A BETTER NORMAL AFTER COVID-19

The Hon Tanya Plibersek is Shadow Minister for Education and Training and, until May 2019, was Deputy Leader of the Opposition. In the midst of the 2020 pandemic, Tanya Plibersek also put her mind to the sort of society Australia needed to develop after the experiences of 2020. Editing a collection of essays from a host of well-known Australian commentators, Plibersek has produced Upturn – A Better Normal After COVID-19. To discuss some of the ideas in her book, Tanya Plibersek addressed Sydney Institute audiences – via Youtube – on Monday 16 November 2020. Her address was followed by a discussion wit Sydney Institute Executive Director Gerard Henderson.

A BETTER NORMAL AFTER COVID-19

 TANYA PLIBERSEK

I want to start by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we meet today, the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, and pay my respects to their elders past and present. I also want to thank the Sydney Institute for giving me the chance to speak here once again. Thank you Gerard and Anne – for all you’ve done to encourage discussion and debate over the years. We need more of it.

A year ago, people would have told you it was impossible for school children to shift overnight to online learning. Impossible for banks to offer mortgage holidays. Impossible to house rough sleepers or put a hold on evictions. Impossible to provide wage subsidies or double the unemployment benefit. And, absolutely impossible to get Australians to stay home from the pub or the beach.

Many things we assumed about ourselves, many things we assumed about the world, have been proven wrong.

The coronavirus has tested us as Australians – and for the most part, we have risen to the challenge. Overwhelmingly, Australians have shown themselves to be disciplined and kind.

We listened to experts. We followed advice. We put our lives on hold for the health of others. For every act of selfishness, there were ten acts of love and community spirit – of patriotism and solidarity at their practical best.

Sometimes we can fixate on our problems as a country. On the things we do wrong.

But we shouldn’t be embarrassed to celebrate our successes – to acknowledge the things we’ve done well as a people.

Of course, Australia isn’t out of danger yet – as today’s figures in South Australia remind us. We can’t afford to become slack or complacent – as the scenes in Europe and America make very clear. But we do have a responsibility to start thinking about the kind of society and the kind of economy we want to rebuild after this virus.

Wars, recessions, depressions, pandemics – all are devastating. All change society fundamentally. This country will face massive questions in coming years – as big as we faced coming out of World War II. Because Australians have sacrificed a lot this year.

Some have lost family members. Too many couldn’t be with them in their final days – or even attend their funeral. Hundreds of thousands lost their job or their business. Millions more experienced periods of loneliness and isolation.

These sacrifices were necessary – but they were painful. They should mean something. They should produce something lasting and good.

Australians have earned a better deal; not a return insecurity and growing inequality. We know what the conservative plan for recovery will look like over the next few years: wage cuts for Australian workers.

We know this because the plan hasn’t changed since Tony Abbott’s budget in 2014; or since the Liberals cut penalty rates in 2017. Falling wages are a recipe for a slower, more painful recovery, and a much less equal country on the other side.

We’re already seeing this in our economy. As the Treasurer admitted last week in Parliament, the unemployment rate has again “ticked up”, immediately following cuts to JobKeeper, JobSeeker and other financial supports.

We must not accept years of lingering unemployment and underemployment and underemployment. We need to be more ambitious than that. And that ambition needs to start at the top.

The federal government should set an official target of full employment – and it should use every tool at its disposal to achieve that goal.

First things first, the government needs to change its attitude to wages. If low wages continue to be a “deliberate design feature of our economic architecture”, to quote Mathias Cormann, this recession will drag on.

Economic recovery requires a thriving private sector – which requires a customer base that can afford its products. Low wages mean less aggregate demand in the economy; which means less buying and selling, which means less recruiting and hiring. It means people don’t have an extra five bucks in their pocket to buy a coffee on the way to work. It means that people don’t feel confident enough to take their kids out for pizza on a Friday night.

Even the Reserve Bank is now acknowledging that stagnant wages are holding our economy back – and stopping us from reaching the Reserve Bank’s two to three per cent inflation target. The federal government also needs to think about how it can directly support employment around the country.

Wherever you look, wherever you live, there’s infrastructure that needs to be built or repaired. There are projects that would make our cities and towns more efficient and liveable. They don’t have to be enormous in scale.

