Sky News interview with Minister for the Environment and Water Tanya Plibersek

SUBJECTS: Unions wages deal; Jobs and Skills Summit; skills shortage; environmental approvals for gas projects; Scott Morrison's secret Ministerial portfolios

PETER STEFANOVIC, HOST: Well, let’s go to the Environment and Water Minister Tanya Plibersek now. Tanya, good morning to you. Thanks for your time this morning. Before we get onto environmental matters, I do want to get your thoughts on this union pitch this morning. They want a new deal on wages at next week’s summit. It wants entire industries to negotiate the same pay and conditions. I know that this is not your portfolio, but I just want to get your thoughts anyway. Do you think that sounds fair?

TANYA PLIBERSEK, MINISTER FOR THE ENVIRONMENT AND WATER: Look, I think it’s important at the Jobs Summit to talk about how we see improvements in wages. Australia is coming at the end of years of flatlining wages. In fact, real wages are going backwards because the cost of living is outstripping wages growth. We need to have sensible conversations about how we lift wages. And that includes, of course, improving productivity for businesses. When businesses are making more money, they should be paying their workers better wages.

STEFANOVIC: Business groups have expressed some alarm though suggesting that this is 1970s-style enterprise bargaining, and a one size fits all approach won’t work. Is that a reasonable concern?

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Look, the reason the Treasurer and the Prime Minister are having this Jobs Summit is so they can bring people together. That means unions sitting at the table. It means business sitting at the table. It means having a sensible conversation about how we see improvements in people’s wages and improvements in business profitability.

STEFANOVIC: Are you for or against higher migration?

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Well, I’m for sensible migration. So, at the moment, we have some very obvious short-term pressures with skills shortages. Every business I talk to in my own local electorate here in Sydney says they can’t find people, from dishwashers to IT specialists and everybody in between; so, we do have to see some migration to fill those skills shortages, but we also need to be training more Australians. The problem with the previous Government’s approach is they focused on short-term migration to fill skills gaps and they cut funding to TAFE, and they cut funding to universities. They stopped training Australians for those jobs. We need to balance the two. 

We also want to see when we have migrants to Australia, we’d love them to become permanent residents here and eventually citizens. We want people to put down roots and become part of our local community, not just focus on churning through short-term migration to meet our skills needs.

STEFANOVIC: So, do you expect that there will be an answer on that point at this Jobs Summit? 

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Oh, I think we’ll have a really strong discussion about the sort of sensible levels of migration we need. I think everybody agrees that we’ve got a very pressing short-term skills shortage and that we need to meet that, including through migration, but I think there’s also pretty strong agreement that the previous Government dropped the ball on training Australians for those skills gaps. A lot of these areas of skills shortage were identified on our skills shortages list for years at a time, much longer than it takes to train a plumber or an electrician or a chef. You know, if we know that we’ve got shortages in particular areas, we need to be making it possible for Australians to afford to get the training they need to fill those gaps. 

I mean, another great example is aged care, childcare. We need to be paying people decently. There are people who have left fields like aged care and early childhood education and care because they can’t afford to keep working in those fields. They can’t afford to pay the mortgage on the money they’re getting. We need to address some of those issues as well to make those jobs more attractive for Australians.

STEFANOVIC: Okay. Senex Energy – it wanted a leave pass from environmental laws. That’s that project up near Roma in Queensland. You’ve rejected that though. We do need gas. It can be here within 15 months. Why did you decide to go against that?

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Well, I’m not going to allow this company not to go through the same environmental approvals as every other project has to go through. This is a large-ish project. I think it’s coal seam gas that they’re proposing to develop. It should just go through the same environmental approvals as any other project. And this is a Gina Rinehart company. They’ve asked me for a leave pass, as you say, not to go through environmental approvals. I don’t think that’s fair. I don’t think it’s fair on the environment and I don’t think it’s fair on all the other companies who go through the proper approvals process and do the right thing.

STEFANOVIC: So, they’re welcome to come back again?

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Well, they – yeah. But they absolutely have to show that this project will be safe for the environment in which they’re proposing to extract the gas.

STEFANOVIC: Okay. Public comment is now closed on Clive Palmer’s Central Queensland Coal project. You’ve knocked that before. We discussed this last time. Are you expecting any change there this second time around?

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Look, as I think I might have explained to you last week, what happens is as Minister I say I’m proposing to knock back this proposal and then Clive Palmer and anybody else have 10 days to make any comment on that. At the very last minute, Clive Palmer has given me additional information on how he’s going to manage some of the water issues I’ve identified as a problem. I have to properly consider that information, and I will properly consider that information. But I just remind your viewers, this is a project this is a proposed to be built, open cut coalmine, 9.7 kilometres from the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, very close to seagrass meadows that feed dugongs and turtles and are the breeding grounds for fish. It is a large project in a very sensitive area. I will consider the additional information from Clive Palmer, but that’s the state of play at the moment.

STEFANOVIC: Okay. No worries. And just a final one here, the next inquiry into Scott Morrison’s secret ministries, do you believe that it’s time to move on from that?

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: No, I think this is really critical for our democracy. The Government has now released the advice from the Solicitor General. His legal advice says that the Prime Minister – previous Prime Minister didn’t do anything illegal when he swore himself into almost half a dozen ministries, but he did do something that is not conventional in Australia. So, we have to look at some of the impacts here. What does it mean for the departments that he was administering in secret, the other Ministers who didn’t know that he was shadowing them in their jobs? I think there are still a number of questions to be answered here.

STEFANOVIC: Okay. Tanya Plibersek, appreciate your time. Thanks for joining us. We’ll talk to you again soon.