Interview - Sky News

ANDREW CLENNELL: Joining me live is the Education Minister, Jason Clare. Welcome back to the program. Let's start with this appointment of Bill Shorten, then. You'd normally like to see someone retire from politics first before they get a job like this, wouldn't you?

JASON CLARE, MINISTER FOR EDUCATION: That's what normally happens, but the proper processes have been followed here. It was an independent process undertaken by the university. A lot of people applied, and Bill, I understand, was the unanimous selection of that independent panel.

CLENNELL: Did Bill Shorten recuse himself from cabinet discussions around the foreign student caps that have occurred recently?

CLARE: He'll be required now that he's made this decision, to do what all Ministers are required to do where they've got a conflict of interest to recuse themselves from any of those decisions.

CLENNELL: Should he have earlier, though?

CLARE: I'm not going to go into the way cabinet works or what decisions cabinet makes. That's not appropriate. But the process is what I've just set out. If you have a conflict of interest, then you recuse yourself and that's what Bill will do.

CLENNELL: Does the University of Canberra get an increase or cut in international student numbers under the cap?

CLARE: It improves next year over what they got last year. There are some universities over the course of this year that have got more students than they had last year, others less. That's in part because of this de facto cap that's been put in place at the moment that's throttling the system. It's helped some universities, hurt others. The numbers that I have set, the levels that I have set will mean that the University of Canberra has more than they currently have. 

CLENNELL: How many?

CLARE: I don't have the number in my head, but what this system is designed to put in place is a better and a fairer way of allocating those international students across the university sector.

CLENNELL: How did you come up with the cap figure of 270,000 and how did you come up with that the Group of Eight were going to get a 26 - 27 per cent cut and there was going to be an 83 per cent increase in how many regional unis can take?

CLARE: This is fundamentally based on returning migration to pre-pandemic levels and we make no apology for that. To take a step back, international education is incredibly important to the Australian economy. We've talked about this on the show before. It doesn't just make us money, it makes us friends, because when students study here and they go home, they take that love for Australia back home with them. It was kneecapped by the pandemic, basically cut in half, and it's come back like topsy since then. And you've had the crooks and the shonks that feed off the sector come back as well. In order to protect the integrity of this system, but also to protect community support for it, we've made the point that we need to set levels or caps on the number of international students.

CLENNELL: So, it's based on pre pandemic?

CLARE: For universities, they will have roughly the same number as last year, 2023. Now that de facto cap, that throttling of the system that's been happening this year, has meant that for Group of Eight universities in particular, they have many more this year than they had last year. For regional universities, it's the reverse. And so the system that we're putting in place will mean that for regional universities, they'll get something like 78 per cent more students next year than this year. For the Group of Eight, it'll be substantially less.

CLENNELL: But how have you come up with the figure of how much to cut the Group of Eight intake by?

CLARE: The 270,000 is based on what we think is necessary to return us to that pre-pandemic migration level. My department has put in place a number of measures which we think are fair, which will mean that the number that universities get, numbers based on roughly where they were at last year.

CLENNELL: This is what Stephen Hamilton, the economist, wrote during the week. I'm sure you've read it. He said, the government is, quote, deliberately sabotaging our largest non-mining export industry, strangling an economic powerhouse, responsible directly and indirectly for hundreds of thousands of jobs and hundreds of billion dollars of GDP. He goes on to say, imagine how insanely self-destructive it would be for the government to ban shiploads of iron ore from leaving our ports. Yet that is exactly what it is doing to our higher education sector. And what about this, it's difficult to recall a greater act of economic vandalism. Are you responsible for economic vandalism, Jason?

CLARE: It won't surprise you that I disagree with that. What this is doing is setting levels for international students, for universities at roughly what they were last year. I didn't have anybody saying those sorts of things this time last year. What is important though, is that we return migration levels to pre pandemic levels, and this is part of doing that.

CLENNELL: Are you going to give universities extra funding to make up for what they see as a cut in revenue?

CLARE: No. And there wasn't extra funding for regional universities when those changes happened earlier this year either. Where there will be extra funding for universities is to help to grow more Australian students to go to universities. One of the big reforms out of the Universities Accord is to help more young people, particularly young people from our outer suburbs and our regions and poor families, the sort of kids who don't get a crack at university now, to get a crack at university. And you'll see those reforms towards the end of this year.

CLENNELL: Well, how much extra can you wangle out of the Treasurer and the ERC?

CLARE: I'm not going to put a number on that.

CLENNELL: Is it going to be billions?

