JOHN STANLEY:
Plenty of work on the plate of the Deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard. She’s the Industrial Relations Minister and the Education Minister. She joins me on the line from Canberra now. Good afternoon to you.
JULIA GILLARD:
Good afternoon, John.
JOHN STANLEY:
You’ve announced today these ten minimum standards that will effectively replace Work Choices. What do you see as the major changes and when will they actually start operating?
JULIA GILLARD:
Well we’re delivering on our promise; we’re sweeping Work Choices away. We did the first bit of that earlier this year when we passed a transition act in the Parliament to stop new Australia Workplace Agreements being made and too many working families have basically been ripped off by them.
This is this second bit. These are ten National Employment Standards every employee’s going to get at work. They’re going to be legislated later this year. They don’t start til the 1st of January 2010 but that’s because they need to operate with our new modern simple award system and the Australian Industrial Relations Commission, the industrial umpire, is working on that right now. We needed to get these finalised so when the Commission was doing the modern awards, the rest of the safety net, it would know what these National Employment Standards said.
JOHN STANLEY:
The union movement is running a campaign in prime time on television arguing that you were elected to sweet away Work Choices and to deliver on what workers wanted. They’re arguing that you’ve been dragging the chain. Is this a response to that?
JULIA GILLARD:
No it’s not. We were elected on the basis of putting into place our policy, Forward with Fairness. We always said to the Australian people that Work Choices was wrong and we were going to get rid of it and we’re certainly doing that. And we said to the Australian people we’ve come up with a fair and balanced alternative – our policy, Forward with Fairness. Now when we wrote that policy we knew it wasn’t everything the trade unions wanted, it wasn’t everything the employers wanted either. Now we think the fact that both sides sort of said they’d like a bit more indicated that we’d managed to come up with a balanced policy that was right down the dead centre in the middle and that’s what we think is appropriate.
JOHN STANLEY:
I mean it is a huge change and I know you’re talking about 2010 but is it fair to say that apart from the Australian Workplace Agreements, much of Work Choices is still there until this legislation comes in?
JULIA GILLARD:
Well when we got rid of Australian Workplace Agreements we set a new benchmark for agreement making. Under Work Choices if you made even a collective agreement all you were guaranteed to get was the five Work Choices minimum standards. We’ve said no – we’re going to have an end to that and you’ve got to be better off than the award. So we’ve already built a substantial new safety net for people and we think that that’s really important so people weren’t subject to the kind of Work Choices rip offs. So we’ve ended that. We’re building the rest of the system. We are doing it as quickly as we can but we always said to people that there was going to be a measured transition. Employment law needs to be right and apart from being extreme, Work Choices was technically flawed and that’s caused a lot of problems for employers and employees. We want to take the time to get it right.
JOHN STANLEY:
OK, the Prime Minister wouldn’t give a guarantee that no workers will be worse off under the new employment standards. Can you give that guarantee?
JULIA GILLARD:
Look, I can certainly say there’s nothing about the operation of our system or the operation of the Employment Standards that’s about making people worse off. It’s about giving people a fair safety net. Now obviously in the employment market people are going to change jobs and they’ll change conditions. You might decide to no longer be on the radio – I don’t know, what would you like to do? You might like to go and work in an aged care institution and I would suspect you would earn less being an aged care carer. You would’ve made that choice. But what I can guarantee from our industrial relations system is whether you’re on the radio, whether you’re working in that aged care institution, whether you’re working at a factory, there will always a safety net for you to stand on and no one can ever strip that safety net away from you and that’s a world of difference from Work Choices which was all about basic conditions getting stripped away.
JOHN STANLEY:
And again the 2010 is as quick as you can do it, it’s not a matter of doing it in 2010 because that’ll lead you into the next election?
JULIA GILLARD:
No, 2010 is dictated because we need to modernise awards. There are more than 4000 awards. Award modernisation is a job everybody has talked about in the past but no one has successfully got done. We are determined to do it. We’re getting the Australian Industrial Relations Commission to do it and we are doing it as quickly as it can possibly be done.
JOHN STANLEY:
OK. On the education front there’s a report today saying Australian private schools are getting $2 billion more than public schools in Federal funding each year. Now I know that the states primarily fund the public schools but isn’t this a consequence of the Howard Government directing more money into private schools and you’re going to continue that at least for the next three years, aren’t you?