In every community across Australia, there is a school, a TAFE, a hospital that needs upgrading. There are footpaths that need fixing; community halls that need work; public toilets that need a lot of work. It’s not glamorous – but it can create jobs anywhere and everywhere.

We also shouldn’t be afraid of stronger employment in the public sector. One obvious example is aged care.

We need thousands more people to look after the more than 100,000 people we have on the waiting list for homecare. This is true across the caring professions – where work clearly needs to be done, and where we have unemployed and underemployed people available to do it.

The only thing missing is a government commitment to training the workforce and funding aged care, early childhood education, disability services, and other caring professions.

People working in these jobs should be well trained, with permanent work that’s properly paid. They are honourable professions; we should start treating them that way.

As we’ve tragically learned this year, an insecure workforce only leads to poorer services. It’s bad for us all.

There’s a lesson there for the recovery. It’s up to government to make sure people have the job security they need to thrive.

Good pay, good conditions, a reliable safety net. These aren’t the end result of growth and prosperity – they’re a precondition for it.

I’m thinking of my own childhood here. My Dad was a plumber and gas fitter at QANTAS – at the jet base in Sydney. Every week, he would come home on Friday with his pay packet. Back then, it would actually come in a packet – cash counted out into one of those white envelopes.

I never felt nervous that it wasn’t the biggest or the fattest pay packet. I felt safe and confident – because I knew he would bring it home again next Friday, and the Friday after that. That the money would be there to look after our family.

Australians deserve that confidence. Their kids deserve that confidence.

Insecurity at work is a choice this government has made – and we can choose to fight against it. There’s no reason why miners working for profitable global companies should be forced onto labour hire contracts on lower wages.

There’s no reason why aged care workers can’t be on full time contracts – instead of working two or three part time jobs. There’s no reason why the gig economy’s growth should mean job insecurity and low wages.

John Howard used to talk about wanting Australia to be “relaxed and comfortable”.

There’s something in that.

Most of us yearn for a time when we weren’t looking suspiciously at doorhandles; or wondering about how we’ll pay the rent or the mortgage next month. We all deserve a bit of relaxation after this year. But we should aim a bit higher than relaxed and comfortable.

It’s too complacent for a country that’s led the world in so many ways. We should instead aim for relaxed and confident. We want people to be confident enough to spend and invest, knowing they’ll have a job next week and next year.

Australians should be confident that, if they work hard, their job is safe and secure.

They should be confident that their kids will have a better life than they did – and that their dreams and education won’t be weighed down by a lifetime of debt.

We should all be confident that our beautiful bush and reef will still be there for future generations. We should be confident that we can withstand the next shock and, if we fall on hard times, be helped back on our feet.

This year has taught us so much about ourselves. Above all, it’s reminded us that we can achieve truly remarkable things; things we once considered impossible. It is within our power to build the country we all want to live in, and leave to our kids.

An Australia that builds things.

An Australia that makes things.

An Australia that cares for its people.

An Australia with secure jobs and good wages.

It’s within our reach – we just need to grab it.

FOLLOWING TANYA PLIBERSEK’S ADDRESS TO THE SYDNEY INSTITUTE ON MONDAY 16 NOVEMBER 2020, GERARD HENDERSON DISCUSSED WITH HER VARIOUS ASPECTS OF HER TALK    

Gerard Henderson: Well Tanya Plibersek, thanks for your speech and congratulations on the book. So, tell me, when did you decide to do it and why did you decide to do it?

Tanya Plibersek: I decided to do the book around April Gerard, for two reasons, really. I had started to turn my mind to how deep a recession was likely to be if the health effects were as catastrophic as we’d seen in other parts of the world. For myself, I wanted to think about how we could rebuild the economy after the health crisis had been managed. So I started ringing some of the contributors and asking, “What do you think? How are things looking?” Some of them are health experts, economists, scientists and others – just to say, how are we managing now? How do we rebuild afterwards? I thought it was one of the greatest privileges of my job that I could ring someone like Ross Garnaut and say, “Ross, can you talk to me about the economy?” Or Stephen Koukoulas. It seems selfish just to do that for one person. So, I thought, why not take what they were saying about their predictions and share that with others It seemed a good project for a lockdown. Also, I was bored on Saturday nights because I wasn’t allowed out, so I thought, why not write a book?

Gerard Henderson: So if there’s another pandemic, there’ll be another book?

