Press conference - Charles Darwin University

MALARNDIRRI MCCARTHY, MINISTER FOR INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIANS: I’d just like to acknowledge that we’re standing on the lands of the Larrakia people and pay our respects to Elders past, present, and emerging. It’s really beautiful to be able to have my federal colleague here, Jason Clare, and it’s wonderful to hear this announcement alongside Scott Bowman at CDU. So just wanted to do an introduction and say how very pleased we are to be here.

I’d also like to just acknowledge that we do have student teachers here, and I’m hoping that you’ll be able to have some time with them as well. And I’d like to thank each and every one of you for being present with us today. So, thank you very much.

SCOTT BOWMAN, VICE-CHANCELLOR CHARLES DARWIN UNIVERSITY: Thank you very much, Minister, for that Acknowledgement of Country. And we are on beautiful Larrakia Country today, and I do pay my respects to Elders past, present, and emerging, and acknowledge the work that we are doing with First Nations people, particularly in the area of teacher education.

A very warm welcome to Minister Clare. It is always wonderful to have the Minister on the campus. He is a great supporter of this university and the Northern Territory. But I do want to give an even warmer welcome to Senator McCarthy who is now the Minister for Indigenous Australians. It is an absolutely fantastic promotion that you’ve had, Minister. You have been a great supporter of First Nations people in the Territory and a great supporter of this university, and we are really looking forward to working with you in your new capacity.

This is a great day. It’s been a great two days for the Northern Territory. Yesterday we heard an announcement from Minister Clare about funding to schools in the Northern Territory, which is going to massively increase the funds that are going into teaching in the Northern Territory. And they are needed. Teacher education in the Northern Territory is more demanding than anywhere else in Australia. The Northern Territory, five and a half times the size of the United Kingdom. Just Kakadu National Park is bigger than the UK. And when you are trying to deliver education over those vast distances, you are going to have vast challenges. And the funding that you’ve put in, Minister, is really going to help the Territory. It’s really going to help this university to deliver on its mission of really delivering for all Territorians, whether they come from wealthier families, but also if they come from low socioeconomic families, First Nations families, immigrant families in the Territory.

What you’ve done yesterday is really going to help us because it is going to prepare the students coming to the university much better.

So, I thank you for the announcement you made yesterday. And I particularly thank you for the announcement you’re making today about the scholarships to our incredible teaching students, our education students. These are students that are really giving their all in their course and really are motivated to make a difference to Territorians through their endeavours in teaching. So, thank you to the students. Thank you to both Ministers. And it is a great day for the Territory. Thank you.

JASON CLARE, MINISTER FOR EDUCATION: Thanks very much, Scott. And Malarndirri the new Minister for Indigenous Australians, my dear friend, congratulations on your appointment. And, Scott, a great vice-chancellor, a great leader of this university here in the NT.

Yesterday was a big day. We all know and understand in our hearts the transformative power of education. Education is the most powerful cause for good in this country. It’s the great equaliser in an unequal world. If we get it right, the investments that we make in education make sure that everybody, wherever they’re born, wherever they live, wherever they grow up, can achieve everything that they want to in life. And yesterday we announced a billion-dollar deal with the Northern Territory Government to make sure that once and for all we fully fund all public schools in the Northern Territory.

Just to remind us about how monumental this is, it means that the most underfunded public schools in the country are now going to become the best funded public schools in the country. At the moment the Northern Territory is not on track to hit that until 2050. We’re bringing that forward by more than 20 years – more than two generations of kids that will benefit from that investment. Investing in education is like building a garden. The seeds that you plant one day you don’t get to see the tree straight away, but the changes that we announced yesterday are going to make a difference for children who aren’t at school yet, aren’t even born yet. It’s going to change their lives for the better and give them the opportunities that for some of us we just take for granted.

I said yesterday that I’m a kid who grew up in a family where no-one had finished high school. No one had finished Year 10. I’m the first person in my family to finish Year 10. I’m here because of the teachers that supported me at school, the opportunities I got for a great education that got me to this place today. And it’s more important to finish school today more than ever. And the investments that we make, if we make them in the right areas, if we make sure that kids have got the reading skills and the writing skills and the maths skills that they need when they’re little, then they can achieve anything and we can help to turn around the decline that’s happening right across the country at the moment in the number of kids finishing high school.

