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| JASON CLARE, MINISTER FOR EDUCATION, LABOR CAMPAIGN SPOKESPERSON: |
** SUBJECTS: Peter Dutton’s nuclear reactor scheme; Election; Costings; HECS debt cut; School Curriculum; TAFE; NDIS; Indigenous Australians.
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E&OE TRANSCRIPT
PRESS CONFERENCE
SYDNEY
THURSDAY, 1 MAY 2025
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SUBJECTS: Peter Dutton’s nuclear reactor scheme; Election; Costings; HECS debt cut; School Curriculum; TAFE; NDIS; Indigenous Australians.
 01/05/2025
(See translation in Arabic section)
Sydney-Middle East Times Int'l:Â JASON CLARE, MINISTER FOR EDUCATION, LABOR CAMPAIGN SPOKESPERSON: Thanks very much everyone for coming along. We've got two days to go, and here are ten things that Peter Dutton doesn't want you to know about his nuclear scheme.
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One, they'll cost $600 billion.
Two, they won't turn a light on for decades.
Three, even when they do turn on, they'll only produce four per cent of the energy that Australia needs.
Four, they'll push up your power bills right across the country.
Five, there's not even enough water at the sites that Peter Dutton has identified to run them.
Six, you'll have to pay billions of dollars to manage the nuclear waste that they produce.
Seven, the waste will fill football fields, not the can of coke that Peter Dutton talked about.
Eight, Peter Dutton wants to use experimental nuclear reactors that no one else is using commercially around the world.
Nine, they'll cause a $4 trillion hit to the Australian economy over the decades to come.
And ten, he'll cut health and education to pay for them.
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That's why Peter Dutton isn't talking about this in the last few days of this election, and that's why he isn't visiting the seven sites where he wants to put these nuclear reactors.
This policy is the most expensive policy that any major party has ever taken to the Australian people in the history of Federation, and the only way that he could pay for it is to cut funding to health and to education. That's why I say that in two days’ time, the Australian people have an opportunity to put this policy where it belongs, and that's in the bin. Happy to take questions.
JOURNALIST: Minister, the Coalition is releasing their costings today, included with the move to reverse your HECS debt forgiveness or payments. Is it money that could be better spent in education? And what would the effect of reversing those write offs?
CLARE: It means more debt for more Australians under the Liberal Party, it means that three million Australians will be lumbered with more HECS debt if the Liberals win on Saturday.
If Labor wins on Saturday, we will cut the HECS debt of three million Australians. Three million Aussies with a student debt will see their debt cut by 20 per cent if Labor wins this weekend. And just remember the average debt that someone with a student debt is carrying today is about $27,000. And that means that if we win on the weekend that debt, the average debt cut, will be about $5,500. For someone with a debt of $50,000, that means their debt will be cut by $10,000.
So there is a lot on the line, and in a lot of those key seats, those battleground seats on the weekend that will decide who wins and who loses, about one in four or one in five voters has a HECS debt, and they know unequivocally today that if Peter Dutton wins on the weekend, they will get nothing from him.
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JOURNALIST: Are you surprised to see Peter Dutton back in his home seat campaigning today?
CLARE: We see today Peter Dutton is desperately rushing back to his electorate, trying to sandbag his electorate two days out, what he should have been doing is sandbagging his electorate when the cyclone was barrelling down at it. Instead, he abandoned his electorate and rushed off to Sydney to fill the money bags for the Liberal Party.
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JOURNALIST: Final question, Anika Wells has suggested that there is potentially a future for the Voice through legislation, is that something being considered by Labor?
CLARE: No.
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JOURNALIST: Peter Dutton this morning has also been asked about what changes he’d make to the school curriculum, citing ‘the woke agenda’ in the past. What's your reaction to these comments, and is there actually a need to reform the curriculum?
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CLARE: The curriculum was put in place by the former Liberal Government. It's often forgotten in this debate that the National Curriculum was set by the Morrison Government on the 1st of April 2022. Peter Dutton will want you to think that Adam Bandt wrote the curriculum. In fact, the Liberal Party wrote the curriculum. In the normal course of events, what happens is the curriculum gets reviewed and the curriculum, the National Curriculum, will get reviewed in the next term of Parliament.
My focus as Education Minister over the last few years has been making sure that we fix the funding of public schools in this country. For over 50 years, Australia has been talking about how we need to fund schools based on need, but it's never happened before. It will now happen because of the agreements that the Prime Minister has struck with every state and territory in the country, and that funding isn’t a blank cheque, that funding is tied to real and practical reforms to help children who fall behind to catch up and help them finish school.