Tanya Plibersek: I’m hoping there will not be another pandemic in my lifetime, although the scientific predictions are that there may well be, and we may be getting them more often.

Gerard Henderson: As you know, we’re heading towards the end of the year. So I’ve got to ask the question – is this is the sign of a leadership challenge?

Tanya Plibersek: No, no, no. It’s the sign of someone who likes talking to people and thinking about how we can do better.

Gerard Henderson: What does your leader Anthony Albanese say about it?

Tanya Plibersek: I don’t think he’s read it yet. He’s just launched Andrew Leigh’s book, so it’s going to have to go on his reading list over Christmas.

Gerard Henderson: So there’s a rival book?

Tanya Plibersek: Well, Andrew Leigh’s book is very good. It’s called Reconnected and it’s about how community building organisations can work better to strengthen society. It’s an excellent book.

Gerard Henderson: So, the second question is, if this book was being reviewed by Joel Fitzgibbon in the Newcastle Herald, what do you think he’d say about it?

Tanya Plibersek: It’s too long.

Gerard Henderson: It doesn’t say much about coal workers.

Tanya Plibersek: Well, I think it does, not coal workers in particular. But there’s two things that are happening in the economy that we can’t ignore. The first is this nonsense that you can either address climate change, or be worried about working class blue collar jobs; that you can’t do both. That’s just rubbish. Globally, we are experiencing an economic transformation driven by cheaper, cleaner energy. We now know that solar and wind power are cheaper than coal fired electricity. That is just a fact. And we need to take the benefit of that and use it to create jobs.

Australia has enormous manufacturing capacity. One of the things that most puts at risk jobs in blue collar sectors is the high cost of electricity in Australia. Ross Garnaut has an excellent chapter that talks about the kind of industries that we could have a natural advantage in, in Australia, if we made the most of our opportunities for cheaper, cleaner energy. The big job killer in blue collar industries is the uncertainty that this government has introduced into energy policy. They’ve had 22 different energy policies. We’ve got high gas prices, we’ve got high electricity prices, and they’ve been in government for seven years. They’ve had the opportunity to do something and their insecurity, the lack of predictability in energy policy, has meant that things have got worse, not better. We’ve now got more pollution and higher prices.

Gerard Henderson: You’ve got a couple of journalists in this book – Annabel Crabb and Lenore Taylor. As I recall, Annabel Crabb got the presidential election right. But she got the last federal election wrong. If you look at the last federal election, as you well know, Labor was favored to win by many journalists, not all but many. And you didn’t win, primarily because you didn’t do well in northern Tasmania, you lost a seat in western Sydney, you didn’t do well as well as you expected in central and northern Queensland, and Joel Fitzgibbon narrowly hung on to his seat in New South Wales around the Hunter region, but only narrowly. So, what’s in this book that will encourage people who didn’t vote for you in northern Tasmania, western Sydney, around the Hunter region or in central and northern Queensland that would encourage them to vote for Labor next time?

Tanya Plibersek: There’s a very strong focus in the book on jobs. It’s always the most important thing that we need to think through and work through if we are seeking to form government. Where are the jobs coming from? What kind of work are people going to be doing? What are the pay and conditions attached to those jobs? In the book we’ve got Sally McManus talking about job security and wages, we’ve got Ross Garnaut and others like Stephen Koukoulas talking about the kind of economy we want to see. Jenny Macklin writes about full employment. Wayne Swan writes about strong jobs growth and how it relates to the macro economy. It’s a cliche, Gerard, but it’s jobs, jobs, jobs. And a big part of the book is focused on that.

Gerard Henderson: In your speech today, and in the introduction, the emphasis seems to be on what governments can do to create jobs, that governments should be doing this and governments should be doing that. But we don’t exactly know where the current pandemic crisis is going to end up, and we’re probably one and a half years away from an election. There wasn’t much focus in the book on small business which, as we know, is probably suffering most from the pandemic. Especially if you look around places like Sydney, more so in Melbourne, where so many small businesses, particularly in the tertiary industries, in entertainment and catering, are closing, probably never to reopen. What’s in this book for people who are running a medium to small business?