So money is important, but I tell you what, so are the teachers at the front of the classroom. Nothing is as important as a great teacher, and the truth is we don’t have enough teachers in this country at the moment. We’ve got a teacher shortage crisis. And so we’ve got to fix funding. We’ve got to tie that funding to the sort of things that are going to make a difference in the classroom. We’ve also got to make sure that we fix the teacher shortage crisis in this country.

Part of that is what we announced in the Budget a couple of years ago – scholarships worth up to $40,000 to encourage people to want to be a teacher. It pays off the HECS, helps with the cost of living while you’re at university, and there’s 11 students here at CDU who are the beneficiaries of the first thousand scholarships that we’re rolling out this year. I got the chance to meet one of those lucky recipients today.

In this year’s Budget we built on that and we announced that for the first time ever the Commonwealth Government is going to invest in paid prac. That means providing financial support for teaching students while they do their prac. So many students have told me that when you go on prac you’ve got to give up your part-time job, you’ve got to go somewhere else. It can mean extra costs. It can mean that you either don’t finish your degree or it slows down finishing your degree. We’ve got to remove those barriers and make it easier for more people to want to be a teacher.

I heard some good news a minute ago – that the number of people enrolled in teaching here at CDU this year is up. That’s fantastic news. In the undergraduate course and in the masters course. That’s a good sign. But let’s build on that. Let’s encourage more people here in the Territory to want to be a teacher. And these scholarships are part of that. Paying people while they do their prac is part of that as well. The pay rise that was announced for teachers by the Northern Territory Government yesterday is a big part of that, and the billion dollars that we’re investing in Northern Territory public schools is part of that as well.

Not everyone’s going to be a teacher, though. Some people we want to be a doctor. And the other thing that was fantastic to announce in this year’s Budget is the investment of almost $25 million to help to create a stand-alone medical school here at CDU for the first time as well. And that’s coming along at pace. Looking forward to catching up with you later, mate, to look at the details of how that’s all coming together. Thanks very much.

JOURNALIST: Minister, 12 scholarships to students from CDU. How many of the next bundle are actually going to go to Territorians and Territory-based students?

CLARE: I hope a lot, because these scholarships make a difference. When a scholarship is worth up to $40,000 it pays for the cost of the HECS, but it also provides financial support while you do your degree. And I’m conscious that for a lot of students one of the obstacles to going to uni or to staying at uni is the cost of paying the rent or paying the bills, putting food on the table while you’re at university. That’s why paid prac is important. But these scholarships really help as well.

It's built on the old model that existed when I was a kid in the 1970s – Commonwealth teacher scholarships – where you were bonded to a school. There was a deal where, we’ll give you some money now to help you get through uni, and the deal is that you’ll work at a school for a number of years as well to sort of repay that investment in you. And the same deal operates here now, which is a scholarship that’s worth up to $40,000 for an undergraduate student, and, in turn, you work for up to four years in a public school here. It helps to fill that shortage of teachers, helps to make sure that we’ve got that magic ingredient at the front of the classroom that can transform kids’ lives.

JOURNALIST: Is there kind of any sort of quotas around each state getting people commensurate –

CLARE: No, there’s no particular quota. But what we’ve said with the scholarships is that we want young people that are coming from poor families, from Indigenous backgrounds, from regional Australia to put their hands up and apply for these scholarships. We want the people that this could be make-or-break; it could be the difference between whether they become a teacher or not.

JOURNALIST: And some questions for the Indigenous Affairs Minister Malarndirri McCarthy. Closing the Gap data has dropped today. It doesn't look good. Most of the 19 categories were not on target to meet – in fact, we’re going back in a couple of areas. You’re now the Minister for Indigenous Australians. What’s going to change and how quickly can we see improvement?

MCCARTHY: It is deeply disappointing to see the figures that have come out today around Closing the Gap. One of the areas that I know we need to improve on as well is the need for bipartisanship in the Parliament. I will be working very hard to try and reach across the aisle to Coalition members, to the Greens, to the teals, to the crossbenchers, that we have to elevate Indigenous affairs, especially around these areas of Closing the Gap targets.

We need to work together as a Parliament, just as we’re trying to do with Ministers in Indigenous Affairs across every state and territory jurisdiction. So I’ll certainly be wanting to do that. What I’ll also do is reach out to the Productivity Commission. I know the report that came down earlier this year also has some directions that we should be looking at. Peter Yu will be at Garma this weekend. There’ll be quite a lot of people attending Garma, and this will be my first event to be able to have those discussions.

JOURNALIST: On the Productivity Commission, we’ve got a situation where there’s actually no way of tracking priority reforms. Why is that?

