SUBJECTS: Leader’s debate; Quality teachers; Lifting teaching standards; Labor’s $5000 teaching bursaries; Labor’s plan to address cost of living; Labor’s plan for a Better Future; Religious discrimination bill; Lifting real wages; Housing Australia Future Fund.
 
ANTHONY ALBANESE, LEADER OF THE AUSTRALIAN LABOR PARTY: [School bell rings] Nine o'clock. Well, thanks very much for joining us and [school bell interrupts] the bells toll for the Morrison Government, time is up. That should be it [school bell interrupts]. Anyone taking this live? This will be really fascinating TV for those at home. Can I say it is fantastic to be back here at St Mary's Cathedral School, a school where I spent eight years of my life from year 5 to year 12. A school that gave me some of the values that I have in life. The Christian Brothers’ philosophy comes from Edmund Rice. A few years ago, I gave an Edmund Rice lecture at Christian Brothers at Lewisham. It's about giving working class people opportunity. That's the philosophy of this school, and this school is a multicultural school, people from different backgrounds are being given the opportunity of a hand-up in life, to give themselves every chance to be all that they can be. And it was wonderful to be welcomed back here at the school. And I thank His Grace as well for the welcome, we had a meeting and a lovely cup of coffee beforehand as well. The bells are tolling for the Morrison Government because early voting starts today. It says it all that the Morrison Government have had a phone hook up with members of their caucus, telling people to not vote early. We want people to participate in our democracy and to vote whenever is convenient, and to vote for a better future. A better future with real plans to address the cost of living, with cheaper childcare, with cheaper energy bills, with making more things here, with strengthening Medicare, with making sure we have more secure work. Last night, I outlined positive plans for Australia's future, Scott Morrison was left with just smears, scares, and a smirk. That's all he's got after three terms of government, asking for another three years, we can't afford to waste another three years. We can't afford three more years of the same, with a government that won't acknowledge the problems that are there, let alone provide solutions for it. This Government thinks that people have got it easy. The truth is that they haven't. We are facing real challenges. And one of the challenges is how we become a smarter country, how we deal with education and training. And that's what today's announcement is about, and I'm very pleased to be here with Tanya Plibersek, the local member, as well as a mother of a student at this school here, as well as our education spokesperson.

The truth is that our teachers really stepped up during COVID, it was a really tough couple of years for teachers, for students, for parents. Teachers stepped up and did what they could to make sure that students weren't left behind. We have of course previously announced, at another school earlier this year, our plan to provide additional support for every school, so that we can deal with the impact of the recovery from COVID, dealing with things like mental health, dealing with excursions, dealing with making sure that students can catch up on what they missed out on during COVID. But today's announcement is a really important one. It's about teacher quality. We will seek to double the number of high achievers teaching over the decade by offering 5,000 achieving students bursaries, up to $12,000 a year to study an initial teacher education degree. It's about attracting people who will become the best teachers into the profession. In addition to that, I'm particularly attracted towards the High Achieving Teachers Program and additional 1,500 qualified professionals in other fields going in. Some of you who've been around for a while, might remember Antony Sachs, he was my deputy chief of staff when I was a minister in the government. He after that, and he's my age, so he began becoming a teacher in his 50s, he went back to university to put back in, to become a maths teacher, a high school maths teacher, and he's currently teaching at Christian Brothers at Lewisham. That's the sort of thing that we need to do. A good teacher changes lives. Here at this school my favourite teacher in high school was a fellow called Paul Cheney. He was my economics teacher, he encouraged me to do economics at university. He made us buy the Financial Review every day, cut out clippings from the Fin, put it in a scrapbook and go through the details. He made a difference to my life. He also made a difference to someone who many of you would know as well, Paul Cleary was the year below me. Paul Clearly became, of course, a senior economics writer at The Herald and with Fairfax it was called then. He is another example, there are so many people at this school, students went on to do economics at university because of that teacher. A good teacher can make an enormous difference. Our plan here costed at $146.5 million over the forward estimates will make an enormous difference as well.
 
