Source: Murray Darling Basin Authority
ANDREW CLENNELL: Joining me live is the Education Minister, Jason Clare. Thanks for joining us.
JASON CLARE, MINISTER FOR EDUCATION: Thanks, mate.
CLENNELL: Let me ask about this beef imports thing, question without notice. Your Government’s doing this to get better relations in the tariff deal and better relations for the US, aren’t they? It’s not just some departmental thing, I mean, give us a break.
CLARE: Mate, forgive me, I’ve been focused on a few other things in the last few weeks, namely child safety in our early education centres. I think you had Don on a minute ago, didn’t you?
CLENNELL: Sorry? I had Don on Sunday.
CLARE: Oh, did you? Okay.
CLENNELL: Yeah.
CLARE: Well, Don’s working on that one, I’m the Education Minister.
CLENNELL: How do you feel though about the prospect of Donald Trump imposing a 15 to 20 per cent tariff as he flagged he could do overnight on everyone?
CLARE: Well, the Prime Minister has made the point we don’t impose tariffs on US goods, and US the goods that we export to the US shouldn’t have tariffs imposed on them either, it’s pretty simple.
CLENNELL: Your New South Wales right colleague, Ed Husic, raised the matter of Palestinian statehood in Caucus today, encouraging the PM to recognise it. What’s your personal view on this issue?
CLARE: Well, the Prime Minister’s made this clear, Penny Wong’s made this clear as well, it also happens to be my view, we’ll make a decision around recognising Palestinian statehood when we think it will help with momentum to make it real, to actually get two States in the Middle East.
If we’re serious about wanting to resolve the problems in the Middle East, you’ve got to resolve the Palestinian question. That means having two States there where the people who live in those two countries can live side by side in security and in safety; one place is called Israel; the other place is called Palestine.
Right now though the most important thing is to stop kids starving to death. Right?
CLENNELL: M’mm.
CLARE: You know, putting food in kids’ bellies and medicine in their arms. That’s not happening at the moment, and it’s pretty bloody obvious.
CLENNELL: And so that probably wouldn’t be as early as September when Emmanuel Macron’s pushing, would it
CLARE: Well, look
CLENNELL: ’cause you want Hamas out of the picture, don’t you?
CLARE: I think the Prime Minister’s made it clear, Hamas can have no role in a future State called Palestine. We also want to make sure we’ve got a better understanding about the structure of the democracy that would exist.
But there’s something even more important here. Kids are dying. Look at the picture of that little boy on the front page of newspapers this week. Remember what it was like when we were kids, and we saw kids starving to death in Africa and how the world responded?
CLENNELL: M’mm.
CLARE: The world needs to respond here too.
CLENNELL: Made a song.
CLARE: Well, didn’t just make a song, made a difference, right?
CLENNELL: Yeah.
CLARE: We’re parents, we’ve got kids. Imagine if that was our children starving to death?
CLENNELL: M’mm.
CLARE: You know, there’s plenty of food in Israel, there’s plenty of medicine in Israel, there’s plenty of trucks to get it in to Gaza, get the food in, get the medicine in, stop starvation and stop the killing of innocent people.
CLENNELL: What about the Israeli Government saying there’s no one starving, what did you think when that occurred?
CLARE: Have a look at the photos. Right? You can’t make this stuff up.
CLENNELL: They said they’re false pictures, the Deputy Ambassador yesterday.
CLARE: Look, if the Israeli Government seriously says that this isn’t happening, let the world’s media in to have a look.
CLENNELL: Let’s talk about the childcare bill, equally sort of serious matter. What difference will this make, and Sussan Ley’s already saying there’s more you need to do to force the State Governments to do. What do you say to that?
CLARE: Well, she’s right, she’s right, and I want to thank you Sussan Ley for the constructive way we’ve been working together on this, you know, this is serious, the whole country’s been sickened by the allegations in Victoria, and I think they would hope that the two major parties would work constructively together on this, and I want you to know that we are, both in the design of the bill and the briefings on the bill, but also the fact that this bill on its own is not going to do everything that we need.
We’ve got a lot of work to do to rebuild confidence in our childcare system, in the system that mums and dads need to have confidence in. The bill’s important because it gives us the power to cut off funding to centres that aren’t meeting the quality and safety standards.
The intention behind it is not to have to shut centres down but to lift standards up, but it’s also not an idle threat. My department’s working with State regulators now on a list of centres that will be the focus of this legislation when it passes.
