Press conference - Elizabeth, South Australia

GLENN DOCHERTY, MAYOR OF PLAYFORD: So the City of Playford is delighted to be here because we know that our students in the north deserve world class facilities to help complete their degree, and that’s what we’ve got here at the Uni Hub of Playford. And I’ll hand over to Matt Burnell, the Federal Member for Spence, who’ll say a few more words about the uni hub. 

MATT BURNELL, MEMBER FOR SPENCE: Thank you, Mayor Docherty and the Honourable Jason Clare for being here today. 

There’s an age old saying – you can’t be what you can’t see, and for university degrees that’s definitely the case here in the northern suburbs. Less than 10 per cent of people living in the north hold a higher education certificate against the national average of 26.4. That’s a big, big difference. Having a university study hub right here in Elizabeth is a vital part of trying to meet that gap and improve the educational outcomes of thousands of people across the north. 

When I first got elected back in 2022, I made it my mission to go and see the Education Minister and rattle the cage about the need to improve outcomes, not just in university degrees but also across all educational levels for people living in the north. We need to improve the opportunity afforded young people moving out of school and into working life. Having these sort of facilities makes that significant shift possible. 

For people living in Gawler, they’re now only 15 minutes from a place of study to complete a university degree. They don’t have to travel over an hour to get into the city or further to go down south to Flinders. 

All that is afforded to you right here in the heart of Elizabeth. I couldn’t be prouder of the work we’ve done over the last three years to deliver this in partnership with the City of Playford and all other key stakeholders to lift the opportunity for educational excellence here in the north. 

Thank you, and I’ll hand over to Jason. 

JASON CLARE, MINISTER FOR EDUCATION: In Elizabeth Bay in Sydney, the percentage of young people with a university degrees is about 70 per cent. And here in Elizabeth it’s 7 per cent. That’s wrong. That’s what we’ve got to change, and that’s what this hub is all about – making sure that kids who grow up here in the northern suburbs of Adelaide get a crack at going to university, get the same chance to follow their dream as kids right in the heart of the city, right across the country.

Ultimately what this is all about is fairness. And the reason it’s happening – I’ve got to be honest about this – is because of these two blokes here. Because of Matt and Glen, their passion, because of the work they did to put this proposal together. 

When I originally came up with the plan to have these university study hubs it was always on my mind that we had to have one in the Playford area, that we had to have one in Elizabeth. And the statistics tell you why. 

When I was a kid growing up in the western suburbs of Sydney, I saw a lot of McDonald’s logos and KFC logos and Grace Brothers logos – now Myers – but not a lot of university logos. And for a lot of kids growing up where I grew up, they just thought that uni was for someone else, somewhere else. It was a long way away and it wasn’t for us. 

I want everybody to know who lives in the northern suburbs of Adelaide or the western suburbs of Sydney or Melbourne or Brisbane that university is for you, too. And that’s what this hub is all about. It’s about bringing university closer to where a lot of people live. 

And when you bring university closer to where people live it makes it a hell of a lot easier for people to start a degree or to finish a degree. It can cut down your travel time by half an hour or an hour or even more. It can make it easier to get to your part-time job. It can make it easier to drop the kids off at school or at child care or pick them up. It can be the difference that changes somebody’s life. And that’s why this hub is so important. 

I’ll also make some remarks about the start of school. School starts today in South Australia. It starts in Victoria as well and it starts in Queensland and it will start across the rest of the country over the next week. So hopefully there’s a lot of excited kids and a lot of relieved parents and a lot of fantastic teachers back at work ready to change the lives of the next generation. 

Last year, we saw some small improvements in attendance rates at school and some small improvements in literacy and in numeracy and in completion rates – the number of people finishing school – and that’s a good sign. 

But there is still a really long way to go. And this year the agreements that we struck with every state and territory to fix the funding of our schools start to roll out. And with that funding big reform starts to roll out this year as well. And that includes phonics checks for kids who are 6 years old in year 1 to make sure that they’ve got the reading skills that they need and if they don’t, extra support to get them there. And this year also the rollout of numeracy checks for 6-year-olds in year 1 as well, again, to identify kids who are falling behind and need more help. And one of the ways to help them is with catch-up tutoring or small group tutoring. That rolls out across the country this year as well. 