TANYA PLIBERSEK, SHADOW MINISTER FOR EDUCATION: Thanks, Anthony. It is such a pleasure to be here at St Mary's Cathedral College. I want to thank Michael Callahan, the principal, all of the staff, and the students who have welcomed us so warmly today, they had a particularly warm welcome for Anthony. It's lovely seeing how warmly embraced he was by the students here at his alma mater. You know, every one of us can remember the teacher that changed our lives. I'm sure that's true of everyone here at this press conference today. As Anthony said, teachers do change lives, they inspire the next generation. Teaching is a vocation, and we want our best and brightest going in to teaching, we want them to be inspiring a new generation of learners, so that young Australian students get the results that will see them set up for a lifetime of achievement. You know, in the last couple of years, I think a lot of parents who were doing the remote learning had a real insight into the complexity, the responsibility, the professionalism of our teaching workforce. But sadly, under Scott Morrison, what we're seeing is too many high achieving teachers leaving the profession, and not enough high achievers entering the profession to replace them. The result of that is a continued slide in our international testing results. Australia is now seeing the worst results since international testing began for reading, writing and maths. We're also seeing teacher shortages, right across Australia there are too many classes in too many schools that are getting minimal supervision, because they can't find a relief teacher to teach that class that day. We're seeing too many students who are being taught by teachers who aren't expert in their subject. So particularly, that's true of maths and science. There are not enough maths and science teachers to be teaching subjects that they are familiar with and passionate about and passing on that passion, as Anthony's economics teacher did for him. 

So in order to lift the standards of people going into teaching, in order to tackle the slide in results, and in order to deal with the massive shortage of teachers we already have, that's only scheduled to get worse, Labor has a plan to attract more high achievers into teaching. First of all by offering bursaries, up to 5,000 bursaries, to attract those high achievers into teaching degrees. Secondly, by making it possible for career changers, like Anthony's friend, Antony Sachs, to go from other areas where they are achieving professionally, going into teaching. And thirdly, to respond to elements of the Quality Initial Teaching Education Review. I'm sure Anthony's happy to answer any questions, or if there are any questions of details about the policies, I'm happy to go to them.
 
ALBANESE: We will be going, by the way, you'll be going to three states today. And there will be a number of events, so we'll just take a few questions.
 
JOURNALIST: During the Religious Discrimination debate, you said the Labor Government will act to protect all students, gay and transgender. How soon will this occur if Labor wins government?
 
PLIBERSEK: Labor's been very clear that we support action to protect people of faith from discrimination on the basis of religion. We've also been consistently clear that we don't want to see any child discriminated against. Any legislation will be done in the normal way. If we form government, we'll be consulting widely on the legislation, we certainly don't want to do what Scott Morrison has done, which is divide the nation by introducing this type of legislation.
 
ALBANESE: Just behind you, and then —
 
JOURNALIST: Just on wages. You said last night that you would try to lift real wages but couldn't guarantee it. Why won't you make that guarantee, is that the ambitious message you want to take to voters?
 
ALBANESE: I'm very confident that working with business and unions, you'll recall, I think you were at the speech I gave at the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry last week, a serious speech of half an hour to 150 business leaders. The Reserve Bank over a long period of time has warned that one of the weaknesses in the economy was the falling of real wages, they refer to that consistently over a number of years. The truth is, we've had flatlining wages over 10 years, the key to lifting wages is lifting productivity. One of the first things I will do is to convene a full employment summit, we'll have a Full Employment White Paper, we'll work with business and unions on enterprise bargaining. But we'll also change the Act so that secure work is an objective of the Act. We'll make gender pay equity an objective as well, and we have a range of policies aimed towards that. The other thing that we need to do is to recognise that so many people are doing it just so tough. Half a million Australians are working three or more jobs, people in the aged care sector earning as little as $22 an hour. Now the minimum wage is $20.33. If you're working $22 an hour, in what's a really tough job, it's tough physically, but it's also incredibly tough emotionally and on people's mental health, which is why people are leaving the sector. We need to address that. Our clear objective is to lift up living standards, that's our objective, that's what we'll work on. It stands in stark contrast, the Prime Minister last night, I got two questions to the Prime Minister, one of them I thought was pretty easy, which is “should people be paid the minimum wage?” And you know what he said? “It depends”. He couldn't even say that Australian workers should be paid the minimum wage.
 
JOURNALIST: You had a meeting with the Archbishop this morning, what did you discuss? Were you concerned about religious voters going away from the Labor Party?
 
ALBANESE: No, not at all. I know His Grace very well. You won't be surprised by that, given I'm an ex-student of this school. We meet regularly and when I meet with a Catholic Archbishop, or indeed my local priest, it's not the subject of public information. It was a private chat, wasn't terribly political. It's on a personal level. I regard Anthony Fisher as someone who is a friend, he's Archbishop, and we discussed a range of, a range of personal issues and included of course, Catholic education, and how important it is.
 