CLENNELL: How many do you think are on that list, and what sort of things have they been guilty of?
CLARE: Well, it can vary, you know, if a centre is not a safe place for children to be in right now, it can be shut down today. State regulators have that power. But there will be different centres where State regulators have put conditions on them, they’ve said to them, “You need to fix this, you need to fix that, there isn’t enough supervision in this room” and they’ll come back later, and it’s not fixed.
What this says is, “If you don’t fix it, then we’ll cut off your funding”, and centres can’t run without taxpayer money. So
CLENNELL: How are centres not safe other than paedophiles running around in them? What sort of things are going on?
CLARE: Well, have a look this is not Sky, but this is the ABC, Four Corners did an exposé that showed the maltreatment and neglect of children in some centres, right, this is not the majority. I want to hasten to add that 99.9 per cent of the people who work in our centres are the best of us, right, these are fantastic people who look after our kids, but every child needs to be safe in these centres, and so we’ve seen evidence of that as well.
And that’s why just sort of wind back to Sussan’s point, which I think is right, this legislation is important because it enables us to tell centres who rely on taxpayers’ money that, “Unless you get up to scratch, you’re going to get your funding cut off”, but there are other things we’re working on as well.
We need to be able to track workers that move from centre to centre and from State to State, that’s what a National Educator Register’s about.
CLENNELL: Are you going to do that?
CLARE: That’s something that we’re working on right now. Ministers have already agreed that we need to do it.
CLENNELL: When?
CLARE: And we need the accelerator
CLENNELL: When can that be
CLARE: Well, we’re going to meet next month to work out how quickly it can be done. Victoria and potentially other States are already expanding their schoolteacher register to include these workers, but we need to build that up and join it up because workers move from State to State.
You asked Anastasia a moment ago about, you know, that grub Griffith
CLENNELL: Yeah.
CLARE: I worked in New South Wales; he worked in Queensland as well.
CLENNELL: Right.
CLARE: So that’s one. I think Anastasia mentioned it, let me underline it, mandatory child safety training is important as well, because the workers in the centre need to know what to look out for. Sometimes it can be hiding in plain sight, and there can be somebody in the centre that’s not just grooming a child but grooming them trying to distract them from what they’re the criminal act they’re trying to commit in the centre.
So that sort of training, not online, face to face, real training is going to be probably one of our biggest assets in making our centres safer, and there’s work to do around CCTV as well. There’s already CCTV in some centres, there’s discussions taking place about where they should be, where they shouldn’t be, and even more importantly, who holds the data, because you don’t want to create a situation where you’re creating a lot of information that bad people might want to get their hands on.
So it’s helpful
CLENNELL: Yeah.
CLARE: you know, in deterring criminals from acting and police in their investigations, but we’ve got to get that right too.
CLENNELL: What do you make of this report this morning in the Nine Newspapers about toddlers having their mouths taped at a Sydney childcare centre?
CLARE: I don’t have words neither did those kids, right, you know, talk about something that is just wrong, and I’m glad that the people who run the centre have admitted that, and I’m glad that the regulators have acted.
CLENNELL: Are you better off having your kids in a family daycare centre, if you’re a parent, do you think, than one of these institutional childcare centres?
CLARE: Mate, I sat down with some mums last week who had their children sexually assaulted in childcare centres and in family daycare centres, right. Wherever
CLENNELL: How many parents have you spoken to who’ve had this experience?
CLARE: Well, these were three mums that were brought in by Georgie Dent who runs The Parenthood to take me through their horrific experiences.
Now one mum, she knows what happened to her daughter, her daughter doesn’t know ’cause she was so little, and her daughter asks her mum, “Why are you so mad?” In the case of the woman whose daughter was assaulted in family day care, she knows, and you know, she talks about taking her own life from time to time.
People live with this for the rest of their life. This is why it’s so serious, that’s why I’m glad that I’m able to work so well with Sussan Ley on this and Jonno Duniam, the new Shadow Minister, who is fantastic, and I’m so glad to be working with him on this. People don’t want excuses, they also don’t want politicians fighting, they want us to come up with sensible answers to fix it. It’s not just Labor/Liberal, it’s the work that we’ve got to do with the States as well.
CLENNELL: Do you fear that this sort of thing is just going to go on? Like there are a certain of checks and balances and different reforms you can do, but there’s still going to be the odd isolated case; perhaps the job of you and State Ministers is to make sure they’re isolated cases.
