Interview with Gareth Parker, 6PR
3 February 2022
GARETH PARKER: Joining me on the line is the Prime Minister of Australia, Scott Morrison. Prime Minister, good morning.
PRIME MINISTER: G'day Gareth.
PARKER: It's been an interesting couple of days for you.
PRIME MINISTER: It always is mate.
PARKER: It's sort of the summer apology tour after the Omicron wave in the eastern states, which so far we've avoided the worst off in Western Australia. My sense is that most West Australians are thankful for that. Did Mark McGowan do the right thing by deferring the planned border reopening?
PRIME MINISTER: Yeah, I think he did. I mean, Omicron, as we learnt over the summer, is a completely different virus. I mean, the things we're doing before don't work the same way under the Omicron virus. And as a result, you've got to reset and you've got to rethink the things you were doing. On the eastern states, as you've been seeing while you've been over here. We have changed how close contact rules work because that impacts then on the workforce and how many people you have working in health and aged care and in food distribution centres, driving trucks. So you've really had to completely change and that's what we were doing over the summer and that had some pretty significant impacts. But you know, Omicron is what brought that about. And I think that's the big lesson from the eastern states for the West when they inevitably move, as the Premier, Mark, has said into this Omicron phase that the lessons from the East Coast would be applied there and that when his health system, he believes is ready to go, I'm sure he will take that next step.
PARKER: So, so when's the right time for us to join back in there because I was talking to Anthony Albanese about this earlier. He's been in Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales just in the last week. Many West Australians would like to be able to travel unencumbered for their work or to see their family or even maybe take a holiday.
PRIME MINISTER: Oh, I have no doubt about that, but I think what we've seen in the West is they want to do that. They want to do it safely, too. And that's why we've been investing heavily to support Western Australians over the course of the pandemic. I mean, we put more than $14 billion in direct economic supports to Western Australians over the course of this pandemic. And importantly, we've been supporting them with their hospital funding as well. I mean, you may not realise, but 50/50 of all the expenditure on COVID in Western Australia is done 50/50 with the federal government, whether it's buying tests or whatever, that might be additional costs in hospitals, even manning and having people at the testing clinics, that's being funded 50/50 with the Commonwealth Government. It's a joint effort and the figures on the vaccinations in Western Australia are encouraging. I mean, you've gone over that 90 per cent on two dose mark, you know you're over 40 per cent on on the on the booster shot as well. In fact, your double dose rate in WA is now higher than Queensland, and that's a that's a great effort. Because you haven't had the spread of the virus in WA, like eastern states have. So I think that's a pretty stunning effort from Western Australia to catch up and to be where they now are on boosters.
PARKER: But Prime Minister, are you saying that it's safe to travel from Brisbane to Melbourne or from Adelaide to Sydney, but not from Perth to anywhere?
PRIME MINISTER: Well, I'm saying that's the Premier's call. That's what I'm saying. And he has to make that decision based on what he thinks his health system is ready to absorb. Now we've been investing in that hospital system, and you and I have spoken many, many times about the boost to the WA state budget from our GST deal, which I put together and argued for and got across the whole Commonwealth of states. I had to argue that case for the West in the East. No one did that more than me, as you know, and we landed that. And that has put Western Australia in a very good position to be investing in their hospital system and get it ready. But at the end of the day, Mark McGowan is going to make that call and we've been supporting him.
PARKER: I'll come back to you on East versus West in a moment because there's something quite important that I want to just get your view on. But but just just perhaps one more on COVID. The Premier Mark McGowan has emphasised almost daily the number of COVID deaths over this summer Omicron wave in the rest of the country, running at sort of 40, 50, 60, 70, sometimes more a day. Thankfully, it looks as though that level is coming down. Is that level of death acceptable to you?
PRIME MINISTER: None of these deaths at the end of the day, whether here in Australia or around the world, I mean, that's what the virus has done, and we have to remember that this is the virus doing this and it's doing it all around the world. And Australia has one of the lowest death rates from COVID, including from Omicron, of anywhere in the world. And yes, every single one of these deaths is heartbreaking for those families. But equally, every life we have saved is a great blessing. Now we've saved over 40,000 lives in this country and many of those in Western Australia. Now that is something that Australians can say we've been able to push through and achieve. Many, many tens of thousands of lives saved. So, you know, the Omicron variant is not as is not as severe, but it is far more far more contagious. And so while its its severity is low, because so many people have it, then obviously it has that greater volume of cases and some that become more severe. And that is the battle with Omicron. It is a very different virus that behaves differently. And so that's why when Western Australia, when Omicron, it will get there at some point. The Premier understands that, we both understand that looking at how you manage that when it's there is very different to what it was with Delta. And that's the lesson from the East Coast and particularly around close contact rules, because the virus can do worse things with rules that don't work than the virus can do on its own.
PARKER: We're seeing that at the moment with the 14 day quarantine rules for schools, for example. I just wonder whether you think that that should change quickly to 7 days like the rest of the country.
PRIME MINISTER: I mean, the Premier has been sitting around our national cabinet table with us and seeing what's been happening. The East Coast and the virus has had a very different course in different parts of the country, and that has been most stark in the West. And so that means what's happened there has been different to the rest of the country and I've always acknowledged that, just like, I've always understood how the Western Australian economy works differently to the rest of the country, why I thought the GST is different, so I've always recognised that. So it is different. But I think the point is that when they're ready then they can move. But ultimately they need to get ready and learn from lessons.