Tanya Plibersek: Heather Ridout’s chapter and Annie O’Rourke’s chapter would be of greatest interest to people who are running a small business or interested in small business. Heather Ridout looks at the sort of tax and other policy settings that you need to have in an effectively operating private sector. Fiona Simpson from the National Farmers Federation writes about some of the most important small businesses, sometimes medium businesses in our country – family farms. Gabby Chan also writes about the family farm. And there’s a really good chapter by Annie O’Rourke, who’s talking about the huge change that’s happened in recent years with predominantly women running their own small businesses from regional communities. Annie’s gone from a very successful political career in Canberra, as a staffer, to running a media and communications consultancy from Byron Bay. She’s made the dream lifestyle change that so many people talk about and never do. She writes very convincingly about what businesses like hers need to thrive in today’s economy.

It’s good to have these different economic perspectives. Cameron Klein writes about banking, Greg Combet about superannuation. They tackle the sort of economic settings that we need for those businesses to be successful, but also what large businesses need to do to support success in the rest of the economy. On the other hand, we’ve got some of these very small, even micro business owners talking about what they need for their businesses to continue to thrive.

Gerard Henderson: So, from government, what would you be doing for them?

Tanya Plibersek: One of the most important things we can do is invest in having an educated and skilled workforce. We know that investment from early childhood through schools, TAFE, and university are critical to our success as a nation. Ian Chubb writes about science, and research and development more generally, and the critical role for government in supporting really good research and development and commercialisation.

It is also about – the big thing government can do is to underpin confidence in our economy. We’re not going to have people confident to spend, businesses confident to invest, unless we’ve got strong aggregate demand in our economy. It’s arguable that the supports that the government introduced, like job keeper and the wages subsidy, have been critical to minimising the economic impact of the COVID-19 recession. But the premature withdrawal, or reduction of some of those supports, can mean that our economy will be in recession for longer, and the recession will be deeper than it needs to be

Gerard Henderson: Going back to the Joel Fitzgibbon point, if you’re a coal miner living in Singleton and your friend runs a small shop selling clothing, and another friend is in restaurants, small restaurants, what do they get out of this? It didn’t work in the last election for Labor. So why would it be better in, let’s say May 2022?

Tanya Plibersek: You keep reminding me of the wounds that I’m just healing from Gerard with the last election.

Gerard Henderson: Oh it’s 18 months ago.

Tanya Plibersek: Let’s talk about the coal miner in Singleton. What does the coal miner in Singleton need? Coal and gas are going to be part of our energy mix for many years to come, there’s no question about that. But as new energy enters into our national energy market, it’s going to be cheaper if it’s solar or wind powered, that is just an economic fact. We need to work out how to get the best use from renewable energy to support jobs in other industries. As for the coal miner, who will have a job for many years to come, because coal and gas are part of our energy mix for the foreseeable future, what about the pay and conditions of that person?

We’ve got a government that pretends to be on the side of coal miners, when they’ve done everything they can to make it easier to replace that coal miner with someone from a labor hire company, doing the same job for less pay. We’ve got a government that’s done everything it can in other industries to reduce penalty rates, to reduce job security. That’s not a recipe for that coal miner to have the confidence to go and spend some of his or her pay packet in the neighbour’s shops, or in the pizza place on a Friday night, or in the supermarket on the way home from work.

Confidence is about saying, yes, the mining sector in Australia is important. And not just coal mining, I would say. Don’t forget, we’ve got some of the best deposits of rare earth minerals, the things that we need to produce solar batteries, and, you know, complex inputs into some of the technologies that we’re making use of every day in modern life. So mining is a big part of our economic future, for years to come. But let’s not pretend this is a fight between the Liberals and the National Party who want to defend these jobs, and also are prepared to give them up. That’s not the case at all. You’ve got a Liberal and National Party who want people working in the mining industry on lower wages, worse conditions. And just incidentally, if those big global mining companies could automate every job, you wouldn’t have the LNP saying, “No, sorry, we’re not going to automate those jobs.” They’d say “No, bring it on. Bring it on.”

So I just get very irritated by this false dichotomy that somehow you’re either for or against mining jobs and you can be in favour of renewable energy, but that means that you are going to turn your back on people in regional communities who rely on mining for their livelihoods. That’s not the case. It doesn’t have to be the case in this country. You think about areas like the Hunter and the fantastic work that Newcastle University is doing on saying we’ve got everything we need in this community to be a manufacturing superpower. We’ve got fantastic potential for renewable energy, maybe hydrogen, they’ve got transmission lines, they’ve got the land, they’ve got the know-how from Newcastle University. The Hunter can be and should be an economic powerhouse. This one-dimensional debate that we’ve entered into is way too simplistic.