Just remember what the Liberals did when they came to office in 2013. They ripped the guts out of funding for schools, and they ripped the guts out of funding for health. They ripped $50 billion out of health and they ripped $30 billion out of schools, and we're still paying for that today. What we've seen over the last decade is the number of kids in public schools finishing high school dropped from 83 per cent to 73 per cent. We've got to turn that around. That's what the agreements that we have struck with the states and territories are all about, fixing the funding of our schools and tying it to the sort of reforms that will help more young people to finish school.
That is critical in the world that we live in today, where more and more jobs require you to finish school and then go on to TAFE or university, sort of elaborating on the answer that I gave to Charles, more and more people need more and more skills. That's why it's important to make courses at TAFE free and to cut the cost of university degrees.
The Liberal party don't get it. They see education as a cost. We see education as an investment, an investment in Australians and an investment in our future.
The costings that the Liberal Party put out today cannot be trusted unless they're honest with the Australian people about the cuts that they're going to make to education and the cuts that they're going to make to health. Remember in the debates that happened, I think it was the Channel Nine debate that Charles was part of, where Peter Dutton was asked about cuts, and he said, ‘yeah, there'll be cuts, but it'll happen after the election. I can't tell you what they'll be now.’ That would have went down like a mouthful of razor blades with the Australian people.
Tomorrow is the anniversary of that infamous interview that Tony Abbott did out at Penrith Stadium where he said, ‘no cuts to health, no cuts to education.’ And what happened next? They won the election, and then they brought in a budget with Joe Hockey and Mathias Cormann smoking cigars as they rip the guts out of school funding and they ripped the guts out of hospital funding. You just can't trust the Liberals when it comes to the investments that are needed in our schools and in our health system.
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JOURNALIST: A lot of courses that are that used to be apprenticeships or would be done through TAFE in the past, like teaching and nursing, they've become professionalised and now uni degrees. Do you think that there's a, I guess, a reputation with TAFE that makes it – through high school when I was growing up, there was this feeling that, like you try for uni, if you can't do that you get up and do TAFE. So do you think that there's a reputation barrier to try and get over to lift up TAFE causes in the eyes of the public?
CLARE: There's a responsibility on all of us, whether it's the media, whether it's politicians, whether it's families, to make it very, very clear that getting a qualification at TAFE is just as important as getting a qualification at uni. One of the things I'm doing as Education Minister is trying to make sure that the two systems, vocational and higher education, work closer together and are more knitted together. Make it easier for people to do a couple of courses at TAFE and then a couple of courses at university. In the world that we're going to live in in the decades ahead, it's going to be more and more important that those two systems work more closely together.
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JOURNALIST: And one last one, just in this election, I guess it's the way the way the campaign works. But from the outset, we've seen the PM and Peter Dutton outline what they think are the key things for this election, but it has then taken away the discussion around disability, First Nations affairs, except for recently, but not in the positive way. Are there other groups that aren't, like there are many groups that aren't being necessarily discussed in this campaign. Are you hearing any pushback from your own constituents, of course, you have to win your own seat, that they're not being heard in the campaign, other than these very broad strokes cost of living discussions.
CLARE: Everybody, when they go to the polling booth, looks for different things. What are the things that are going to help them? What are going to help their family? What are the big ideas and plans that different parties have to build a stronger future for our country, make the best country in the world even better? Some people will look at the tax cuts that we're introducing and say ‘that's something I really want.’ Some people will see the Medicare reforms that help every single Australia, whether you're young or old, and making it easier to see a doctor for free, and say ‘that's what I want, a stronger Medicare system.’ Others will see the cuts to HECS debt by 20 per cent and say ‘that is something that I really want.’
You mentioned the NDIS. That's a proud Labor reform, in the model of Medicare and superannuation to make sure that that no one's held back, no one is left behind. I see it at pre poll, where you see people with disabilities and their supporters, their carers, helping them to come and vote. And I say that's the NDIS that has made that possible.
You ask about Indigenous Australians. One of the things I'm most proud of as Education Minister is the agreement that I struck with the Northern Territory Government to fix the funding of schools. There no public school is properly funded at the moment, but it's Northern Territory schools, public schools, that are the most underfunded in the country. It's the agreement that we struck with the Northern Territory to double Commonwealth funding that will bring that day forward where schools in the Northern Territory are properly funded by more than 20 years, from 2050 back to 2029. That's a game changer, and that will change the lives of countless people in the Northern Territory. Thanks very much. |
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