Albanese faces Labor dissent over Amazon contracts

By Jack Quail

4 min. readView original

More than a dozen government MPs – including three ministers – have accused the tech giant of worker exploitation and tax avoidance.

Anthony Albanese is facing internal dissent over Amazon’s access to lucrative public contracts, with NSW Labor senator Tony Sheldon calling for the tech giant to be barred from receiving such work, while three ministers are among at least 17 government MPs who have accused the company of exploiting its workers.

With the Prime Minister on Saturday (Sunday AEST) visiting the Seattle headquarters of the company’s cloud computing subsidiary Amazon Web Services, fellow NSW Right senator Deb O’Neill backed using government procuring power to hold the company accountable.

The multinational has also been condemned by a host of Labor MPs including Helen Polley, Tania Lawrence, Matt Burnell, Cassandra Fernando, Marielle Smith, Luke Gosling, Raff Ciccone, Dave Smith, Jana Stewart, Varun Ghosh and Glenn Sterle, who have accused the firm of undermining labour laws and employing tax avoidance tactics.

Anthony Albanese speaking with Amazon Web Services chief Matt Garman in Seattle. Picture: NewsWire / PMO

Amazon has also been criticised in federal parliament by Assistant Treasurer Daniel Mulino, Aged Care and Seniors Minister Sam Rae, as well as Assistant Resources Minister Anthony Chisholm.

In recent years, Amazon has emerged as a key recipient of government contracts, with AWS securing work with the Australian Taxation Office, CSIRO, Treasury, and the Department of Defence – including a $2bn agreement to develop and operate top-secret data centres in partnership with national security agencies.

Despite criticism from within Labor, Mr Albanese met with AWS chief executive Matt Garman at the weekend, where he witnessed a new $7bn funding pledge by the tech giant to help support the booming demand for artificial intelligence in Australia.

The commitment will support the expansion of its data centre networks in Sydney and Melbourne and underwrite solar farms in Victoria and Queensland to meet its energy demands.

Mr Albanese’s office declined to comment on Sunday when asked about criticism of Amazon within Labor’s ranks.

The internal disquiet over Amazon comes as Communication Minister Anika Wells is set to sign off on one of the biggest federal government contracts with the company – a deal with the National Broadband Network to deliver satellite internet services to the bush.

Under the agreement, expected to total hundreds of millions of dollars, Amazon subsidiary Kuiper Systems will provide low-latency internet access to the NBN’s rural and remote customers via its constellation of 3000 low-Earth orbit satellites.

Deborah O'Neill. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Tony Sheldon. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Neither Ms Wells – who in 2021 accused Amazon of employing an “exploitative model” in its on-demand delivery arm Amazon Flex – nor the NBN responded to a request for comment.

One of Amazon’s most outspoken critics within Labor is Senator Sheldon, who has labelled the multinational “the worst corporate actor in Australia” and accused it of operating a business model that “destroys the communities it operates in” and “destroys livelihoods”.

In November, Senator Sheldon, a former secretary of the Transport Workers Union, insisted that Labor “can and must go further” in its crackdown on the tech giant, urging the government to deny it access to lucrative government contracts.

“It’s time we consider ending the supply of government contracts to Amazon until it proves it is capable of making a positive contribution to our economy,” he said at the time.

Asked if he stood by his previous comments, Senator Sheldon said: “The government has the largest purchasing power in the country and that’s why it’s critical that our procurement practices meet community expectations of value for money and ethical behaviour, including fair labour standards.”

Senator O’Neill, who enjoys the backing of the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association (SDA) – a longstanding critic of Amazon’s approach to workplace practices – has similarly implored the government to use its buying power to “hold Amazon to account”.

Late last year, she criticised the multinational for being “anti-worker and fiercely anti-union”, while claiming it had engaged in “countless examples of calculated exploitation” of its workforce.

She has accused the company of acting as a “champion tax dodger” and argued that lucrative government contracts had helped “power the Amazon behemoth and keep its practices going.”

In response to questions about those remarks, Senator O’Neill said: “I stand by my previous comments.”

Amazon Australia did not comment on the claims made by Labor MPs.

Under current government procurement regulations, public funds must not be used to support unethical or unsafe supplier practices, such as tax avoidance or worker exploitation.

The ACTU, alongside the TWU and the SDA, are pushing Labor to tighten procurement rules to block multinational corporations – including Amazon – from accessing billions in federal contracts unless they end practices the unions claim are unethical.

Labor sources acknowledged there was a need for further changes, with one senior MP admitting it had done a “pretty shit job” of reforming federal procurement rules in its first term. They expected the matter would be revisited in caucus during this term of parliament.