One of the other things that rolls out this year is our National Anti-Bullying Plan. The fact is bullying is worse today than it was back in my day or back in our day. Back when we were at school, bullying happened in the playground, now bullying can happen any time of the day and night, and that’s partly because of the internet, it’s partly because of social media. That’s why we introduced the social media ban. But it’s not just social media where bullying happens, and that’s why last year ministers got together and agreed on a national plan to roll out reforms to help tackle bullying online and in the playground. And ministers will be back here meeting in South Australia in the middle of February to agree on the details of that implementation plan so it can roll out across the country this year. 

Happy to take some questions. 

JOURNALIST: What does the centre have or what specifically makes it special? 

CLARE: Well, a hub like this allows you to do almost any university degree at any university in the country. So you can be doing a degree at the new Adelaide University down in the CBD and visit the campuses down there and then come back here to do extra study. 

Or you could be doing a degree in marine biology at James Cook University up in Cairns and you can do it from here. It’s a place, it’s a space that allows you the opportunity for a bit of quiet to be able to plug in your device. Not everybody’s got that at home. 

But I want you to think about this as not just a building or a space, it’s also got a staff, a team of experts who are here and can help you. Sometimes studying at university can be a pretty lonely thing. And just talking to some of the students already, they told me that it’s the team here – whether it’s the academic help in getting your assignments done or whether it’s the mental health support and all of the other health and wellbeing supports to help you when things get tough – that can be the difference between starting a uni degree and finishing a uni degree. 

And I think also situating it here on the TAFE next to the senior college also helps as well because it means that for some of the students that are still at school or at TAFE, they can think, “Hey, I can do a uni degree too.” 

JOURNALIST: You mentioned that less than 10 per cent here in Elizabeth [inaudible] and it’s I think 26.4 per cent on average. Is this going to close that gap? 

CLARE: It’s part of it. It’s one of the things that we need to do. If we want a country where your chances in life don’t depend on where you live or how rich your parents are, then one of the things that we’ve got to do is bring uni closer to where people live. 

At the moment I think, as I said, and, Glen, you were telling me, depending on whether you’ve got a car or not, a trip to uni at the moment can be half an hour, an hour, an hour and a half, even longer. So it cuts down that travel time and makes things easy. But it’s just one of the things that we need to do. That extra investment in our schools, in our public schools, is important. Helping kids to learn to read and write when they’re young so they don’t fall behind so they’re more likely to finish school means that more kids will think about going to TAFE, will think about going to university. 

And can I give a quick shoutout to the Premier and the Education Minister Blair Boyer. It was about 12 months ago that we signed that agreement, and that agreement that the Commonwealth Government signed with the South Australian Government was really the trigger that then meant that Victoria and New South Wales and Queensland signed the agreement as well. It got us to the point where finally after more than a decade we’re now fixing the funding of public schools right across the country. 

But there’s other things that we need to do in our unis as well. And this year real needs-based funding for all of our universities will roll out. And that means the sort of extra supports that you find here for students to help them finish their degree. You’ll see that roll out at universities across the country as well. 

JOURNALIST: I’ve got a couple of burning questions for you, Minister. 

CLARE: Did you want to – we’ll go back and forth, but why don’t you have one and then we’ll – 

JOURNALIST: I might have two. Students return to classrooms from tomorrow. Could the social media delay make it harder for younger students to make connections? 

CLARE: Look, I don’t think so. Social media is a cess pit. Any mum and dad – and I’m one of them – can see what this is doing to our kids. And over the last couple of weeks we’ve seen about 4 million accounts shut down. And that’s a good thing. I want to see fewer kids online and more kids out on the soccer field or on the cricket field or in the playground having a bit of fun. 

There’s still ways for kids to communicate, whether it’s in person or whether it’s with messaging apps. But what we’re doing here is getting kids out of that endless doom scrolling. Ask any parent who’s yelled out at their kids in their bedroom that dinner’s ready and heard nothing back and they’ll tell you that there’s something wrong here, that the companies that run these social media apps are using our kids, feeding off our kids. It’s affecting the mental health of our kids. And taking action here is a good thing that I’m pretty sure other countries are going to follow. 

JOURNALIST: Righto, while we’re on the subject, psychologists say children may feel left out of their main way of keeping in touch. Have you heard these concerns? 

CLARE: No, I haven’t. What we did last year and the year before that was ban mobile phones at school. And we all thought this was going to be pretty difficult. It turns out it wasn’t that hard. 