JOURNALIST: Labor's off budget spending plans are going to see the nation's debt balloon by another $52 billion to pay for your climate change and policy for housing. Deficits set to increase already by $10 billion under your government. Doesn't this threaten your attacks on the Coalition over economic management and will you commit to budget repair?
 
ALBANESE: Gee, they're getting desperate, aren't they? Here we have spending that's on the same basis as the National Broadband Network, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation that they tried to abolish, this is an investment that produces a return, you only have off budget commitments if it produces a return to the government. So for example, our Housing Australia Future Fund will see $10 billion invested through the Future Fund, by the way, which was established and that Peter Costello and others were appointed to. And the interest on that to be used to invest in social housing. This is good policy, it makes sense, and it will make a difference.
 
JOURNALIST: Mr Albanese last night you talked about negative gearing being a good thing, that's the exact opposite of your party's policy from the last election. Did you not support that policy and just not speak up at all, and doesn't negative gearing contribute to our immediate housing market? 
 
ALBANESE: We were not successful at the last election, we've come up with a better policy, it's a better housing policy that we have, that we're taking to this election.
 
JOURNALIST: Just back to touching on wages which was mentioned late last night, you have gone to this election promising an increase in wages, given the fact the inflation is going to be double than wages growth, isn't that a massive hole in your central plan, and that you won't be able to deliver on something you promised?
 
ALBANESE: Not at all. There are two approaches towards wages at this election. Scott Morrison and his Government who want low wage growth to be a key feature of their economic architecture. They've said that, explicitly they've said that, the former Finance Minister. And Labor, which understands that we don't want people to be left behind, we don't want people's living standard to be falling. That's our approach. That's why we support wage increases for aged care workers. That's why we want to change the definition of the way that areas like the gender issues operate. So there's only been one successful case in the 21 that have been taken over recent years going way back. In 2012 —

JOURNALIST: If you don’t —

ALBANESE: You ask the question, now you get the answer, that's the way it works. In 2012, we successfully as the Labor government put forward a submission for the Social and Community Services Award. What that did was lead to an increase in pay that kept community sector workers working in that sector, that led to higher wages, particularly for women in that sector. That's what we did, we'll continue to make practical measures that make a difference, including Same Job, Same Pay. And just one difference as well, that I can't understand this Government, the Government had legislation before the parliament to outlaw wage theft and make it a crime, and they withdrew it. They withdrew it even though it had overwhelming support. It says all about this Government, says it all. And at the same time, they had legislation which wanted to get rid of the Better Off Overall Tests, you only want to get rid of the Better Off Overall Test if you don't want people to be better off overall. 
 
JOURNALIST: On the debate last night it did get pretty fiery, and shouting by both you and Scott Morrison, you mentioned disillusioned voters last night, what are disillusioned voters meant to make of two leaders shouting at each other?
 
ALBANESE: Well Scott Morrison didn't have anything to say except shouting. He only had smears and that smirk throughout it all. Last night I put forward ideas about cheaper childcare, our ideas about cheaper energy bills and dealing with climate change, our ideas about making more things here. Our ideas about lifting living standards through practical measures to lift wages. Our plans for more affordable housing, for addressing those issues, whether it be social housing, or our Help to Buy program. They're the positive policies that we put forward. I ask you to think about what were the policy measures that Scott Morrison said he would do in his fourth term if he's elected, if he's given three more years, we can't afford three more years of the same. Three more years of smears and scares because that's all this Government has got. And then their drops to newspapers, you know, breathtakingly reported, like Labor has an off-budget program to build social housing using the interest from the Housing Australia Future Fund. Then for goodness sake, if that's all they got, they are out of time, they are out ideas. Last one.
 
JOURNALIST: Dominic Perrottet says a minority government is good for democracy, do you agree?
 
ALBANESE: I want a majority Labor Government, that's my position, and I'll be working every day for 76 —
 
JOURNALIST: So you disagree?
 
ALBANESE: I think we should have 150 Labor members in the House of Representatives. Okay, that's my starting point. And I think we'll fall short of that, but my objective is 76. Thanks very much and see you in Adelaide. 
 
PLIBERSEK: Thanks everyone.

ENDS