2CC Breakfast with Mark Parton

Subjects: WikiLeaks, Fair Work Australia ruling.

Transcript, E&OE

8 December 2010

PARTON: There’s been so much said and written in recent days about Julian Assange, the man behind the WikiLeaks website. And I guess the thing you’ve got to also understand here is that this arrest of Julian Assange overnight is, in theory, nothing to do with WikiLeaks. You know, it’s hard not to separate the two. I’ve actually tried to, wherever I can. I’ve tried to avoid discussion on a lot of the stuff that’s appeared in the WikiLeaks leaks because I just don’t think it should be out there in the public domain. Dr Craig Emerson’s the Minister for Trade and, of course, among the big leaks at the moment, the one that the newspapers and news websites are focussing on, are these suggestions from American diplomatic personnel that Kevin, our Kevin, was a bit of a control freak. And they’re talking about all these Foreign Affairs blunders that he made. Dr Craig Emerson is the Minister for Trade. He joins us right now. It’s very hard for us to talk today and not talk about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, Craig.

EMERSON: It’s certainly making a lot of news, Parto. But I’m as constrained as any other Minister in talking about the content of these sorts of communications. I agree with you that this sort of information that’s been put in the public domain about sensitive sites around Australia is grossly irresponsible and it does affect our national security.

PARTON: Does it make you angry?

EMERSON: Well, it does in this sense – I guess Mr Assange is coming across as some sort of crusader for, you know, truth and goodness. But I don’t think there’s much good done by getting this information in the public arena about sensitive locations into which we’d be very concerned about that sort of information being conveyed to people who don’t have a good attitude towards our country. So that’s the area that I’m most concerned about.

PARTON: Has it created tension amongst the ranks of, I don’t know, well, even in your department and certainly for people like Kevin Rudd.

EMERSON: No, my...

PARTON: But don’t you fear what may come next?

EMERSON: There is apparently a pipeline of information yet to come out, and I’m now going from media reports where Mr Assange seems to have come to arrangements with some media outlets. So all I’m saying is we haven’t seen the last of it. In relation to, you know, who said what to whom and about whom, I don’t think that has caused any particular anxiety or concern because the rhetorical response is ‘well you ought to hear what we say about you’. Someone said that about Australia recently. I mean, I think people just have a bit of a yak about these things. I’m not confirming or denying the content of particular cables, but I really genuinely don’t believe that affects relations between countries.

PARTON: See, I think it will. And I think what we’ve got going on here is – it’s like if every kid in every school had to get up in front of the class and basically tell everyone what their parents said about teacher ‘A’, teacher ‘B’, and student ‘A’ and student ‘B’. Can you imagine the fallout from that?

EMERSON: Well I think that’s right but this diplomacy is pretty robust sort of stuff and so I don’t think that there’d be huge surprises about free character references being given and so on. I’m probably more concerned about, definitely more concerned about, highly sensitive information being ventilated publicly. You know we’ve always got to look at Australia’s security, Australia’s national interest, and I just don’t think it’s the right thing to do. So you know anyway that’s the world in which we live, so we just have to deal with these stories, or so-called leaks, as they arise.

PARTON: Craig Emerson’s with me, the Minister for Trade. One of the stories that The Australian newspaper, which I know is one of your favourite publications, is leading with this morning is that employers apparently fear Labor’s Fair Work laws. That they’ve given unions a short cut to strike action after a ruling that opens the door to workers taking industrial action before workplace bargaining has started. That, you know, step ‘A’ can just be ‘let’s go out on strike’. And business groups yesterday moved to overturn the Fair Work Australia ruling that also gave the go ahead for strike ballots without a claim being lodged. Is this a worry?

EMERSON: I don’t think so, personally. Every few months there are, you know, grave fears by employers about Australia’s, the Government’s Fair Work Act. There were certainly grounds for grave fears by working Australians on Work Choices. But the Fair Work Act has worked really well. I mean, during that period of the Global Financial Crisis that became a recession, there was so much flexibility in Labor’s Fair Work Act that people were able to negotiate reduced hours without losing their jobs. But every three months or so there’s some Armageddon story about how it’s the end of the world as we know it. Just so that your listeners are aware of how this works – protected industrial action means that you can take it in the context of a new bargaining round for an agreement that would run for several years. You can’t just go out and say ‘oh I feel like going out on the grass and having a strike’. And this is about whether the necessary conditions for that action, which would occur only once in the life of creating an agreement, and therefore not after it, have been met. Now the union says that it was trying to bargain genuinely. Employers saying well it wasn’t trying to bargain genuinely. And in this case Fair Work Australia has made a decision, apparently, that the union was fair dinkum in trying to bargain.

PARTON: And of course, as is often the case when these two groups go at each other, never the twain shall meet.

EMERSON: Well you get a lot of, I guess sort of overstatement of facts...

PARTON: From both sides.

EMERSON: Yeah, well I’m not, in this case I’m not commenting on whether the TWU overstated or the Australian ACCI overstated. I’m just saying that when you get into these situations of conflicts, there can be a bit of exaggeration. But something like 6,500 agreements were settled very peacefully in the last 12 months. So, obviously I don’t expect those to be in the news, but again your listeners probably would understand that this is very, very isolated, where there’s a dispute over whether the parties were actually, you know, fair dinkum engaged in bargaining at the time. There is no right, like there used to be Parto, you might remember all the threats of beer strikes at Christmas and milk strikes at Easter. You can’t do that any more. You can’t do that. You couldn’t do it under Coalition legislation. You couldn’t do it under Paul Keating’s legislation. You can’t do it under the Fair Work Act of the Gillard Labor Government.

PARTON: Good to see you out there looking after big business, Craig. Look, thanks for your time this morning, we’re going to keep moving.

EMERSON: All right mate, thanks for having us on.

PARTON: Dr Craig Emerson, the Minister for Trade.

END

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