E&OE TRANSCRIPT
RADIO INTERVIEW
ABC RADIO NATIONAL BREAKFAST
MONDAY, 28 APRIL 2025
SUBJECTS: Leaders’ Debate; Western Sydney; Welcome to Country; Costings; Housing.
SALLY SARA, HOST: Jason Clare is the Education Minister and Labor’s campaign co-spokesperson and joins me now. Jason Clare, welcome back to Breakfast.
JASON CLARE, MINISTER FOR EDUCATION, LABOR CAMPAIGN SPOKESPERSON: Good morning, Sally.
SARA: Today’s Newspoll is the latest to show that Labor is on track to hold the most seats, if not retain a slim majority. Is that the result that you’re expecting this weekend?
CLARE: The result on the weekend is going to be very, very tight. It usually is in federal elections. I don’t think it’ll be any different this weekend and it’ll come down to a couple of thousand votes in a couple of seats. So everything is on the line here. I think that the more people see Peter Dutton, though, the less they like of him. And a good indication of that was the debate last night. You saw a Prime Minister with a plan and an Opposition Leader with anger management issues. In Anthony Albanese, you saw a calm and rational leader. In Peter Dutton, you saw all of that aggro and negativity that you see in the Parliament in that debate and very little optimism. Mark Riley asked at the end of that debate, ‘give us some hope, give us some optimism.’ What we saw last night from Peter Dutton was all the optimism of an undertaker.
SARA: In Western Sydney, how would you assess the Labor campaign in Western Sydney? One state Labor Minister is on the record as saying ‘there’s been a change in atmosphere.’ Community leaders can’t recall an election like it, talking about division and hostility. What’s your assessment of what’s happening in Western Sydney right now?
CLARE: The first thing I’d say about Western Sydney, as a proud Westie myself, is it’s not homogenous. Western Sydney’s big, millions of people. It’s different in Campbelltown than it is in Bankstown, than it is in Parramatta, than it is in Penrith. In Western Sydney, you’ll find more people working from home than there are tradies on the tools. In places like I represent or seats like Werriwa in Western Sydney, you’ll see one in four or one in five people that will vote this weekend that have a HECS debt. So there’s a lot on the line for them. They’ll be looking at the commitment that we’ve made, that the first thing that we will introduce into the Parliament if we win the election is to cut everyone’s HECS debt by 20 per cent. So they’re the sorts of things that will be on people’s minds, including our commitment to raise bulk billing rates to make it easier to see a doctor for free. If they watched the debate last night, I think one of the most chilling parts of that debate was Peter Dutton defending his decision to try to introduce a tax to go to the doctor. Ask people in Western Sydney what’s on their mind. A lot of people will talk about Medicare. They’ll talk about access to top quality health services and the ability to get it for free rather than have to pull out your credit card.
SARA: Should there be a minister for Western Sydney? The Coalition has a Shadow Minister.
CLARE: There’s five ministers for Western Sydney that sit in the Cabinet right now, including Chris Bowen, myself, Tony Burke, Michelle Rowland and Ed Husic. For the first time, I think ever, we’ve now got five Cabinet Ministers from Western Sydney.
SARA: But as a standalone portfolio?
CLARE: It’s bigger than that. If you’ve got five Ministers from Western Sydney sitting around the Cabinet table, then you see the impact of that in the decisions that we make as a Government, whether it’s cutting the cost of child care, whether it’s finally, after 50 years of debating this, funding our schools, our public schools properly, or whether it’s making it easier to get to uni. When I was a kid growing up in Western Sydney, Sally, I’ve got to tell you, university for my mates seemed like it was somewhere else, for someone else. It was just too far away. Lots of McDonalds logos, lots of Westfield logos, not a lot of university logos. As a result of the sorts of things that I’m doing and we’re doing as a Government, we’re bringing university now closer to where people live. And some of that includes setting up these University Study Hubs in places like Liverpool and Fairfield and Mount Druitt. They’re the sorts of things that happen when you’ve got a Labor Government and you’ve got Labor Ministers from Western Sydney.