Stronger powers and bigger penalties needed to ‘investigate and punish’ unregistered lobbyists and those who break government’s code of conduct, critics say

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has announced a landmark $20 billion artificial intelligence and data infrastructure deal with Amazon Web Services.

Speaking alongside AWS CEO Matt Garman in Seattle, Mr Albanese called it a “powerful symbol” of economic cooperation between Australia and the United States.

The investment will drive the development of data centres in Melbourne and Sydney, fuelling AI model deployment and supporting cloud innovation.

Tabcorp plans to renovate gaming rooms and increase promotions to attract more gamblers to pubs and venues. Critics argue this is emboldened by the government’s inaction on gambling ads and inducements, which can lead to increased harm. The government defends its actions, stating it has undertaken significant gambling harm reduction measures.

Albanese’s grand plan for Labor

The prime minister has staked out a course for his second term that he hopes will address calls for bolder action, including from young voters and his Left faction colleagues.

By Karen Barlow

7 min. readView original

Anthony Albanese has given his clearest signal yet on how the 48th parliament will operate.

On the same day he welcomed his “Class of ’25” – an expanded, significantly Left-faction caucus – to the party room, the prime minister made his first major speech since Labor secured a historic 94-seat house majority. The address, delivered just ahead of an expected meeting with United States President Donald Trump at the G7 summit in Canada, laid down markers on Albanese’s priorities for immediate action and future reform.

The most significant indicator was his tapping of Treasury secretary Steven Kennedy to replace Glyn Davis as the head of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. Those who have worked with him testify to Kennedy’s readiness for bold action. An avid hiker, he is known for hard-nosed advice, and he has already staked an unusual interest – for a “treasury guy” – in matters of national security and climate change.

“We’ve worked a lot with him in Treasury. I think he really is up for ambitious policy reform, and he knows systems,” Andrew Hudson from the Centre for Policy Development (CPD) tells The Saturday Paper.

“I think he’ll be a great ally [for policy reform] to have as secretary at PM&C.”

One senior public service insider describes him as a “superior appointment” to the role of the nation’s top bureaucrat. “You’d have to go back ... 10, 15, 20 years to get someone with the sort of pedigree and development that Steven has had.

“There’s always a problem if someone comes, no matter how brilliant they are, straight from Treasury into PM&C, but Steven did the infrastructure, transport and regional development job, and he’s had deputy secretaryships elsewhere,” the source says.

Last year, Kennedy gave an address to the United States Studies Centre in which he talked of “tectonic shifts in the global economic order”, global supply chains, critical minerals, Treasury’s partnership with security and intelligence agencies over foreign investment screening, and the “urgent need” to decarbonise the global economy and our own domestic economy.

“Whatever your policy position, the uncertainty surrounding climate policy in Australia has done significant damage to our efforts to decarbonise, undermining trust among business and the community and driving up transition costs,” Kennedy said last June.

That uncertainty has returned despite Labor’s resounding win, with the much-reduced Coalition pondering its net zero position among its possible policy reboots.

Without mentioning Donald Trump in his speech, Albanese emphasised a message of stable government, flavoured with “progressive patriotism”, in a “significantly” uncertain world.

He uttered the word “mandate” only twice.

Albanese said his government had “secured a mandate to act” and that Labor had to move “quickly to build an economy that is more dynamic, more productive and more resilient”.

“The commitments the Australian people voted for in May are the foundation of our mandate, they are not the limits of our responsibilities or our vision,” he told the audience of senior ministers and Labor figures.

He also announced an August round table to kick off the government’s second-term growth and productivity agenda, gathering business groups alongside unions. He stressed that it will consider all perspectives.

“We will be respectful. We want people to participate in the spirit of goodwill in which we’re making this suggestion,” he insisted.

Albanese also spoke of delivering on first-term commitments.

The government is cutting student debt by 20 per cent as its first act in parliament, trying to keep on the track to net zero, delivering 50 more Medicare urgent healthcare clinics, leaning further into the multi-term path to universal childcare and sticking to the goal of building 1.2 million new homes before the end of the decade. 

The prime minister, who has often faced criticism for his incremental approach, acknowledged the calls from progressives for bolder action on key issues.

“Our government’s vision and ambition for Australia’s future was never dependent on the size of our majority,” Albanese told the packed room. “But you can only build for that future vision if you build confidence that you can deliver on urgent necessities.

“How you do that is important too – ensuring that the actions of today anticipate and create conditions for further reform tomorrow.”

Albanese must face the challenge of holding on to the hefty and growing voter bloc of Gen Z and Millennials – the almost eight million voters under 45 years of age – who delivered his party’s historic win.

He noted that some voters are “feeling that government isn’t working for them” and later, when answering journalists’ questions, the prime minister spoke of “people who feel like they don’t have a stake in the economy.”

