Press conference - Bankstown, NSW

JASON CLARE, MINISTER FOR EDUCATION: Well, thanks very much for coming to Bankstown this morning. Yesterday Education Ministers met in Queensland. We focused on a lot of really important issues. This gives me a bit of an opportunity to give you a bit of a briefing on the things we discussed and the decisions we made. 

First and foremost, we were briefed on the childcare safety reforms that we announced in August of this year and advised that those reforms are on track. That includes the rollout of the CCTV trial in the next few weeks, also the testing work in December on the new Educator Register, as well as the development of mandatory early educator training that will roll out in February next year. 

We also focussed on the next stage of reforms to school education. This year we signed agreements with every State and Territory to fix the funding of our schools and to tie that to real and practical reforms in the classrooms. 

But yesterday we focussed on the next stage of reforms, and that includes a decision yesterday in principle to establish a new Australian Teaching and Learning Commission. That's a body that would bring under one roof the work of ACARA, that focuses on curriculum, and on NAPLAN the, testing program at the moment, but also AITSL, that are responsible for teacher standards, as well as AERO, that independent important body responsible for expert evidence about what works in the classroom. And ESA, that's responsible for the tools and technology that we apply in the classroom. 

We agreed that if we get the design of this right, it will be bigger and better than the sum of its parts, help us to implement the big reforms that we're all committed to to lift standards right across the country, and help to ensure that more young people finish high school. And not just that, potentially this is a body that can help us to implement the reforms we need in our universities, the initial teacher education degree, the degree that you do if you want to become a schoolteacher, and we're making significant reforms to that degree. This new body can help us in the implementation of that as well. 

Yesterday we also agreed to make some keyhole surgery to the curriculum, starting with maths, and starting with the first three years of maths, from kindergarten to prep to Year 1 and Year 2. 

Getting maths right is critical, having a basic grasp on maths is really important for work and for life and for setting you up for the future, and it's important that we get the curriculum right and get the materials for teachers right so they teach it in the right order. 

Maths is really sequential. You’ve got to learn it in the right order, and if you don't understand the basics, the fundamentals, then you get lost, and you can't catch up, and teachers and principals have told us that the current curriculum is a bit too complex, others have told us they need more tools to help them to teach it in the right order. 

And so on the advice of ACARA, we've made the decision yesterday to ask them to scope out a review of that curriculum and to come back to us with a plan about how to do it when we next meet in February. 

Yesterday we also looked at the next step of reform in higher education, and we were briefed by Melinda Cilento, the Chair of the Expert Council on University Governance, and today we're releasing the report of that Expert Council on University Governance. 

I think anybody that's looked at this will know that university governance at the moment is not up to scratch. If you don't think it's up to scratch you've been living under a rock the last few years. And what this report does is set out some principles that all universities should meet, and if they can't meet them they've got to explain why not. And we will, as an Australian Government, implement those principles in law and require universities to report to the Tertiary Education Regulator every year on "an if not why not" basis. If you're not implementing them, then why not? 

We also are making reforms in law to improve the accountability and the transparency of our universities, to help make sure basically that they meet the sort of expectations that the community expects, that students expect, that the staff who work at our universities expect. 

And yesterday we also made the decision that we will get the Remuneration Tribunal to work with us to set a framework for the salaries of university Vice-Chancellors. 

Now that's before we get to the important issue of bullying in our schools, and the social media changes for under-16-year-olds that come into place in just a couple of weeks' time. 

Yesterday we were briefed by Anika Wells, the Communications Minister, and Julie Inman Grant, the eSafety Commissioner on the work that they are doing to prepare the country for those changes that will come into effect on the 10th of December. 

They also briefed us on some materials that they're going to provide teachers and schools to help them with the implementation of this report, because inevitably, the impact of these changes is going to be felt in our schools as well. 

We made a very important decision yesterday around bullying in our schools. I think this is something that mums and dads across the country all worry about. It's getting worse, not better. It's different than it was when we were kids, when we were at school. Now a lot of it happens online. What Anika and Julie were telling us yesterday is that most of the bullying's happening through TikTok and Snapchat, so the changes we're making to social media will help; getting kids off TikTok and Snapchat will help, but it's not the only place where kids are bullied day and night. You know, we heard about message apps and messaging services that can be used as means to humiliate and hurt other children. 

We heard - I heard for the first time yesterday the impact that AI chatbots are having in this area as well. I don't know if you guys have heard this before, I haven't, that AI chat bots are now bullying kids, it's not kids bullying kids, it's AI bullying kids; humiliating them, hurting them, telling them they're losers, telling them to kill themselves. 

I can't think of anything more terrifying than that, than AI telling kids to kill themselves; we've heard stories overseas of kids doing that. That's what we're up against. That's why I say this is getting harder and harder, AI is supercharging this problem. 

I'm not naive enough to think that you can end bullying. There's always been bullies, there will always be bullying. And now it's just not happening in the playground, it's not push and shove in the ground or stealing lunch money, it's so much more insidious than that, and it happens day and night, and everybody can see it. 

It helps explain why some children, heartbreakingly, are taking their own lives because of it. That's why we've got to take it so seriously. 