Gerard Henderson: Speaking to trade union leaders in the minerals industry, you make a point there about someone employed by a company and someone employed indirectly by a company through a labor hire company, and the latter getting less than the former. But as you know, wages in the mining industry are substantially higher than they are in the renewables industry. They are substantially higher, probably double, possibly more than double. So, one of the resentments there is that miners, whether they’d prefer to be working for a company rather than a labor hire company, their wages are very high. These are some of the highest paid workers in the country. And they feel their jobs are threatened by people with the kind of message Mark Butler gives.

Tanya Plibersek: I don’t think that’s fair. There is literally no one in the Labor Party who doesn’t want to see continued good employment and conditions for people in the mining sector. Nobody thinks coal is finishing tomorrow, or gas is finishing tomorrow. But we know long term, that when you’ve got a cheaper source of energy, our economy will increasingly rely on that. The fact that people in renewable sectors are paid less, again, is a choice that we are making as an economy. We’ve got a government that is doing its very best to drive down wages across the board. We had Matthias Corman say that low wages are a deliberate part of their economic strategy not that long ago. Until we have strong industrial relations mechanisms that make sure that people are paid decently and their work is secure, there will be a rush to the bottom, particularly in an environment with high unemployment and underemployment. That’s bad for all of us.

Gerard Henderson: But as you know, Australian wages are probably the highest in the Western world. They could be higher if there was productivity, but they’re not low. The minimum hourly rate in Australia would be about twice what it is in the United States, and higher than in much of Europe.

Tanya Plibersek: And who wants to live like that? In the United States, for working people, if there is a legislated minimum in their state, which of course, in many states there isn’t, you have people who are working full time and still relying on food stamps. That’s not good for that individual. But it’s also not good for aggregate demand or confidence in the economy.

Gerard Henderson: I agree with that. But Australian wages are among the highest in the world. I’m not saying we should have lower wages. I’m just saying that our wages are very high compared, and we’re trading on world markets.

Tanya Plibersek: We’ve seen Australian wages flatlining for years.

 Gerard Henderson: Well that’s true around the rest of the world – Europe, North America.

Tanya Plibersek: We’ve seen wages flatlining while company profits have held up pretty well. You mentioned the link with productivity. Most people are up for that conversation about linking productivity with wage growth, because we’ve seen the decoupling of productivity growth and wage growth in recent years. That’s a serious problem. One of the reasons is that enterprise bargaining has gone into a period where it’s easier for some employers to allow drift not to work with their workforce to see productivity improvements that would go hand in hand with wages increases.

Gerard Henderson: But if you’re talking about wage increases, obviously, there’s some companies who can pay more, while there are a lot of medium to small businesses struggling to pay what they pay now. So, any across the board increase in wages, irrespective of whether a company is doing well or a small company is doing badly, is going to have impacts on both. But the most deleterious impact will be on the small company.

Tanya Plibersek: Well, wage increases are generally not across the board.

Gerard Henderson: Well they are actually. The minimum wage is across the board wage.

Tanya Plibersek: Okay. But most industries don’t pay minimum wage.

Gerard Henderson: But a lot of people in small business do. Anyone on casual rates …

Tanya Plibersek: You have to be sensitive to that. But if you take some industries, like early childhood education and care, like aged care, like disability services, you see some of the worst paid workers in our community, in some of the most insecure work, increasingly casualised. You cannot tell me that it’s not related to the fact that these are largely feminised workforces. You’ve got people working in aged care for just over $21 an hour doing really serious, responsible, important, difficult work. How is it proper that you can earn more stacking shelves at a supermarket on the weekend than looking after older Australians? When you take industries like aged care, disability, early childhood education and care, there are very substantial taxpayer subsidies in all of those areas. It’s unfair to the workforce and dangerous for the rest of us if we continue to let wages in these industries flatline in way they have in recent years.

Gerard Henderson: Within those industries, many of them are government run. So why aren’t governments paying more, whether it be the current Coalition government, previous Labor governments, or the various state governments. If more should be paid then more can be paid, can’t it?

Tanya Plibersek: I think that’s a very good question.

Gerard Henderson: So who’s stopping it? Is it just the market operators?

Tanya Plibersek: No. I don’t think it’s as simple as that.

