Interview - ABC Adelaide

JULES SCHILLER: Well as you know, the Albanese government was overwhelmingly re-elected and Jason Clare has resumed his ministry. He is the Federal Education Minister. He joins us now. Jason Clare, welcome.

JASON CLARE, MINISTER FOR EDUCATION: G’day, guys. Good to be here.

SCHILLER: Congratulations on your re-election and becoming Federal Education Minister again. Of course, one of the big ticket promises of your Government was to reduce the debts of HECS students by 20 per cent. When will they see that extra money in their pockets?

CLARE: This year there’s two things that we’ve got to do: one, we’ve got to pass a law through the Parliament to make this happen. And then the second thing is the Tax Office have to lop this off everyone’s debt. You’re right – one of the biggest promises we made in the campaign was to cut everyone’s student debt by 20 per cent, and that’s 3 million Aussies that might have a debt from uni or TAFE or somewhere else. And it will be the first bill that we introduce into the Parliament when Parliament sits for the first time in the last week of July.

What that legislation will do is cut everyone’s debt by 20 per cent and backdate that cut to this coming Saturday. And that’s important because every 1st of June in every year HECS debts or student debts get indexed. That 20 per cent cut will come into effect before that indexation effectively happens this Saturday, to make sure that we honour the promise we made, and we cut everyone’s debt by 20 per cent. Legislation, once that’s passed, getting the Tax Office to cut everyone’s debt by 20 per cent.

RORY McLAREN: What is the cost to the budget of this decision, Minister?

CLARE: The cost to the budget over the forward estimates, or the next four years, is about $700 million dollars. The cost over the longer term is around about $16 billion. We’re reducing the debt that’s owed by Australians to the Commonwealth over the next few decades by about $16 billion dollars. Now, what it means –

McLAREN: That’s not small. That’s not a small change to the federal budget at all.

CLARE: No, it’s not small. It’s not small. But when you think about the 3 million Australians – many of them in their 20s and 30s, they’ve just finished uni, they’re just moving out of home, they’ve got their first job, they want to buy a home, and they’ve got this big HECS debt that they’ve got to pay off. I think everyone listening will know somebody in this situation and perhaps will know that HECS debts are bigger today than they were when I went to uni, when many of us went to university – that by cutting this debt by 20 per cent, it’s going to help a lot of people get a good start in life, make it easier to get out there and buy their first home. The average debt today is about $27,000 and so what this will mean for someone in that situation is that their debt will be cut by about $5,500.

SONYA FELDHOFF: And while I’m sure they will be thrilled about that, they will then get it indexed again. And a lot of people question how fair the indexation side of things is. Is there any option to look at that?

CLARE: We’ve done that. One of the things that we did last year, because of rampant inflation, when inflation was raging around the world. It hit Australia and it hit HECS debts here in Australia. We saw HECS debts go up by 7 per cent in 2023. That wasn’t fair. Everybody with a HECS debt told us that, and so we passed legislation last year that said that HECS debts or student debts can’t go up by either the lowest of either inflation or wages.

So that change happened last year, and it meant that in December last year, everyone with a HECS debt would have seen their debts drop. We cut HECS debts by about $3 billion dollars last year because of that. So that’s an important change. Indexation is important because it means that when the Australian taxpayer lends you a dollar, you get that dollar back in real terms. But we’ve changed the formula to make it fairer.

SCHILLER: Jason Clare, can I ask you about the Job-ready Graduates Scheme? Now this was introduced by Dan Tehan, your predecessor, under the Morrison Government. It increased the contributions, HECS debts of arts students, society and culture degrees by around about 113 per cent. Considering a lot of these students are women who overwhelmingly voted for you in the federal election, it is seen as punitive because, you know, they’re earnings aren’t necessarily as much as STEM graduates. Will you reverse this decision?

CLARE: It’s one of the things that we’re looking at right now. You’re right – it was introduced by the former Liberal Government and didn’t work. If the intention was to reduce the number of people doing arts degrees, then that hasn’t happened. There’re more people studying arts degrees today than when they implemented this reform. And that’s because people pick the courses that they love, that they’re passionate about, that they want to do, not based on the price tag attached to it.

Fixing it is complex. What we have announced is that we’ll establish something called the Australian Tertiary Education Commission to help to drive long-term reform of our universities and our tertiary education system. It starts work on the 1st of July, so in just over a month’s time. And one of the tasks that we’ve asked them to look at is exactly this – to look at that Job-ready Graduates program and what change can happen.

Can I mention just quickly two other things, because there’s been a lot of attention on the cut to HECS by 20 per cent, and that’s what that bill that I introduce will do. But the bill will do two other things as well: it will change the amount of money that you have to earn before you start paying your debt back. At the moment you have to start paying it back once you earn $54,000 a year. That will be increased to $67,000 a year. And it will also reduce your annual repayments. For somebody on an income of $70,000 a year it will reduce the amount that you have to repay back to the Government every year by about $1,300 a year. It means more money in your pocket. And they were recommendations by Bruce Chapman, the architect of HECS who designed it with John Dawkins back in the 80s.

FELDHOFF: Just before we move on from the HECS debt, Federal Education Minister, I’ve got a question on the text line. I think you mentioned June 1st was the date that that would be backdated to?

CLARE: Yep.

FELDHOFF: So, I don’t think that applies to this person. What about those that just finished paying their HECS debt back? Do they get a refund? I guess hypothetically, what happens if you choose to pay the HECS debt, you know sometime after June 1st? Will they get the refund?

CLARE: People that have got a HECS debt today and they have a HECS debt next week, they’ll see the benefit of this. Obviously if your HECS debt has already been paid off today then a 20 per cent cut to zero is still zero.