Parents told us that the key thing we can do is get their schools to act more quickly. That in too many cases it's taking too long to act, and that if you take action within the first 48 hours, then it can help to nip this in the bud. And that means digging into the situation, talking to the kids, finding out what happened and taking action to stop it, but also talking to the parents of the kids, the mums and dads, whose child is the victim of this, but also the mums and dads of who's the alleged bully. 

What we also heard from the review is that we've got to provide teachers are more tools to help them to manage this and tackle this, and tools for mums and dads too. 

There's a lot of great programs out there at the moment, a lot of great policies in our schools that are being implemented at the moment. Ministers agreed yesterday we've got to put them all in the one place online so schools can access them and decide what works for them. 

But we also agreed that mums and dads need a bit of help too. And so we've agreed that we're going to use $5 million to develop some resources for them too; basic information to tell mums and dads, if the school tells you that your son or daughter's being bullied, here's some things that will help you. And if the school rings you and tells that your son or daughter is the bully, that they're the one that's alleged to have done these awful things, here's some things to help you, so you can help your son or daughter to change their behaviour to make our kids safer, and our schools safer. 

So really important discussions and decisions by Education Ministers yesterday. We agreed to get our departments to develop an implementation plan of how we do all of this, and I'll report back as to when we meet again next, in February next year. 

Happy to take some questions. 

JOURNALIST: Minister, I was just speaking to Kelly O'Brien, the mother of a child that has passed away. She thanks you personally for the work that you've done. Do you have a message for her, and secondly, it might seem obvious, but why is that 48 hours so important? 

CLARE: There's nothing I can say that's going to fill the hole in Kelly's heart or Mat's heart, they lost the most important thing in their life, their little girl, their precious little girl. You know that hurt it was so big, and it hurt so much that she made that tragic decision to take her own life, and you can't bring her back. 

What we can do is to still listen to her and what she said to us. She asked us to act. She asked the kids to be upstanders, not bystanders, to look after each other, to help each other. And it's not just Kelly and Mat, it's other mums and dads who've told us the sooner we act the better. 

So this is not about punishing schools or calling schools out, it's about saying here's the standard. If we do this, then we can really make a difference and we can help children like Charlotte. 

JOURNALIST: A lot of this strategy is predicated on children being safe and comfortable enough to file a report. What's the strategy for helping many of the kids who are too ashamed or too afraid to report these incidents? 

CLARE: Yeah. You're right, we need children to feel confident enough and safe enough to say to their teacher, to say to their principal, "This terrible thing has happened to me, and I need you to take action". I see it in our schools all the time, I see from the little fella behind the TV cameras making a noise at the moment, but I do think that our schools are doing a better job than they did when we were kids. 

Our kids today know the word "bullying", and they know the values of their school and how, if something's wrong, they should walk away or they should go see the principal or go see the teacher and call it out. 

I think things have improved in that regard over the last 20 years. What's harder today, what's worse today is the technology that makes it so much easier to hurt people. Young people ‑ older people do this too ‑ there are some things that you wouldn't say face-to-face to somebody, whether it's in the playground or at work that you'll say to somebody anonymously online designed to hurt them or humiliate them, and it's not just you seeing it, it's the whole world seeing it, and that's what makes this so much more insidious today than when we were kids. 

There's a lot more work that we've got to do here. First, we've got to call it out, then we've got to develop a plan for how we implement it, and then the hard work begins about helping to make sure that it's not just some schools that meet that standard but all schools. 

JOURNALIST: I won't jump ahead [indistinct] but you talked about the hard work of how we [indistinct] so how do we enforce something like this? 

CLARE: Look, it's not about enforcement so much, it's not about punishing schools, it's about recognising best practice and encouraging all schools to meet it. I'm very conscious as the Australian Education Minister that I don't run schools, I don't employ teachers. This is only going to work if all schools and all school systems think this is the right thing to do and it will work. So ‑‑ 

JOURNALIST: If I can, what's the incentive then?

CLARE: I’ll tell you what the incentive is: looking after our kids. Everybody that becomes a teacher wants our children to be safe, to be happy, to learn and to thrive. We know that the sort of bullying I'm talking about, whether it's in the playground or online, hurts our kids, and it can lead to really serious mental health challenges. 

Now that in turn can lead to children falling behind at school, their academic results suffer, it can also lead to children not turning up to school at all, and in the most awful situations it can lead to children taking their own life. That's the incentive to act, for all good people to act. 

I got the impression yesterday that every Minister and every Director-General of every department gets this and wants to act. The evidence tells us that ‑ we're releasing the report today, have a good look at it - the evidence tells us, the earlier you act the better. 

In too many tragic examples that I've seen, schools took two or three or four weeks to act. If we take initial action in the first two days, chances are we can nip this in the bud and help to save young lives. 

JOURNALIST: I appreciate the good faith effort here that's being undertaken, and in theory I understand the system. You just mentioned that teachers are an important part of the system. Teachers are also telling us that they’re incredibly strained and that we're adding to their workload, with a tipping point, counting down 48 hours to file reports for each of these many incidents. Aren't we over-straining - aren't we overworking teachers, and the fact that they are being strained as a resource, doesn't that risk the system's value? 