SARA: Welcome to Country ceremonies, are they overused in your view or do they remain appropriate?
CLARE: This is just simply a matter of respect, respecting the history of this country. And for organisations, they’ve got a choice. They can decide whether they want to hold a Welcome to Country or not. But let’s remember where all of this debate began. This all spawned out of actions of neo-Nazis on dawn services last Friday. You had neo-Nazis booing when a Welcome to Country happened, in Melbourne and again in Perth. I don’t think that we should be letting these sorts of extreme individuals carry the debate or lead the debate here in Australia.
SARA: Do you think there’s wider criticism of Welcome to Country ceremonies and support for them to be wound up?
CLARE: Look, different people will have different views. That’s the beauty of a democracy. But the last thing that I want to see is this debate being led by people like the people who were booing on Friday morning.
SARA: Both parties will release final details on their costings this week. Does the Opposition place a higher priority than Labor on getting the Budget under control in the next few years ahead?
CLARE: I’ll leave it to Jim Chalmers and Katy Gallagher to set out our costings this week, and they’ll be able to answer that question in detail. I’ll tell you what we put a top priority on, and that is making sure that we help Australians with the challenges they face now, and that means delivering a tax cut for every Australian taxpayer. It means making it easier to see a doctor for free than ever before. It means skilling up young Australians for the jobs that exist now and the jobs that will exist in the future. And that means free TAFE courses. It also means cutting HECS debt by 20 per cent. What are the Liberals offering here other than a promise to increase taxes? I’m not joking here. They’re promising to introduce laws to increase taxes. They’re promising to give your boss a tax cut. Again, this is not a joke. They’re promising tax deductions for free lunches for bosses. And then this other big policy that they’re now trying not to talk about, $600 billion that you have to pay for, for these nuclear reactors, which are now about as popular as a pimple at a school formal.
SARA: The Coalition says its costings for that are much lower.
CLARE: They might say that, but have a look at the work that the CSIRO has done that proves that this will cost $600 billion. It won’t turn a light on for 20 years. It’ll only produce about four per cent of the energy that Australia is going to need and Australians are going to have to pay for it, both in cuts to health, cuts to education and increases in your electricity bill, which is why I say this is about as popular as a pimple at a school formal and why Peter Dutton is going out of his way now to cover them up and why when he was asked last night, ‘will you visit one of these sites before Saturday’, he said ‘no.’
SARA: Just finally, housing is one of the central issues of the election. Both you and the Coalition say that you want to fix the housing affordability crisis, but you also want house prices to keep going up. Can those two things happen at the same time?
CLARE: The truth is it’s harder to buy a house today than it was when we were kids. Everybody listening here knows that. And there is no simple or single solution, but there are productive and important things Governments can do. So one of those is making it easier to buy a house with a smaller deposit. That’s what the five per cent deposit policy is about. So you don’t have to pay $20,000 in mortgage insurance. The other thing that we can do is make sure that we build more homes, more homes for first home buyers to buy without having to bid in an auction against people who are looking to buy their second or third home, but also building more homes that are affordable rental homes where you might be able to get a lease for five years rather than for six months and importantly making sure that we build more social homes to help Australians who are homeless, to help veterans who are sleeping on the street, to help women who are fleeing domestic violence. There has been a chronic underinvestment in social housing for decades in this country. We’re seeking to turn it around and that’s what the Housing Australia Future Fund is all about.
SARA: And how many houses have been built under that fund at this stage?
CLARE: So far about 2,000. There’s about 28,000 that are under construction now. There’s about 400,000 homes that have been built in the first three years of this Government across the board. But I’m not going to take a lecture from the Liberal Party about a fund that they stopped in the Senate for two years. Criticising the Government for the number of houses that have been built under this fund is like criticising Gout Gout for not finishing the 100 metres after one second. They stopped us from building for two years. We finally got this legislation through the Parliament and it’s going to build the sort of homes that Australians need.
SARA: Jason Clare, we’ll need to leave it there. Thank you for your time this morning.
CLARE: Good on you. Thanks very much.
ENDS