Gerard Henderson: State governments can always increase payments for people who work in government hospitals, can’t they?

Tanya Plibersek: I can give you an example where we did that, with the social and community sector award, where we had people working in homelessness services, domestic violence, drug and alcohol. The workers in that industry took a case to the industrial relations courts, and it was determined that their industry was largely underpaid because it was largely feminised work, and they had increases – in some cases, very substantial increases – of, at the highest end, over 40 per cent. It was brought in over a number of years in acknowledgement that it’s very hard for governments to fund such large increases overnight.

That has made an important difference to the day to day budgets of the people who work in that industry, but it also makes a difference to being able to attract and retain a workforce. If you look at somewhere like aged care, at early childhood education and care – another good example – we’ve been relying a lot in recent years on temporary skilled migrants to fill those jobs. Because they’re so badly paid, it was hard to find Australians to do the work. And because we have dropped the ball on training in areas like disability services, aged care, community services, early childhood education and care, we’re not going to have any large movement of people on temporary skilled visas anytime soon. Perhaps you’re right, perhaps it will just be a market and the shortages will cause wages to go up. But it’s pretty alarming that we need to have shortages in areas like aged care during a pandemic for that to be the response.

Gerard Henderson: Well, as you know, there’s also the discussion in the United States where some argue that because of illegal immigration across its southern borders, this suppresses wages of working class people in the southern states and elsewhere. There’s a chapter on multiculturalism in your book, but there’s not a lot on immigration. I know it’s very hard to estimate, but the way it’s going, you would expect, according to your analysis, and I agree with it, that a shortage of workers in aged care should lead to an increase in wages in aged care, which would be a good outcome.

Tanya Plibersek: Well it would be a good outcome. But we do need to have the trained workforce ready to do it as well. Another critical area where we’ve seen very substantial cuts is in apprentices and trainees in recent years. There are about 140,000 fewer apprentices and trainees today than when the Liberals came to office seven years ago. We do need to make sure that we are training people in those traditional trades where we’ve got shortages – electricians, plumbers, carpenters, hairdressers, pastry chefs, tree loppers; there’s a bunch of jobs where we’ve had shortages for some time. There are also areas where we have simply been going overseas whenever there’s a shortage. Nursing is one example, also early childhood, aged care. We’ve been filling those vacancies with temporary skilled migrants. Without an immigrant flow, we can’t just snatch people off the streets and have them working in a nursing home tomorrow; we need to have training attached.

Gerard Henderson: So, as we are probably in the midst of a downturn in immigration, and don’t know when we come out of the pandemic, what’s Labor’s position on immigration? Do you propose to go back to the high levels, which was a bipartisan policy essentially because the Coalition’s high levels of immigration in recent times.

Tanya Plibersek: I think that’s a very difficult question to answer for some time to come, Gerard. It will depend on our economy, on when we get a vaccine, how successful the vaccine is, and how the pandemic is spreading or contained in other countries. It will depend on a lot of things. Obviously, the immediate priority has to be getting Australians back from overseas. As of last week, we still had about 25,000 Australians stuck overseas. That’s a phenomenal failure from the federal government. Australians stuck overseas. I would like to see a return to people who bring substantial economic benefit to Australia, like overseas students, skilled migrants, who would be contributing to the economy. But I don’t know when that will be able to happen.

Gerard Henderson: In terms of your political career, a very successful one, I probably think more about you as speaking about education than other matters. And I notice in your stunning performances on Alan Jones’s show on Sky News – where you do the remarkable thing of holding your own with Mr. Jones, which isn’t all that easy – there you talk a bit about education as well. Before we talk about your own chapter, tell us a bit about yourself. You arrived out here with your parents, from Slovenia, what then would it be called Yugoslavia?

Tanya Plibersek: That’s right?

Gerard Henderson: A small country, a small part of Yugoslavia. Now it’s a small nation of its own. Tell us a bit about your background, and how that led to this interest in education, which you’ve always exhibited.

Tanya Plibersek: My parents came to Australia in the early 1950s. They met in Australia, both from Slovenia, at a dance at the Paddington Town Hall, just up the road here. They weren’t pushy parents, but if I said anything was for school or for my education, that was it. They didn’t have a lot of money, but if I said, we’ve got an excursion, or I need some new pencils, or I’d like to buy that book, that was it, they would find the money for it. They were like a lot of postwar migrants that had their own education interrupted by the war.