MCCARTHY: Well, again, these are sorts of issues that I need to get right across. This was not my purview. Obviously, I had Indigenous Health and the areas that I worked in around renal dialysis chairs, making sure that we had over 500 Aboriginal health clinicians in traineeships, and we now actually have over 300. So these are the matters that you’re referring to which I will be now getting stuck into.

JOURNALIST: Do you think, though, that people might rightly say, you know, we ought to be able to track these priority reforms? Closing the Gap isn’t a new project or program by any stretch. So what’s going on?

MCCARTHY: Well, again, these are the things that I need to really get to the heart of talking with Pat Turner and the Coalition of Peaks. Clearly they know what’s been going on in this space. I’ve been an observer; now actually in the driver’s seat, and I’ll be looking forward to being able to answer those questions once I know more details myself.

JOURNALIST: Now that you are in that driver’s seat, what would you say your top priorities in the portfolio are?

MCCARTHY: Well, clearly this weekend it’s getting out to Garma, listening to First Nations people. It will be the first real gathering since the referendum about resetting, regrouping, working with the Prime Minister on his targets going forward. But, again, as I said, working with crossbenchers in the Parliament. It’s really important to elevate Indigenous Affairs in a way that brings a lot of harmonious responses. We have the highest suicides, First Nations people. We have the highest rates of incarceration. I will be striving to reach across the parliamentary divide to ensure that there are some certain areas of Aboriginal affairs where we should be untouched in terms of it being a political football. And I will be striving to do my best to bring different political allegiances together on that issue.

JOURNALIST: Do you think you can bridge the divide between Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and the Labor Party, and I guess what would – many people would argue is a mood in the bush that is pretty furious with her and her attitude and the way she talks about First Nations people?

MCCARTHY: When I’m in the Senate and I listen to each of the Senators, including Senator Nampijinpa Price, there is an underlying theme here: one is that we do want to see the best outcomes. We may have different ways of trying to get there, and that’s going to be the challenge for me is to try and reach out and see what we can do and where we can find common ground.

JOURNALIST: What do you think common ground might be in terms of the next 12 months?

MCCARTHY: Well, I’ll certainly let you know when I know that.

JOURNALIST: In February the Government announced there would be a First Nations children’s commissioner, long called for by the sector. We still don’t have one yet. Why?

MCCARTHY: Well, that’s what we’re going to look at now. We certainly want to see a First Nations Commissioner up and running. In terms of an interim position, that is certainly something that the previous Minister, Linda Burney, had pushed for. And I am very conscious that with the results today and we see that out of home care removal of First Nations people is incredibly high. And so we do need that position.

JOURNALIST: I just had another question about scholarships. I’m not sure if this is a question better for Scott or the Minister. Will the scholarship quotas be just for domestic students or for international students as well?

CLARE: No, it’s for domestic students. These are scholarships for Aussies, young people that might be at school now that are thinking about, “What do I want to do when I leave school?” I want more kids to jump out of school and want to be a schoolteacher rather than a lawyer or a banker. So these are scholarships for Australian students. But they’re also scholarships for people who might already be doing another job here in Darwin or in Palmerston or in the Northern Territory and are thinking of changing careers. I met one of those people today. People who might be in their 30s or 40s and thinking, “hang on, I don’t want to be a journalist forever; I want to be a schoolteacher. I want to change people’s lives.”

I saw an ad on a train in New York, a subway train 20 years ago, and it said, “you remember your first grade teacher’s name, who will remember yours?” The fact is we do remember our first grade teacher’s name, and that should remind us of the impact and the power that teachers have on our lives, whether they’re teachers in first grade, whether they’re teachers in high school, whether they’re teachers here at the university. The transformative power of education rests in the hands of these people. That’s why these scholarships are for people thinking of leaving school to become a teacher, but they’re also for you too – for people who might be thinking, “hey, I want to be a teacher.” The scholarship can help because it can pay the HECS and pay the bills while you're at uni.

JOURNALIST: And we know that international students play a huge role in the Territory’s economy. Will there be any support? I know we’ve got those caps that we’re looking at. Will be there any support for international students, particularly in Darwin and the Territory?

CLARE: Scott might talk about the different supports that the university provides for international students as well as, the work that you’re doing in terms of accommodation for students as well. But these scholarships are for Australian students. Did you want to talk about that at all?