CLARE: What we have said is that this is a significant amount of money if we want more Australians to get a crack at going to university. And what the Universities Accord tells us is that 60 per cent of the workforce today either has a uni degree or a TAFE qualification, and in 25 years time, so by the middle of the century, it'll be 80 per cent. So, that means more people finishing school, more people going to TAFE and more Aussies going to university. And it can't just be people who live in Vaucluse or Potts Point or Toorak. It's got to be Aussies who come from places like Cabramatta and Liverpool and Bankstown and the western suburbs of Sydney and the bush and the regions. That's how we're going to do this, and that's where the investment needs to occur.

CLENNELL: So, there's going to be greater investment in universities, there's going to be greater funds going to university.

CLARE: There already is.

CLENNELL: But there's going to be, on top.

CLARE: There already is allocated in the budget, extra investment by uncapping the number of places for those university ready courses to help young people who finish school but aren't ready for uni to get the skills that they need to do a course. That's in the budget. That's a significant investment. The paid prac places to help people…

CLENNELL: But there's more coming. You said before.

CLARE: There's going to be extra funding in order to make the changes that we need over the next 25 years to give more Aussies a crack at going to university.

CLENNELL: Do you think this caps proposal will get through the Senate?

CLARE: The Liberal Party have indicated they support caps, and that's a good thing, but you can't have it both ways. If you support caps and if you support migration going back to pre-pandemic levels, then this is the mechanism to do it.

CLENNELL: What about this suggestion from the Group of Eight, they might cut their domestic student intake as a result of these caps?

CLARE: I think that's an empty threat and the fact is, with universities like Sydney University, for example, over the last ten years, they haven't increased, they haven't increased their domestic student numbers while they have increased their international student numbers. So this argument that if the numbers go back to where they were last year or where they were a few years ago, that they have to reduce domestic students, I don't think adds up.

CLENNELL: Vicki Thompson, the Chief Executive of the Group of Eight, described the caps as reckless, said there'd been no Treasury modelling on the economic impact of the changes. Has there been no Treasury modelling?

CLARE: Treasury have been involved, working with my department on setting that 270 number that's required to return us to those pre-pandemic levels.

CLENNELL: Will these student caps shift the dial on housing and migration because 270,000 is still a big number?

CLARE: On migration, what it does is it helps us to return migration to those pre pandemic levels. If universities want more international students, then they'll need to build more housing. It's not the only thing, though, that we need to do in order to tackle the housing crisis in Australia, but we need more housing, and this is part of it.

CLENNELL: Is it about educational standards or is it about migration?

CLARE: It's principally about returning migration to pre-pandemic levels, and I haven't hidden that. That's the point. Australians expect us to return migration to pre-pandemic levels. There was a surge of students coming not just to Australia, but to Canada and the UK. All that pent up demand after people couldn't study overseas during the lockdowns. And so that's come. We do need to return that to pre-pandemic levels. But what's also happening here, you say quality. The fact is, this is an industry worth tens of billions of dollars, and particularly, not in universities, but particularly in the VET sector, we've seen evidence of exploitation, evidence of people feeding off the sector to make money. I think on the last time I was on this program, I told the story about how a student comes here, enrols at a university, gets approached by someone at a railway station about transferring to a VET course. They pay that fee, they never turn up to the VET course, and really they're using the system as a backdoor to work here. Now, we can't have that. And these reforms are about changing that as well. So, one of the reforms in the bill says that if you want to set up an institution to educate international students, you can't do that until you've been educating Australian students for more than two years.

CLENNELL: Have you been concerned about students who can't speak English at university?

CLARE: Part of the reason why we have increased the English language requirements is to make sure that when an international student is here, that their level of English is sufficient for them to be able to be educated in English.

CLENNELL: I wanted to ask about reports over the weekend about antisemitism in universities. Jillian Segal is the government's envoy on antisemitism, has reportedly been told by Jewish students they believe they've been marked down because they're Jewish. They've been shunned by friends and classmates and told to study from home. What do you make of that?

CLARE: I met with Jewish students, too, who've told me that they don't feel safe at university, who've told me that they've been made to feel unsafe at university. There is no place for the poison of antisemitism, whether it's at university or anywhere else. It's obvious that it exists in our universities, but it's obvious that it exists elsewhere in the country as well. And I've made it clear to all university vice chancellors that they've got a responsibility to enforce their codes of conduct here.

CLENNELL: Are you happy with the job Mark Scott's doing at Sydney Uni at the moment? Because the Jewish students aren't.