CLARE: The awful truth is that the work is never going to end, because there’s bad people that are always going to try to get into childcare centres. We’ve got to make the system as strong as possible, and so legislation is important, the register is important, the training is important, the CCTV is important, but this work will never end.
CLENNELL: The HECS debt legislation, the Coalition has decided to wave it through. What do you make of that, first of all?
CLARE: Well, I think, what it says is that the decision of millions of people across the country to vote for us at the election has been heard by this Parliament, and that’s a good thing. You know, young people don’t always see something for them on the ballot paper when there’s an election, but they did this year, and they voted for this in their millions. We promised that it would be the first bill we introduced, we introduced it last week, and I’m glad to see that it’s now passed through the House. It’s now up to the Senate.
As soon as we get the bill through, then the ATO, the Tax Office, can do the work they need to do to be able to implement it. They’ve got to write I think 50,000 lines of code to implement that, so that’s going to take some time, but once they do that it will happen automatically, and people will get a text message to tell them that their debt’s been cut by 20 per cent.
CLENNELL: The argument is that someone pays for this, the taxpayers bear the burden for writing off that debt. What do you say to that?
CLARE: I think you asked me this question when we announced it back in November last year. The truth is that uni costs more today than it did when we went to uni. This helps to address that. I’ve got a report in front of me called the Universities Accord that helps us to set out a plan to build a better higher education system over the next decade.
At the moment about 50 per cent of people in their 30s have got a uni degree, but not everywhere. Not where I grew up in the western suburbs of Sydney, not in Regional Australia, I want more people to get a crack at going to uni, and this is just one part of it.
So too are things like the University Study Hubs that we’re setting up in places like Mount Druitt, as well as Liverpool, Macquarie Fields, in the western suburbs of Sydney but also in the western suburbs of Melbourne and Brisbane as well. We want more young people to be able to get access to TAFE or –
CLENNELL: Are you going to reduce some of the HECS fees, like people talk about $50,000 art degrees?
CLARE: I think I was asked this in the House by Monique Ryan yesterday, and the Prime Minister was asked about it on Insiders on Sunday as well. We’ll take this one step at a time. It’s one of the other recommendations from the Accord. We’ve implemented now about 31 of the 47 recommendations in that report.
CLENNELL: When will we get a decision on this, and are you minded to reduce them, or is the Treasurer going to stand in and Treasury
CLARE: Well, as I said in the Parliament yesterday, there’s always more work to do, but it’s not like we’re doing nothing. Cutting people’s debt by 20 per cent is massive, it’s going to take a load off the back of 3 million Australians.
We’re also rolling out Paid Prac which is financial support for people while they do their practical training at university for teachers and for nurses as well. We’re going to roll out next year a new funding model for universities to provide more help for students who need it to finish their university degrees. They’re just some of the things that we’re doing to make sure that we’ve got a better higher education system tomorrow than we have today.
CLENNELL: I wanted to ask the use of mobile phones at schools and the social media ban for under 16s. Do you think that ban will work, and in some high schools kids don’t have to hand the phone in the front office, they have to put it in pouches so they can access them. How do you think that’s all going?
CLARE: You might have a different view on this, but I actually think the ban on phones in schools is working. The research that the New South Wales Government has done has shown that kids are more focused in the classroom; they’re not reaching for the phone, they’re focused on the teacher. And the big thing that we didn’t expect is that kids are now playing with each other in the playground instead of doing what adults in this building do, just looking down at their phones.
The South Australian Education Minister said to me the other day they’ve had complaints at schools from kids who say they’re bored, and they want us to set up clubs and activities for them to do at lunchtime.
CLENNELL: Perhaps it’s going better in primary schools though?
CLARE: Oh, well, in primary school there’s fewer phones. It’s definitely working in high schools too. Where the problem exists, mate, is that at 3 o’clock when the bell rings, go past a bus stop, and you look at kids, they’ve turned their phone back on, and they’re back on TikTok or they’re back on to Instagram, they’re back into that cesspit of social media. Bullying is not just what happens in the playground or the stealing of lunch money, it happens online.
The most sort of horrid version now is through AI and people cut and paste a student or a friend’s face, put it on a naked body and then use that to humiliate students or female staff, we’ve seen a lot of evidence of that recently. So whether it’s the mental health of kids, or whether it’s bullying or whether it’s just, you know, just the addiction to social media, there’s more work we need to do here.
CLENNELL: Education Minister, Jason Clare, thanks so much for your time.
CLARE: Thanks mate.