Interview - Weekend Today

MICHAEL ATKINSON: Jason, morning to you. 

JASON CLARE, MINISTER FOR EDUCATION: Good morning. 

ATKINSON: 30 per cent of the 271,000 temporary graduate visas this year are family members and not students themselves. Does this point to the system being broken? 

CLARE: Well, I think the first point is we've now cut migration by almost half, and there are less international students in Australia today than there were before the pandemic. 

To your point, you know, if we train someone to become a doctor here in Australia or a nurse, then it makes sense for us to want them to work in a hospital for a couple of years and help Australians when they're sick. But we're working on, you know, the next stage of reforms to migration, and Minister Burke will have more to say about that in due course. 

ATKINSON: One Nation is calling for all secondary applicants to be removed. What's your take on that? Are they on the money, off the mark? 

CLARE: Well, I tried to introduce legislation ‑ well, I did ‑ I introduced legislation into the Parliament a couple of years ago to put a cap on the number of international students that come to Australia every year, and that was opposed by One Nation, by the Liberal Party and by the National Party. 

So I don't think they've got a lot of credibility here. They're also, incidentally, against putting more money into TAFE. You know, if we really want to do something to reduce migration, then we've got to train up more Aussies to do the jobs that we need here in Australia, whether it's doctors or whether it's nurses or whether it's construction workers, and they seem to be against putting more money into TAFE or into universities to train Aussies to do those jobs. 

ATKINSON: So do you think they wouldn't do anything if they were in Government, if they have opposed previous proposals by you; this is just easy opposition? 

CLARE: Who knows? You know, it seems all talk when, when they're put to the test in the Parliament they vote against the sort of things that are going to help to train more Australians at TAFE and at university. 

What we know, if you look at the polls, is that if you vote for One Nation you'll get a Liberal Government, if you vote Liberal, you'll get a One Nation Government; you vote for one, you get both. You get Angus Taylor and you get Pauline Hanson. You know, the Dopey and Gabbana of Australian politics. 

I think Australians who are looking at that at the moment would be shaking their heads at the chaos that would come if you had a Liberal One Nation Coalition Government in Australia. 

ATKINSON: Minister, moving on to property prices and the slump happening right across the country.  The Big Four banks say they expect the trend to continue well into next year. People voted for your party with the expectation there'd be no changes to capital gains and negative gearing, those sorts of things. You've made those changes, but is this proof that the overhaul has gone too far, the prices dropping and continuing to drop?

CLARE: Well, the advice from Treasury hasn't changed. Their advice is that property prices will grow sustainably over the next few years. And when you think about it, when you think about supply and demand, that makes sense, that property prices will grow over the long‑term, but grow sustainably rather than exponentially. 

Over the last 20 years or so we've seen property prices grow exponentially, they've dipped about seven different times, that's put it out of the reach of a lot of young Australians. I don't want us to be a country where our kids can't afford to buy a home, where they're forced to rent for their entire life. 

The sort of changes that we've made just make it a little bit easier for young Australians, put them on more of a level playing field when they turn up to an auction and want to buy their first home.

ATKINSON: A new campaign to tackle bullying is being rolled out this morning, the message, "Bullying is harder to spot than you think". Is a catchy slogan the answer to this growing issue in our schools? 

CLARE: Oh, it's not just a slogan, but what this campaign is about is providing some help and some information for mums and dads. You know, what the ad points out and what kids have told us is that it can be anyone and it can happen anywhere, not just at school, it can happen on the Internet, it can happen at sport, it can happen at the shops, and bullying, you know, can end in the worst of all worlds in young people taking their own life. 

So mums and dads are worried about this. This links to a website that provides some tips and some helpful information for parents if they think their kid might be being bullied or they think their child might be the child at school that's doing the bullying, but we're also providing more resources for teachers. 

The funding that we're putting into schools, the extra $20 billion into schools over the next 10 years are not just about improving literacy and numeracy, it's about extra mental health and wellbeing support in our schools, and from next year it will be mandatory for all schools across the country to take steps within the first two days when a complaint about bullying happens, because all of the evidence tells us that if you act quickly here you can nip it in the bud. 

ATKINSON: Yeah, certainly no place for bullying in our schools. Education Minister, Jason Clare, great to talk to you this morning, thank. 

CLARE: Thanks mate.