CLARE: This is not about adding workload to teachers. I get it more than anybody how overworked our teachers are. This idea that teachers start at nine o'clock in the morning and finish at three is rubbish. Any mum and dad knows that, as Minister, I know that too. I also know that bullying's happening right now in our schools, and it's impacting our schools. It makes it harder for teachers, it has a real impact on the kids and on the teachers too, and if we act early and nip it in the bud, that's going to help our teachers. 

The teachers have told us flat out, "We need better tools, we need more support, can you build this into our professional development", so, for example, on the student days off, for example last Monday here in New South Wales, so the pupil-free days when teachers get together and do their professional development, build that into the training we get there. Put all the best practice on a one-stop-shop website that you can look at and use, but also for people who are at university now training to be a teacher, one of the things we talked about yesterday was building it into the degree. 

We're changing the degree so it's more focussed on teaching children how to read and write and to manage disruption in the classroom. But we also agreed yesterday that as serious as this is, it demands being of part the curriculum in our university degree as well. 

JOURNALIST: Can I quickly ask about the AI threats, that's ‑ I've never heard that before, that's quite shocking. How do you manage something like that, where it's not even a person, it's AI? 

CLARE: Yeah. Glad you said that 'cause I hadn't heard that either, and my jaw dropped when I heard this yesterday, the eSafety Commissioner briefed us on this, and of all of the terrifying things I've heard in this area, this is the worst. The idea that it can be an app that's telling you to kill yourself, and that children have done this overseas terrifies me. 

And I know in Australia we're lucky to have an eSafety Commissioner who's taking the action that she is to try to stop and eliminate these sorts of threats. It doesn't exist in other parts of the world, but the planet's getting smaller, an app that's developed on the other side of the world can hurt a child here in Australia, and that's why we've got to take this seriously. 

JOURNALIST: While we're on the subject of AI, the ABC reported yesterday, and this is not the first incident that this new form of bullying is occurring, where there's students uploading photos of female students into AI, declothing and sharing, which seems to be a new front in this bullying kind of issue. How are we preparing to deal with new forms of bullying that we don't actually know yet? How are we creating a proactive approach to this? 

CLARE: Yeah. You're talking about these Nudify apps, where a student will crop the face of one of their friends --

JOURNALIST: That's correct. 

CLARE: -- or one of their teachers, superimpose it on a naked body, and then send that to the world. Can you think of anything more humiliating and hurtful than that; can you imagine the impact that that's having on young women across the country? It leads to some young female teachers quitting the job that they love. 

New South Wales has taken some action in terms of legislation there. The Communications Minister has flagged work that she is doing in this area too so that we stop these Nudify apps getting on to the app store in the first place. There's more work that we need to do there. 

What Anika told us yesterday and what Julie Inman Grant told us is that this is a dynamic area, this is changing all the time. It's one of the reasons why the social media reforms are dynamic, the type of platforms that are going to be the subject of the legislation will change based on what they do. 

But likewise here, we need an eSafety Commissioner that can pounce on new things that are hurting our children. That's what she's doing here. The job will never ever finish, because there will always be people coming up with some app or some piece of technology which they think is fun, but hurts our kids. 

JOURNALIST: In the New South Wales example that I referred to, it wasn't a victim, but one of the male students who had received these images who reported the incident. It makes me wonder, under this new national strategy, what work is being done so that other witnesses report the incident, kind of taking care of the burden away from the victim. Has that been addressed in the strategy? 

CLARE: That will be something that we'll look at in the context of the implementation. I talked about upstanders, people who are prepared to stand up, not walk past the problem. It sounds like from what you've just told me that's a good example of that, where someone has seen something that's hurt their friend and they've reported it. 

That helps to take the pressure off the victim to be the person to say, "Something terrible's happened to me", somebody else stands up, and is a good person, and says "This has happened, can you please make sure that it's taken down”, that it's taken off the Internet, or that action is taken by a school to help out. 

If we leave this just to children who've been bullied themselves, then we're not going to be as successful as we need to be. We've got to look out for each other, more now than ever. 

JOURNALIST: Yeah. This is from Tim Lester at the Seven parli office.  

CLARE: I know Tim. 

JOURNALIST: I know you know Tim well. He says, Barnaby Joyce is widely reported to be considering One Nation, a strong Opposition is important to our system. Does the fracturing on the other side of politics worry you? 

CLARE: Look, I try not to get distracted by this. What's going on in Barnaby's mind or Pauline's mind is a matter for them. If they want to get together, really, that's up to them. But the Opposition's in a world of pain at the moment, they've got to decide whether they want to be Howard or Hanson, that's the bottom line. 

I figure they'll eventually work it out, they'll eventually get their act together, but I'm not getting distracted by this. The Albanese Government's not getting distracted by any of this. We're focussed on the Australian people in doing our job. What I'm talking about today, all of the things that we agreed to yesterday I think is evidence that we're focussed on the Australian people, not this sort of rubbish. 

JOURNALIST: That's all of my questions. 

CLARE: Okay. Thanks guys, I appreciate it. 

JOURNALIST: Thank you.