CLARE: It's not my job to hire or fire university vice chancellors. It's my job to make sure that vice chancellors are enforcing their codes of conduct. One of the things that I've done is ask the university regulator, TEQSA, to convene a meeting with Jillian, the Antisemitism Envoy, and the universities that have particularly experienced the encampments over the last few months, so they can discuss what actions they've taken, what improvements they're taking, or that they're intending to take. 

Just on that, there's a couple of other things that we're doing. I've also asked the Race Discrimination Commissioner to commence a piece of work looking at not just antisemitism, but racism across our universities and the actions that universities should be taking. And this week I'll introduce legislation into the Parliament to establish a National Student Ombudsman that'll have the power to launch its own investigations, but also take complaints from students about antisemitism or any other complaint they wish to make about their experience at university.

CLENNELL: And why is that necessary, been deemed necessary, that new independent student ombudsman?

CLARE: The origin of this came out of evidence about rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment of university students at universities, in particular in dormitories where the person that might have assaulted them is on the same floor in the same building, in the same tute, and university is just not taking sufficient action. Universities haven't done enough; governments haven't done enough. The former Liberal Government turned their back on this and ignored this. I'm acting, I've got the states and territories to agree to set up this independent National Student Ombudsman which would have the same sort of coercive powers that a royal commission has to go into universities to get documents, to be able to get people to answer questions and to be able to provide recommendations to universities about how they should be responding and publish public reports.

CLENNELL: Should we be concerned as Australians about this rift between Jim Chalmers and the Reserve Bank?

CLARE: Short answer to that's no. You know, what's this all about? Really what's happening here is interest rates have gone up and the economy is slowing down as a result of that. That's basic economics. When interest rates go up, then the economy slows down. It's the same thing with inflation. When interest rates go up, you see inflation come down. We're starting to see inflation come down from a peak of 8.4 now down to 3.5. There's still more work that needs to be done. We want the Reserve Bank to be able to cut interest rates and there's more work to do…

CLENNELL: Should Michele Bullock be talking about a rate hike?

CLARE: I'm not going to tell Michele Bullock what she should, or she shouldn't be…

CLENNELL: Does it annoy you that she is?

CLARE: No. Again, politicians shouldn't be telling the Reserve Bank to cut rates or increase rates. We're not doing that at all. We've got to work to make sure that interest rates do come down to… 

CLENNELL: Should politicians be saying interest rates are smashing the economy, then?

CLARE: What politicians are saying is the truth, right. When interest rates go up, the economy does slow down.

CLENNELL: It's a little bit loaded, isn't it?

CLARE: This is the economics of it, right? We're talking about what the impact of interest rates going up is on either inflation or on economic growth. For people watching out here what the real-life impact of interest rates going up is it's harder to pay the mortgage. Inflation going up means it's harder to pay the bills or pay for what you need at the supermarket. This is where the politicians come in…

CLENNELL: Why couldn't Jim Chalmers say interest rates are smashing the economy, but they're necessary at the moment to be at this rate so we get on top of inflation. I mean, he left that last bit out. It's a little bit tricky, isn't it?

CLARE: Last question you asked me was what Michele Bullock should say. Now you're telling me that I should tell Jim what he should say. Let me say what I think is necessary. When you've got interest rates going up, you're going to have economic growth slow down. That's happening now. We're going to see inflation come down from what, 8.4 down to 3.5. We want to see it continue to drop. But in the meantime, government needs to act to help people who are doing it tough. That's what tax cuts are about. That's what real wage growth is about. That's what, I mentioned the Ombo, but I'm also introducing legislation into the parliament this week to give a 15 per cent pay rise to childcare workers. 

CLENNELL: Fair enough. We've got to go. I just want to ask briefly one more question. Labor's new ad against Peter Dutton on nuclear. Do you see this as an election winner for you campaigning against this, shouldn't the government come up with a policy of its own?

CLARE: We're only, what, nine months max away from an election and this will be the time where people will focus not just on what the Government's doing, but what the opposition has to offer. What do they have to offer at the moment apart from telling people not to shop at Woolworths, build nuclear power stations, and now a tax cut for politicians. And as that ad points out, and I think I said this to you last time I was on the show, this is going to take forever to build. It's going to cost a bomb and then it'll only produce less than 4 per cent of the energy that we need as a country. You know, it shows that this is not a serious outfit with a serious set of policies to put to the Australian people at the next election. It means they're not ready to govern.

CLENNELL: Education Minister Jason Clare, thanks so much for your time.

CLARE: Thanks mate.