They were kids in primary school. They went to school one day and the familiar teachers were gone and the new teachers were speaking German. It was a pretty disrupted childhood. They saw education as a ticket to freedom and choice in life. So they supported my brothers and me. They said, while we were at school or at uni, they would support us financially. They didn’t have much formal education themselves, but they really valued it. That attitude has given my brothers and me a lot of freedom to pursue what we were interested in. I’m very grateful for that. My brothers and I would never have been able to afford to go to university but for the Whitlam higher education reforms.

Gerard Henderson: Well I’m not sure that’s right. Because your brother Ray, whom I know, and you are bright. You both would have won a Commonwealth scholarship under the old system.

Tanya Plibersek: And, most likely, under the old system, I would have had a choice between nursing and teaching. And that’s fine. They’re both wonderful professions.

Gerard Henderson: Hang on. You could have gone to university. People won Commonwealth scholarships and they not only got free education and they also got a tax-free allowance. It was probably more generous than just the free education. You would have probably topped your class, didn’t you?

 Tanya Plibersek: Well, I was dux of my class.

Gerard Henderson: Well there you go.

Tanya Plibersek: That’s a long time ago.

 Gerard Henderson: It’s not that long ago.

 Tanya Plibersek: It’s not just about the small number of people who get the opportunity. Our mission is to democratise the access to university as well. In a complex economy, where 9 out of 10 jobs being created need a post-secondary qualification, whether university or TAFE, having a highly rationed entry into your university is counterproductive for the whole economy. Life’s more complex, jobs are more complex, work is more complex, today than it was decades ago. And our education system should reflect that.

Gerard Henderson: I’ve got an interest in history. Did your parents flee Yugoslavia? Were they allowed out? It wasn’t as repressive as most of the regimes in Eastern Europe.

Tanya Plibersek: They fled at night. My father left and crossed the border to Austria. He was shot at as he was crossing the border. I think he had to swim across a river. He luckily had an aunt living in Austria where he was able to stay with for a while and finish his apprenticeship. My mother escaped across the border to Italy. She was first in a refugee camp in Italy and lived with a family there for a time as a domestic help. And both of them were offered passage to Australia by the International Organisation for Migration. It could have been Australia, it could have been anywhere. They were just happy to have somewhere safe

Gerard Henderson: They were pretty resourceful people but it’s good to know they were welcomed by Sir Robert Menzies’ Liberal government here.

Tanya Plibersek: They felt grateful. My mother’s still alive. They felt grateful every day of their lives for that. And that sense of gratitude and having to repay the great gift of Australian citizenship has really informed the way they raised my brothers and me.

Gerard Henderson: You quote here in your chapter, the declaration that people sign up to …

Tanya Plibersek: The Australian citizenship pledge.

Gerard Henderson: Which I think came in under the Labor government?

Tanya Plibersek: Yes, and I’ve said this a few times – it would be good if more people knew it and said it, particularly on Australia Day. I have had a massive pile on of left-wingers saying it was terrible and how right wing it was for me to say that people should know our pledge. But this is the pledge we make to one another, that we share democratic values, our rights and liberties are respected, our laws I will uphold and obey. This is the simplest, most elegant way of saying what is required from us as citizens. You don’t have to be white, you don’t have to pledge your loyalty to the Queen, you don’t have to pledge your loyalty to a political party or a particular government. We pledge our loyalty as Australian citizens to one another. And if there’s anything that COVID has taught us, it’s that sense of responsibility to one another which enlivens us as a society and holds us together, even holds us together economically. It’s a very neat way of expressing what is required of us as citizens and it’s no burden for the privileges that it brings.

Gerard Henderson: It works out well in your chapter and it’s good to know the left oppose it. I’m not sure if it was the Hawke or the Keating government who was responsible for it. I know the poet Les Murray, who died recently, had something to do with it.

I want to move back a bit to the post COVID thing in a minute but tell me if you were Education minister, what would your priorities be?

Tanya Plibersek: First of all, I’m not keen to change portfolios. I chose the education portfolio as the deputy leader because it’s one of the greatest opportunities we have to make a difference to the lives of individuals and to the economic success of our nation. If I could change tomorrow, I wouldn’t. I did the foreign affairs portfolio in my first term as deputy leader, and education in the second term. I had my choice of portfolios.