BOWMAN: Yeah, I can do. Yeah, so, look, we do have scholarships for international students that want to come over and do teacher education. And there are a lot of them that come to the Territory. And, to be honest, we rely on international students to come over and be teachers in the Territory. So we have a range of scholarships. There’s a Vice-Chancellor’s scholarship which helps them, there’s a Global Merit Scholarship that helps them. The big thing at the moment, though, is to get the students here and to get more visa approvals. So, we’ve seen a massive dropping off of the number of visas that are being issued. We are hoping to get some clarity in September around that issue. But to provide the number of teachers that the Northern Territory Government needs for the public schools, we need international graduates, yeah.

JOURNALIST: What would you say the ratio of support for domestic student teachers versus international student teachers would be?

BOWMAN: In terms of scholarships?

JOURNALIST: Scholarships and other, like, financial supports, yeah.

BOWMAN: Well, I think really all students get quite a lot of support. So, you know, just the HECS scheme is just an incredible scheme which allows people to go to university without having to pay fees upfront. I mean, that is a barrier to education in a lot of countries which we don’t have here. There are a number of scholarships for domestic students, and now the announcement today of this incredible scholarship of up to $40,000 over the course. So there is quite a lot of support.

International students do it tough. I mean, I am full of admiration for international students. Often our students, their families will have clubbed together and put enough money in to get them to be able to come and study here. They come and study, they work hard, they do part-time jobs in the hospitality industry, and then with all those skills and that knowledge, they actually give back to the Territory. So I am full of admiration and respect for international students. And, I would argue, we need them more in the Northern Territory than anywhere in Australia. As you know if you live here, we have job shortages across the board, and we need migration of people into the Territory. And international students is just the most wonderful way of doing it, in my opinion.

JOURNALIST: I’ve got a question for Minister McCarthy as well, if that’s okay. So obviously we’ve spoken a bit about Closing the Gap with only five of the 19 measures in place. What are you wanting to see change to change this trend?

MCCARTHY: Well, as I’ve said, obviously working in a bipartisan manner is absolutely critical to me. I see that we can as political leaders across every party be able to rise above this. We are an incredibly wealthy nation. We’re a brilliant nation. We can sort all sorts of problems, and we must be able to sort this. And I do want to call out to every politician in the Federal Parliament, but across every jurisdiction, I will be determined to see that we can turn around some of these figures.

JOURNALIST: In terms of the interim commissioner you mentioned there, why do we need an interim commissioner for First Nations children, and will they have the same amount of powers? Why can’t we just direct appoint someone, get the role filled and have them operating properly?

MCCARTHY: Sure. When we made the announcement we also knew that we had to do a lot of work in terms of establishing what the Commissioner’s role would be. So it was important to have an interim commissioner, which is underway at the moment, so that then there could be a legislative process as to what is defined through legislation in the Parliament. It's not dissimilar to actually the Aged Care Commissioner, First Nations Interim Aged Care Commissioner, who’s doing exactly the same thing. We just want to make sure that whatever legislation we bring to the parliament we are very clear as to what that role will be.

JOURNALIST: Who should be the interim?

JOURNALIST: Sorry, so your promotion to Indigenous Australian Minister, can you tell us what your main goals are within that role?

MCCARTHY: Well, to see Indigenous Affairs not treated as a political football. I am absolutely determined to see and to give hope to our families across Australia that we mustn’t see the high rates of suicide that are continuing. We must reduce the high rates of incarceration of First Nations people. We have to stop the deaths in custody. We have to see the increase in the health and lifestyle, and to give fairness and equality. I mean, the rate of inequality and poverty in this country for First Nations people is something that I will focus on. We’ve already established here in the Northern Territory that we’re going to contribute $4 billion towards improving housing. We’ve seen that with the rolling out as well in the health sector with the urgent care clinics in places that we want to announce and I have announced In Ali-Curung, at Groote Eylandt, in Maningrida, in Tiwi Islands. So, we are specifically focused and wanting to see the Closing the Gap, and I know I need to do it with all politicians.

JOURNALIST: Do you think there should be anyone in particular who should be the interim children’s commissioner, First Nations children’s commissioner?

MCCARTHY: That will be a role for Minister Rishworth. That actually comes under her purview.

JOURNALIST: And obviously Garma is this weekend. What are we actually going to see announced and substantively changed? Obviously last year Garma was used as a means of really pumping up the Voice referendum. What will we see this year?

MCCARTHY: Are you coming out to Garma?

JOURNALIST: No. My mum is, though.

MCCARTHY: Tune in and we’ll let you know on the weekend.

SPEAKER: Thanks, guys. Cheers.