And the people that were telling us we did the right thing were students and teachers. Kids were more focused in the classroom, but they were also having more fun in the playground. They were doing what we used to do when we went to school – they were talking to their mates. Playgrounds are a bit noisier than they were a couple of years ago because they didn’t have their head down doom scrolling. They were talking and playing and having fun. 

Blair Boyer, the Education Minister, told me that one of the complaints he had from students was that they were getting bored and they wanted the music club back or sports clubs back, different things that kids could do during lunchtime. So we’ve had a bit of a live experiment for the last few years, and it turns out when you get the phone out of the hands of kids then they find other ways to communicate – talking to their mates rather than talking to them on the phone and having more fun. When school finished, go past the bus stop and you’d see kids back with their heads down looking at their phone, doing that doom scrolling. We all know the mental health impact it’s had on our kids. I’m glad that we’re acting. 

JOURNALIST: On schools, have any that you’re aware of had to postpone their first day back because of the heat wave. And if so, how many? 

CLARE: I’m not aware of that. But that’s something that Blair and the state education department would be able to help you with. To the best of my knowledge all classrooms in South Australia are air-conditioned. And certainly the Department of Education here, like other departments, have set policies about what to do in extreme heat conditions. And one of those, I know because I’ve got a little boy in primary school, is when the heat goes up to a certain temperature kids don’t go outside; they stay in those air-conditioned classrooms. 

Some departments have different policies about when school might close for the day. But, of course, that has risks as well if kids are going back to homes that don’t have air-conditioning. And so I haven’t heard of any changes made today, but that air-conditioning is critical.

JOURNALIST: And, sorry, just to clarify about the [inaudible]? 

CLARE: To the best of my knowledge, yes. I certainly know that’s the case in Queensland. Most classrooms across the country are air-conditioned. But I don’t want to give you that absolute guarantee because I haven’t seen the data for every state. 

JOURNALIST: I’ve got something else here. Two men set fire to the Australian flag at a protest in Brisbane yesterday. It sparked renewed about whether the practice should be outlawed. Do you support federal laws to ban the burning of the Australian flag? 

CLARE: We already have state laws that allow police to act here. But I think any right-minded Australian looking at this would just be shaking their head today. You’ve got idiots burning the Australian flag. We should be looking up at the Australian flag with pride, not burning it. What we saw yesterday was some pretty serious and despicable stuff. 

In Perth, you had someone throw a bomb, or what looked like a bomb, into a crowd. Now, if that was real or if that worked, that could have killed people. And in Sydney you had neo-Nazis spraying filthy, vile antisemitic hate at a rally there. Have we learnt nothing as a country here? 

Words lead to bullets, and we’ve seen that in my home town on the beach at Bondi. Now, we’ve got to turn the temperature down. That’s what the Prime Minister is calling for here and a bit of unity. Attention seekers like this are getting a lot of attention, but the truth is that most Australians are looking at this bloke today and say this is not on. 

JOURNALIST: Should the government at least consider such a move? Queensland’s Premier says he’d support a federal ban. 

CLARE: I remember looking at what John Howard said on this a number of years ago where he said depending on what you do here you potentially turn a yahoo into a martyr. 

We’ve got to be careful here, we don’t want to encourage idiots to do more of this sort of despicable stuff. We’ve got to work here to bring the country together. This is the best bloody country in the world. Yesterday was about celebrating that. Most normal Aussies were out there having a barbie, having a few beers, catching up with their mates, looking forward to the year ahead. They weren’t out there protesting or doing stupid things like this. 

JOURNALIST: Just to be clear, is the Federal government considering a ban on burning the Australian flag? 

CLARE: As I said this morning, I’ll leave that to the legal eagles. The advice I’ve got is that there’s laws at a state level that allow the police to act. 

JOURNALIST: And I’ve just got one more, if that’s okay? This is a particularly expensive time for families. How conscious is the government of the struggles [inaudible], are going through? 

CLARE: It’s the top of our list. Cost of living is the top priority of this government, and it has to be. We’ve made progress. We’ve seen inflation coming down. We’ve seen interest rates come down three times last year. We’ve seen wages going up. We’ve seen tax cuts roll out. We’ve seen the big changes to Medicare that make it easier to see a doctor for free. But we’re under no illusions here that a lot of Aussies are doing it tough. We know that there is always more work that we need to do. 

Good stuff. Thanks, guys.