.
 
ANTHONY ALBANESE, LEADER OF THE AUSTRALIAN LABOR PARTY:My pleasure.
 
SALES: You can't deny that under the Morrison Government Australia has come through the COVID pandemic economically and healthwise among the best in the world. What do you have to complain about?
 
ALBANESE: Australians have been magnificent. There's no question about that. They've shown resilience, they've made sacrifices in order to protect each other. That's the value of caring for each other that makes us such a great country. The leadership has come from Australians here, Leigh. And by and large they have overwhelmingly responded. But the other thing that has happened during the pandemic is some of the weaknesses in our economy, our vulnerability has been exposed. Our need to manufacture things here. Our need to be more self reliant. And we need to grow back better. That's my vision.

SALES: The tag line of your speech tonight was a Labor government, a government on your side. But a huge number of Australians were kept afloat thanks to JobKeeper and their firsthand experience is of the Morrison Government squarely on their side?
 
ALBANESE: Well, Leigh, as you'd be aware, it was Labor who put forward the idea of wage subsidies and Scott Morrison called it a dangerous idea when we did so. It was only when the queues formed outside Centrelink offices that the Prime Minister changed his view of that.
 
SALES: In your speech, you said that in terms of quarantine and borders, locked out or locked up, it's a message that no Australian government should send to our  citizens. Does that mean you would never activate a policy that prevented Australian citizens from returning home?
 
ALBANESE: What I mean by that is, as you'd be aware, is that we brought citizens home from Wuhan at the beginning of the outbreak. We managed to get Australians home in those circumstances. But the Indian community, the Australian diaspora in India, were told that if they tried to return home, they would be subject to a prison sentence or very hefty fines. The Prime Minister promised to get Australians home by Christmas. And that shouldn't have been beyond the capacity of the Government to do so. We've never had more aviation assets, whether they be the Australian Government's assets through the Air Force or Qantas planes sitting in central Australia available at our disposal. And we should have done much better at bringing Australians home.

SALES: Australia's economic recovery hinges a lot on when international borders will reopen. How much longer can Australia live in this kind of elimination bubble? As vaccination rates increase, will you encourage your Labor colleagues, among the state premiers, to stop with the lockdowns over one or two cases?
 
ALBANESE: Well, the premiers have kept their respective states safe. It is Scott Morrison who went to Queensland and criticised Annastacia Palaszczuk for keeping Queenslanders safe. I think she's done a magnificent job. What we need to do in order to open up the economy is to get two things right - vaccinations and quarantine. Tonight I put forward a plan for Australian Government involvement in quarantine around the nation with 
appropriate facilities, including the one I nominated in outside of Darwin, it's outside of Darwin that's currently being used by US Marines. The fact is that we need to get those two things right and the Government has bungled both of them. We were told four million people would be vaccinated by the end of March. We're now in mid May and still not up to that figure.

SALES: On your plan for government support of start-ups, wouldn't the good ones already attract private sector. So the Government would be wasting money on those that aren't appealing to the market?
  
ALBANESE: That's not right. What you have in many cases is that start-ups haven't been able to gain capital. And that's one of the reasons why we see a whole range of Australian innovations, particularly one of the ones I used as an example was solar technology. It's Australian solar technology that has, is essentially powering the shift in energy grids throughout the world. But we haven't been able to benefit from it. So this is about, it's a modest scheme. Its loans of up to $12,000. That's not a lot. But it would provide real support for people to be able to commercialise those breakthroughs that come through our innovation centres.

SALES: If you want innovation, why not simply direct all of the funding into universities which is so desperately struggling at the moment?
 
ALBANESE:  Well, this is about universities which have incubators and have these research institutes attached to them and that's why the funding that we've said will be connected with them. But there's the next step. The universities do the research. Universities aren't by and large in the business of then going out and commercialising those opportunities. It's about maximising the benefit from university research.
 
SALES: You were promising in your Budget Reply to lift wages but with no real explanation of how. The previous Labor government wasn't able to do it. What would be different?
 
ALBANESE: Well, there are two ways you can lift wages. One is of course through productivity benefits. Which are then shared and past Labor governments have been very good at that. We've seen productivity not flow through to wage increases in recent times. Due to changes in the nature of the workforce. And that's why we need to address that. We need to address insecurity at work. It's insecure work that is driving down wages. And examples that I used today was about making sure that job security is recognised in the Fair Work Act, making sure there's gender pay gap reporting for large companies. Making sure as well, I said, and committed to, taking a case for aged care workers to the Fair Work Commission, looking at the historic gender pay gap which is there. Now we did that in government for social and community service workers. That led to a pay increase of 30% which means that those staff, those community workers had been far more likely to be retained and to stay in those industries. At the moment, an industry like aged care, you can earn more stacking shelves than you can looking after our older and frail Australians who are aged care residents.

SALES: On Budget Night, your Shadow Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, was on the program and we were talking about the size debt and the long running forecast of deficits. He said the only way out of that is honestly admit it will require economic growth, plus potentially tax increases and spending cuts. Will you go to the next election putting a plan to Australians about how you'd begin the debt recovery?
 
ALBANESE: We'll have a full economic plan at the next election. It will include all of our expenditure and revenue measures. Tonight, we have a very modest cost to the announcements that we've made. And that compares with the Government's approach. If you had the right reforms that produced growth, rather than the 21 pots of money, slush funds, with $4 billion in it, $9 billion in funds, decisions taken not announced. This Government treats taxpayers' money like its own, like it's Liberal Party money. That has to stop. What we need is investment and we would have made investments if we were in the circumstances just as we did with the global financial crisis. The difference is we had a legacy. We left paid parental leave. We had a fibre to the premise NBN. We had infrastructure in every school in the country. We reformed public transport with major projects, regional rail link and projects right around the country. We finished the Hume Highway, started the duplication on the Pacific Highway. What has this Government got as its legacy apart from $1 trillion of debt?
 
SALES: We're out of time. Thank you.
 
ALBANESE: Thanks very much, Leigh.
 
 
ENDS