JULIA GILLARD:
Well what I’ve said is for the next four years we would continue to have the same funding formula. We gave that commitment before the election. We said that schools needed certainty. But what we’ve also done is through the Council of Australian Government process that the Prime Minister kicked off a couple of days before Christmas at the end of last year, is we’ve started talking to the States and Territories and everybody interested in education about new investments, so above and beyond what people are expecting to see in the schools agreement, new investments for disadvantaged schools and new investments on teacher quality and we think that they can make a real difference for schools that are confronting disadvantage. We’re also investing in $1.2 billion in our Digital Education Revolution and $2.5 billion in Trades Training Centres so there’s a lot of new investment in schools.
JOHN STANLEY:
But they’re going to public and private schools, aren’t they?
JULIA GILLARD:
Both computers and trades training are going to public and private schools. Obviously the new partnership we’re talking about with the States and Territories is focused on disadvantaged schools, and that’s because we want students, whether they’re in a state school or an independent school or a Catholic school, if they’re in a disadvantaged school we want to make a difference.
JOHN STANLEY:
But most of those disadvantaged schools are public schools, aren’t they?
JULIA GILLARD:
Well we need to agree a measurement of disadvantage but I suspect when we do that we’re going to see that there are many schools in the states that need additional assistance.
JOHN STANLEY:
OK, just on computers. You mentioned that computer promise, you talked about one computer per senior student, I think that was the promise, wasn’t it?
JULIA GILLARD:
What we said was that if for years nine to12, so upper secondary, we’re going to get computers to students. If they need a computer for their, you know, school work, it will be there. Obviously we’ve said schools can pick what sort of technology, whether they want a fixed computer on a desk or a laptop or these things called thin clients, the little keypads that relate to hard drives. There’s been a bit of a fear campaign started by the Opposition because in our first round of funding we focussed on schools that had the fewest computers. We’ve deliberately focussed on schools that had a ratio of worse than one to eight, so one computer to eight students and worse than that.
JOHN STANLEY:
You’re going to bring it to one to two, is that right?
JULIA GILLARD:
We’re going to lift it to one to two. That’s the first round of funding and those schools can come back in subsequent rounds for more assistance.
JOHN STANLEY:
But the promise was one for each student, so isn’t that half of what you promised?
JULIA GILLARD:
It’s the first step in the first urgent round which we have delivered this financial year. That will take them to one to two in a first step. They can come back for additional resources.
JOHN STANLEY:
OK and I think it’s $1000 per student, is that right?
JULIA GILLARD:
$1000 per unit, you know, per computer.
JOHN STANLEY:
So if you can get a computer for $500 you can spend the other $500 on the power and infrastructure that might be needed?
JULIA GILLARD:
Absolutely, and we know through bulk purchasing arrangements around the country people are getting very good deals. I mean obviously this is a different mathematical proposition than you or I just wandering off to, you know – well I won’t use a store name – but off to a computer store and just buying one. You’re buying huge numbers. Obviously the per unit cost is quite different.
JOHN STANLEY:
Yeah, but when will the one per student promise be fulfilled?
JULIA GILLARD:
The $1.2 billion rolls out now over the next four years so we’ve had this financial year, the forthcoming four financial years. It’ll be $1.2 billion in all and that’s to achieve the vision of every student having access to a computer, years nine to 12, when they need it.
JOHN STANLEY:
OK. And the other issue that was around today, raised in the Parliament there, the Belinda Neal issue. Have you got any comment, do you have any knowledge if anyone in the Federal Government was involved in preparing those statutory declarations by her staff?
JULIA GILLARD:
Look, it’s easy to throw around allegations in Question Time but all of this is being dealt with by the police and given that, properly, the Prime Minister said he wasn’t going to comment and I’m not going to comment either.
JOHN STANLEY:
So you don’t have any knowledge, you can’t, you’re not going to…
JULIA GILLARD:
I’m not going to speculate on facts or allegations or things thrown round Question Time by a pretty desperate looking Opposition. The police are going to have a look at this, they’re going to investigate it, they know their job and I’m more than happy to say they should just be allowed to get on with it.
JOHN STANLEY:
OK, we’ll leave it there. I appreciate it, thank you.
JULIA GILLARD:
Thanks, John.
JOHN STANLEY:
Julia Gillard who’s the Deputy Prime Minister, Minister for Education and Industrial Relations talking to us there from Canberra where they’ve had a pretty busy day.
ENDS