On 14 days, now we dropped that in the East Coast because that was taking people off trucks out of distribution centres, out of hospitals, out of schools. And we've got kids back now here in New South Wales and my kids are back. You know,I got an alert the other day saying oh, there was a case, they're back at school today, they left first thing this morning and will be back home this afternoon. They're doing their thing. Their education is continuing. We're living with it here, and our experience in the East is different to the West, and the West has done incredibly well. And I commend Mark for that and the work that we've done together. We're working together right now on the challenges regarding the rail lines. I appreciate the strong cooperation we’ve had on that. We always work together to try and solve these problems and understand that it is different in the West.
PARKER: And that's exactly the issue that I wanted to go to. And I think there's been way too much east versus west rhetoric from both sides over the last two years. My view has always been that we need each other, you know, the East needs the West and the West needs the East.
PRIME MINISTER: I agree.
PARKER: This rail line is exposed a significant vulnerability has it. Paul Scurrah from the rail operator Pacific National earlier this week called for more money to be spent on the rail line so there's more resilient to future flooding events. Is that something the government will consider?
PRIME MINISTER: We'll work through all these issues, particularly with the Premier, the South Australian Premier as well. Barnaby Joyce has, you know, just flew straight into gear on attacking this challenge and working with both premiers, and we're getting through it. And we've made some changes to regulations around trucks and licences and things like this. And that means things can keep flying, but it's going to take a little while to restore that line, and I think people understand that. But it does highlight those vulnerabilities. It's one of the reasons, you know, go back to the other side of the country. When you look down in Tasmania, they've got the Bass Strait and the what is called the [inaudible], which is that basically an extension chord between Tasmania and the rest of the country, you know, that's it's a similar sort of issue. And what we do there with shipping and the West, you know, it's a land sea in effect between the West and the East and and you know, those connections are incredibly important. I think COVID has highlighted that as well.
PARKER: The starters gun has sort of been fired in the election campaign, I think, this week. That's my observation. You've been saying May for months and months now. So that's I presume when we're going to the polls. But and we alluded to this earlier event, we've all had revelations this week that apparently some colleagues in the Liberal Party think that you're a horrible person and you're a psycho. There's ministers currently stood down over personal conduct. We've got the issues over the RATs, cost of living emerging as a big issue for households. And then there’s Newspoll. How do you convince West Australians that you're the man for the job for another term?
PRIME MINISTER: Well, I think there are two very important issues, and, you know, there's a lot of politics that goes on in between elections and that's true and I'm looking forward to the opportunity I'll have to come and speak to West Australians directly. But when it comes to their job and the security of their job and their future, when it comes to, you know, getting people into a home, we've got 300,000 Australians into their own home over the course since the last election through our home guarantee scheme, the homebuilder scheme. When it comes to getting that education, the skills, we've got 220,000 apprentices in trade training at the moment around the country, so many of them in Western Australia. That's the highest level since 1963, and we've got unemployment heading to below four per cent and youth unemployment below 10 and a million more women in jobs. So we've had the plan to get those jobs and we've got the plan to keep those jobs and keep growing those jobs, whether it be in our manufacturing sector, our resources sector, we've always stood up for the resources sector. We've never had an each way bet on that like our opponents. So we have the plan to keep that economy strong and take Australia forward from small businesses to large.
And then it comes to the issues of national security. We live in an incredibly, incredibly more dangerous and uncertain world, and we've stood up for Australia in the middle of all. We’ve had our critics, including in the West. But we will always stand up and not appease for Australia. What we will do is will stand up for Australia. We won't trade away Australia's values or interests. And we've been very clear that investments in defence, cyber security, national security, standing up to the big tech companies when they undermine our society, people can trust us to run the economy, run the finances and ensure that we stand up for Australia's interests in a very, very changing and often hostile world.
Now the other thing that's going to happen on the other side of the election, whichever way you're voting. Mark McGowan's the Premier the next day. So it's not a state election, it's a federal election. It's about who do you want to be prime minister? You've got Mark McGowan. He was strongly supported at the last election, and he's premier either way, the next day after. And we've always worked very well together.
PARKER: So you don't want a contest of Scott Morrison versus Mark McGowan. You want a contest versus Anthony Albanese.
PRIME MINISTER: And that's because it's not one between Mark and I any more than it's a contest between meaning any other premier. I've met 65 times in the national cabinet, calling them together. That's more than any prime minister has met with any premiers, any time in our history to deal and work together through this pandemic, and Mark's been an important part of that. And he's openly acknowledged that process and has been a keen advocate for it. And it's been good to have him around the table and to have that perspective and for the eastern states to understand that perspective. So it's not just me standing up for Western Australia, we're together on that on many occasions.
PARKER: Well, Prime Minister, I hope the next time that we talk on air, it's in Perth. We hope we can get you, or at least somewhere else in the western third of the continent. We'd like to see you on our side of the country ASAP.
PRIME MINISTER: You and me both. Looking forward to it.
PARKER: Good on you, Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
