SUBJECTS: Glasgow summit, emissions reduction targets; National Anti-Corruption Commission; compulsory vaccination for politicians.

RAFAEL EPSTEIN, HOST: Anthony Albanese, good afternoon.

ANTHONY ALBANESE, LEADER OF THE AUSTRALIAN LABOR PARTY: Good afternoon, Raf. Good to be with you.

EPSTEIN: Why does it make a difference whether or not the Prime Minister’s at a meeting in Glasgow? Isn’t the policy the most important thing?

ALBANESE: Well, what’s important is that Australia is represented at the most senior levels. We’ll have President Biden there, we’ll have Prime Minister Johnson, we’ll have Prime Minister Trudeau. There’ll be leaders from all around the world will be there. And if the Australian Prime Minister isn’t there, it sends a message about Australia’s attitudes towards climate. We’ve been absent from a lot of the debate. We shouldn’t be absent from even attending the meeting.

EPSTEIN: Isn’t the performance what counts?

ALBANESE: Well, the performance is appalling. 

EPSTEIN: Meeting and beating. ‘Meeting and beating’, they say consistently.

ALBANESE: But it’s nonsense. The fact is, if you look at the detail, the big difference that’s been made has been the end to land clearing by various state governments, particularly the election of the Queensland Labor Government, and the Renewable Energy Target, which was set in place by the former Labor Government, that the Coalition tried to get rid of, like they tried to get rid of the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. They did get rid of the emissions trading scheme that was there in place. This is a government that have, at each and every step, been a blocker. And the last time they attended an international conference, they were there in the naughty corner with Saudi Arabia and a few other countries arguing for less ambition.

EPSTEIN: Okay, let’s talk about what Labor might do. At the last election, Bill Shorten had a tougher 2030 target. By the way, people are asking what the cuts mean. Usually, the baseline for these cuts in emissions are the year 2005. Not always, but usually. So when we talk about cuts in emissions, you use 2005 as your baseline. Sorry, Anthony Albanese, just getting some texts on that.

ALBANESE: That’s alright.

EPSTEIN: Bill Shorten had a tougher 2030 target than the Federal Government. Almost double, actually, what the Federal Government's is. So Scott Morrison is unlikely to go a lot higher than a 28 per cent cut in emissions. Is Labor's target going to be higher than Scott Morrison's?

ALBANESE: Well, we would be going to this conference, if we were in government, and Chris Bowen announced that a little while ago, with more stringent targets.

EPSTEIN: Sorry, just to be absolutely clear, more stringent means a higher ambition than 28 per cent?

ALBANESE: A higher ambition, correct. And if you actually look at what state and territory governments have committed to themselves, you get a higher target without any additional effort from the Federal Government. So it's quite astonishing that they haven't been prepared to do that.

EPSTEIN: So does that mean you pick the Liberal target of the New South Wales Government and stick with their 2030 target to give you a political cover? Is that what you do?

ALBANESE: No, it means we pick our own target. If we're in government, we'd have proper modelling done that you can do when you have Treasury and the departments to do that, work out what the best thing you could achieve would be whilst protecting jobs.

EPSTEIN: So does that mean you don't set a number before the election?

ALBANESE: No, no, it doesn't mean that at all. It means that, I've always said, Raf, and I've probably said it on this show before, that we'd make announcements about what we would do in the lead-up to the election after a couple of events. We said there were two big events coming this year. One of them, well, occurred last year, but he only got sworn in earlier this year, President Biden's ascension to the leadership in the United States has made a significant difference. And the second is the Glasgow conference. We want to see what comes out of Glasgow. But we did, very early on, one of the first commitments I made was to net zero by 2050. It seems that Scott Morrison can't even do that. And it's not clear whether he's leading the nation

EPSTEIN: Well he’ll land it, but there’ll be a price on it. There’ll be a price on it, but they’ll land the 2050.

ALBANESE: Well, you would have thought it wouldn't be hard to. But he hasn't up to now. And the fact that he's not attending Glasgow is quite extraordinary. And the week before, there's the G20 Summit, not by accident, so that world leaders can go to the G20 in Europe and they can then attend Glasgow. We've hosted the G20, of course, before, most embarrassingly, when Tony Abbott announced to the world's leaders that he'd gotten rid of action on climate change, much to their horror, and wondered why they didn't applaud at the time. But the G20 is a significant meeting as well. And that's why one would have thought that the Australian Prime Minister should go to the G20 and then go to the Glasgow conference. That's what's expected, that Australia won't be absent from the field.

EPSTEIN: Someone's actually suggesting you go as a way of tempting the Prime Minister there. But I'll just throw that in as commentary.

ALBANESE: I have written, actually, to the Prime Minister asking for Labor to be represented there. When I was the climate change spokesperson, I went to climate conferences when we were arguing to ratify Kyoto.

EPSTEIN: Because you need to get government permission to travel? Is that why you wrote to the Prime Minister? Or just as a political manoeuvre?

ALBANESE: No, no. You might be aware, Raf, you can’t just jump on a plane these days.

EPSTEIN: I thought so, just double checking. Intensely aware.

ALBANESE: You also need accreditation to be part of the delegation. You can’t just rock up to the conference.