What would I change? What would I do? One of the most undervalued areas of investment and reform is early childhood education because the return is so great. If kids start school educationally disadvantaged, if they haven’t caught up by age 8, then you will see that disadvantage live with them for the rest of their lives. Those early years are when we can make the biggest difference. Early childhood education and up to about year three in primary school, needs a much sharper focus.

And then there is schooling. I support greater funding in our schools. But it’s what we do with the dollars that matters. Having the best and brightest attracted to teaching as a career is critical. It is heartbreaking for me that we continue to see marks to get into teaching degrees slide, because not only does it potentially attract people who are not suitable to become teachers into the profession, but it sends such a bad signal of the value that we place as a society on education.

I want kids who are the top in their school, to be competing to get into teaching degrees. I want to make sure that we take those super smart teachers and keep them in the classroom. When you first come out of university, it’s pretty good pay when you start teaching. By the time you’re a highly experienced teacher, who’s done 8 or 10 years in the classroom, to see an increase much beyond that you need to become a principal, or go into school administration, you need to come into the Department of Education head office, you need to go off and do a completely different career. What a waste of talent that is.

If we could continue to see those highly skilled teachers, not just teaching in the classroom, but teaching other teachers to become highly successful as well, that would be a really important reform. The Commonwealth can set standards around that. We can set standards and support the use of research in our classrooms, actually being scientific about what helps kids learn most effectively. Here in New South Wales, we did a program called Reading Recovery for years before we worked out we were wasting our money. The kids who did the program actually didn’t gain much better results after two years than the kids who’d never done the program. How tragic is that, that we would spend tens of millions of dollars on something that was letting kids down? We should be as scientific in our approach to education as we are in our approach to a new medicine or a new medical procedure, and we’re not.

Gerard Henderson: We’re getting towards the end now. The book is very nicely produced by NewSouth. But I’ve come across I think an error in the introduction that you wrote, and I think it’s a technical error.

Tanya Plibersek: Is that because I haven’t dedicated it to you, Gerard?

Gerard Henderson: Well, partly that. The quote from the author Arundhati Roy you must have picked up from the Green Left Weekly handed out in your electorate. It is  terribly alienated. She claims that what we are doing at the moment is “walking through dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks, our dead ideas, our dead rivers, and the smoking sky behind us”. That sounds like an alienated rant from a 1960s lefty, doesn’t it?

Tanya Plibersek: I love that quote.

Gerard Henderson: Do you?

Tanya Plibersek: Because she’s saying we can choose. We can choose to hang on to the things that weren’t working.

Gerard Henderson: But is that it now? In the electorate of Sydney? It’s not as grim as that where I come from.

Tanya Plibersek: It’s actually an excellent piece. I commend to you the rest of the piece. The point that Arundhati Roy is making here is so important. We can choose to hang on to the things that weren’t working, or we can let go of the things that weren’t working and grab onto the things that will give us a stronger economy and a fairer society after COVID-19.

Gerard Henderson: You’re not going to be the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez woman in the next government are you?

Tanya Plibersek: I do not have the social media skills that she does. I cannot fix an IKEA bookshelf or put on my makeup while talking politics on the social media.

Gerard Henderson: So she might be in the next edition if there is one? But Arundhati Roy will stay in with the dead rivers?

Tanya Plibersek: I’m not ruling it out.

Gerard Henderson: We’re pretty close to the end. Tell me what Cate Blanchett and Kim Williams are on about because Cate’s got a huge following here. I spoke to her on the phone once.

Tanya Plibersek: Cate Blanchett and Kim Williams have written together about arts policy in Australia. Cate offers a beautiful part in her chapter where she talks about how the need to communicate, for artists and for the broader community, has been shown to be a need, not just a want during COVID-19. That people profoundly felt the lack of being able to go out and socialise and enjoy a concert or music or go to the pub and hear a band. And the artists themselves have found ways to break through and communicate. Her piece is very good.

Kim brings his razor-sharp intellect to that proposition and says we need a better arts policy in Australia. And we really do. This is one of the areas where the government has said they’ll spend $250 million. At last count they’d spent none of that money supporting an industry with tens of thousands of people who’ve seen their income very significantly impacted by COVID-19. So, you’ve both got a very artistic and a very intellectual lens on this very important subject.

Gerard Henderson: Congratulations on the book. I hope it goes well and well done today.

Tanya Plibersek: Thank you.