FELDHOFF: But if you paid that off on June 2nd, for instance, you might get a refund?

CLARE: I’ll have to have a look at that. But what we want to do is make sure that everybody that’s got a HECS debt, a student debt now, and there’s 3 million of them right across the country, get the benefit of this cut by 20 per cent.

McLAREN: Minister, ahead of the federal election you managed to get a new funding agreement in place with states and territories for schools. It comes at a time when the latest NAPLAN results show one in three Australian school students is performing below literacy and numeracy benchmarks. How quickly can you turn that performance around in this term of government?

CLARE: This agreement that we’ve struck not just with the South Australian Government but every Government across the country is crucial. It makes good on what Whitlam was talking about in the 50s about needs-based funding for schools and what Gonski built as a formula but has never been implemented before. It’s about funding our schools properly but also tying that funding to practical and real reforms that are going to address the sort of things you’re talking about.

What NAPLAN really tells us is this – and it’s a test for students at school in year 3, year 5, year 7 and year 9 – and it tells us that about one in 10 children are below what we used to call the minimum standard, but it's one in three children from poor families, from our outer suburbs, from our regions, Indigenous kids, who are below that minimum standard. And even more concerningly, what really concerns me, because there’s always going to be children who fall behind, what NAPLAN tells us is that 80 per cent of the children who are below the minimum standard in year 3 are still below the minimum standard when they’re 15 in year 9 – in other words, they’re not catching up.

What this funding is tied to are things like phonics checks, literacy checks in year 1 that South Australia did first, and the rest of the nation has followed. But also, numeracy checks in year 1 to identify the maths skills of students when they first start school, and South Australia is going to roll that out next year along with Victoria and New South Wales. And then when you identify the children through those checks that are behind, investing in things like catch-up tutoring where, if a child needs more individualised support, they get it by being taken out of a classroom of 25 or 30 –

McLAREN: But this is all going to take time, Minister, with respect. So how quickly are you hoping to see improvements in the results, as a result of the agreements you reached, including with Queensland back in March?

CLARE: There’s two things I want to see improvements in. I want to see improvements in results through things like that catch-up tutoring. I want to stress this point, because it’s an example of the sort of practical reforms that I think are necessary. We know that if a child gets taken out of a big class into individualised support with one or two other children 40 minutes a day, four days a week, they can learn as much in six months as they’d normally learn in 12 months. In other words, they catch up, and the sooner a child who needs extra support gets it, the better chance they have of catching up occurs.

But the other thing that we need to do is increase had number of kids finishing high school. 10 years ago, 83 per cent of young people at public high schools finished high school. Today it’s 73 per cent. It’s gone in the absolute wrong direction in public schools. We’ve got to turn that around. It’s more important to finish school today than it was when we were kids and then go on to TAFE or go on to uni, get the sort of skills for the jobs that are being created now and will be created in the future.

If we get this right, if the funding is invested in the right things that help kids catch up, they’re more likely to finish school, particularly kids from poor backgrounds and from the outer suburbs. And so, this is all connected. It doesn’t mean that you can click your fingers, pass a bill and it all gets fixed straight away; that’s not the way this works. But you’ve got to invest now in the right things to see an impact in the years ahead.

SCHILLER: You’re listening to Jason Clare, Federal Education Minister. It is 891 ABC Radio Adelaide’s Sonya, Jules and Rory for Breakfast at 13 minutes to 9. Jason Clare, can I ask you about civics in schools? I think we spoke to some people who literally voted – their basis of voting was who gave them a how-to-vote card first.

FELDHOFF: Yeah.

SCHILLER: Now, that’s not all –

FELDHOFF: And we don’t learn civics in school to a great extent.

SCHILLER: Yeah. That’s not all people, but the understanding of how local government, state government and federal government works you would have to say is not great at the moment. Do you think this is a discipline that needs to be more prominent in our education?

CLARE: We do learn it at schools. One of the things that worries me is I often find that kids in primary school have got a better grasp on this than kids in high school. It’s a big part of the curriculum in year 5 and year 6, and when I visit primary schools and I ask children about the way the Parliament works, you get the right answers. If I go and see students in year 9 or year 10, they’ve sometimes forgotten it. It’s not just what you learn in the classroom, it’s the opportunity to visit Parliament House, whether it’s in Adelaide or whether it’s in Canberra as well. We’ve cut the cost of those visits to make it easier for people not just from Canberra to visit Parliament House but from South Australia as well. I think last year about 3,500 students visited Canberra, get to visit the War Memorial as well. People don’t just learn in the classroom. If you can see it with your own eyes, I think it has an impact. But all of the evidence we’re getting is that young people don’t understand the way that our system of Government works as well as you’d like them to. And it’s the sort of thing we need to look at.

FELDHOFF: Yeah. So that will be a priority. Any others that you have over the next three years, given that it’s the first time we’ve spoken to you since you’re re-in the role?

CLARE: A couple of things. Obviously top priority is doing what we promised, delivering on the things that we committed to. So that’s the legislation we’ve talked about this morning – cutting student debt by 20 per cent. In schools, it’s the rollout of this big agreement, the billion dollars in South Australia but $16.5 billion across the country and the reforms that are tied to it.

I’m also responsible for early education as well. And so that includes the rollout of the 15 per cent pay rise for our early educators and building more early education centres in places where they don’t exist. We know that most of the brain develops before you even get to school and children who miss out start behind. And so those investments there are just as important.

FELDHOFF: Thank you for your time today. The Federal Education Minister Jason Clare.