EPSTEIN: Understood, understood, understood. Anthony Albanese is with you. He’s the Federal Leader of the Opposition. Sydney Labor MP, of course. 1300 222 774. You can hear what he has to say about our emissions. So they're going to set a higher number for the end of the decade than the Federal Government. We’ll get that number, who knows, definitely before the election, hopefully, he says yes, we will get before the election. So whatever you make of that. 1300 222 774. Anthony Albanese, it looks like we're going to get a vote on a federal anti-corruption body before the election. That looks pretty certain, in fact, the Government’s saying they're going to present legislation in the Lower House before the end of the year. Do you think we'll have a federal IBAC or ICAC before we vote?

ALBANESE: Well, Raf, they said that in 2018. Then they said it would be before the election. And then it was going to be immediately after the election, they promised in 2019. And we're still waiting. It's been more than a thousand days. So we're committed to having a national anti-corruption commission with teeth, with independence, one that's able to conduct its own inquires. And I think it will take a Labor government to get one. After all the controversy surrounding Gladys Berejiklian and the fact that there’ll be an inquiry before ICAC in two weeks’ time, it's about a couple of grants. Well, if there's a problem with Gladys Berejiklian, we know with sports rorts and regional rorts and commuter car parks and all of these programs -

EPSTEIN: You haven’t answered my initial question. Do you think we will have a anti-corruption body federally before the next election?

ALBANESE: No I don’t. No I don’t. They’ve had a thousand days. Why would you think that they're going to do something in the last few weeks. There’s four weeks sitting in the House of Reps before the end of the year. There is three Senate sitting works before the end of the year. They haven't been bothered to introduce legislation. I've asked questions in Parliament about it. And today, we had Scott Morrison again, dismissing ICAC.

EPSTEIN: Well, can I ask you about that specific point. He said that he doesn't want to follow that specific model. Does Labor want public hearings from a federal corruption body in the same way that the New South Wales anti-corruption body has those hearings? Because they happen very early on in the investigation. Do you support that idea?

ALBANESE: Well, we want a body that operates independently of the government, that can set its own inquiries. The problem with Scott Morrison raising these red herrings, under the government's talk of legislation, what they're proposing is that only the government effectively could decide whether they be an inquiry. So, guess what? We've seen that time and time again. This is a fellow who appoints people to have inquiries, the head of his department, former chief of staff, into what his own office knew about what happened in his office.

EPSTEIN: There’s pretty widespread criticism of the body they’ve proposed. But can I ask if you, as someone going to ask for everyone's vote at the next election, you'll be proposing your own version of an anti-corruption body. Are you going to be closer to ICAC, the New South Wales version, or closer to IBAC, the one in Victoria? The one of Victoria doesn't have as wide-ranging powers, doesn't have as many public hearings. Are you more ICAC Sydney or IBAC Melbourne? What do you think?

ALBANESE: Well, I'm not writing the legislation on the program this afternoon. But what I think is it needs to be independent, it needs to have its own capacity to have inquiries, it needs to have teeth. And that is what we would propose.

EPSTEIN: And you’re going to have it retrospective, aren’t you?

ALBANESE: Well, it needs to be able to look at matters certainly at least going back as to when there was broad agreement. According to the then Prime Minister at the time was Scott Morrison in 2018.

EPSTEIN: So what, the model you propose could look back over the last parliamentary term, is that what you mean?

ALBANESE: Of course it could.

EPSTEIN: Final question, Anthony Albanese. Politicians, should they face a mandatory vaccination? Two of your frontbenches, Bill Shorten and Mark Dreyfus, they're very firm, ‘yes, mandate the vaccine’. Do you agree with them?

ALBANESE: Look, I think politicians should get the jab. There's a little issue of the Constitution on whether it's a breach of privilege to stop someone sitting in the Parliament.

EPSTEIN: Well, Mark Dreyfus just gave a flat ‘yes’ when he was asked the question. I assume he knows his law?

ALBANESE:  Well, there is that issue. And the Speaker and the President, there’s an issue on the capacity of people to sit in the Parliament, and I think the Speaker and the President are looking at that. At the moment, what there is is that anyone who isn't fully vaccinated has to quarantine beforehand for 14 days in Canberra, is ruling that the ACT Government has done.

EPSTEIN: But do you support the idea of mandatory vaccines for politicians?

ALBANESE: I think people should get vaccinated. Everyone should get vaccinated. I absolutely think that that's the case. Can you stop someone voting on legislation because of it? You know, I think that's a separate question that would require a legal response.

EPSTEIN: What about getting rid of anti-vax sentiment and anti-vax misinformation? The Leader of the Opposition here, actually, the Liberal Leader, Matthew Guy, wants some sort of ad campaign to get rid of or sort of try and overcome vaccine misinformation. Do you think we need something like that?

ALBANESE: Well, we've needed something like that for the last two years. And the reason why we haven't had it, when we raised it with health department officials in the COVID Committee, they basically said the problem was we didn't have enough supply.

EPSTEIN: There’s been some federal ads.

ALBANESE: There’s been very little and they've been pathetic, frankly. They've been way, way way, compared with the amount of money that they've spent on ads, that’s a couple of their bodgy commuter car parks, but where there are no actual train stations.

EPSTEIN: Well, there aren’t car parks either.

ALBANESE: Well, there is that. But they've been prepared to allocate that. It's been appalling. And that has been one of the issues that we've continued to raise.

EPSTEIN: Thanks for your time.

ALBANESE: Thanks Raf.

EPSTEIN: Anthony Albanese, the Leader of the Opposition. Don’t forget, you’re going to get to vote soon. Won’t be the end of the year, that’s unlikely, but it’ll definitely be before May next year.

ENDS