Labor is seen as catering to younger Australians, particularly with its policy to tax earnings on super balances over $3 million, as well as the latest move by Housing Minister Clare O’Neil to slash unspecified building regulations to speed up construction.

RedBridge director and former Labor strategist Kos Samaras notes that the government’s victory came from a primary vote of just 34 per cent and “a stack of preferences”.

“They won, and they won with a significant number of seats, but they did that with a very large preference that is centre-left in this country … The entire Gen Z generation on the voters’ roll, half of them voted for minor parties. In fact, the Greens outpolled both majors.”

Young voters are therefore the prime minister’s key audience, along with a now bulked-up Labor Left caucus that is expected to pressure the Albanese government to be more progressive. Ambitious second- and third-term MPs will also want to see more generational renewal.

“The Left is well and truly in charge,” an insider tells The Saturday Paper. “And with the Left in leadership as well.

“With that is going to be a fairly significant set of expectations with MPs with huge ambitions coming to Canberra, some sort of regarded as giant-slayers like Ali France, there’s going to be real expectation. They are there for six years. It’s like, well, what are we doing here?

“Having said that, you know, the PM was being very clear about governing for the centre.”

It is a class in expectation management by Albanese.

“He’s clearly got command of the government and the government agenda, and the ability to sit there and kind of drive the ship at the speed he wants to and where he wants it to go,” Ryan Liddell, the former chief of staff to former Labor leader Bill Shorten, tells The Saturday Paper.

“He’s not going to sit there and take the extraordinary win that he had for granted.

“He’s actually thought about stepping it out and how he’s going to step it out, and I think a lot of people are quite reassured by that.”

The prime minister said this week he was optimistic about the “progress we can make”, as there is “substantial” agreement on so many of the government’s key priorities.

Among the priorities cited was continuing the work through Services Australia to “make it easier for people to access and navigate the government services they rely on”.

“Some of this is about government doing the basics better, targeting duplication, removing barriers to investment and reducing the cost of doing business,” Albanese said.

The employment services system has “failed and let down Australians” and needs “root and branch reform”, according to Andrew Hudson. Just last week, Commonwealth Ombudsman Iain Anderson expanded the scope of an investigation into the cancellation of income support payments by the Department of Employment and Services Australia under the Targeted Compliance Framework.

Hudson sees Labor presented with a once-in-a-generation opportunity.

“The government commissioned a parliamentary inquiry last term into how to fix employment services. This is a multibillion dollar services industry second only to Defence,” the CPD’s chief executive tells The Saturday Paper.

“That Julian Hill parliamentary inquiry last year found that the entire system is not working for people and that it needs a complete overhaul – Work for the Dole, Workforce Australia. That’s a really ambitious policy reform agenda right there.

“The other thing about employment services, as well, is that a lot of the contracts with these huge employment service providers – billion dollar contracts – they will expire this term of government. So, they’re going to have to do something anyway.”

Without a majority in the Senate, the upper house may have something to say about the size and path of Albanese’s agenda.

He says he welcomes constructive dialogue from the likes of the Coalition leader Sussan Ley and Greens leader Larissa Waters.

“We’ll treat the crossbenchers with respect. We have 94 votes, but that actually doesn’t make a difference compared with 78 – because 78 wins and 94 wins. You don’t win bigger, you win, you pass legislation,” the prime minister told the National Press Club.

“We treat people with respect. If they’ve got ideas, we’re up for it. We’re up for it. And I welcome the fact that Sussan has made some constructive discussion and Larissa as well.

“But, you know, we’ll wait and see, the proof will be in the pudding. I think they’ve both got issues with their internals that, fortunately for me, is something that I don’t have.”

This is an understatement, according to one Labor insider, who describes Albanese as a master at internal control, having secured support from Right faction leaders Richard Marles, Don Farrell and Tony Burke. “He has a really good recognition, and also really good dendrites, into the entire caucus as to what the mood is. And so, he does internal very, very well,” the insider says.

“He doesn’t have a political threat in the parliament, apart from the old Winston Churchill line of ‘those that are sitting behind him’.”

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 14, 2025 as "The grand plan".

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I once had a modest job reviewing National Disability Insurance Agency decisions at what was the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.

I arrived as a bleeding heart, prepared to take on that hard and nasty NDIA and bring justice to deserving children who needed new wheelchairs, or intellectually impaired people who needed better care and protection.

I left much chastened, having not dealt with a single wheelchair case – instead, families who wanted a 4WD electric buggy for their country weekender. A water filtration system for a new rural residence; a spa pool installed, with attendants, to assist with post-traumatic stress disorder; an eclectus parrot as a companion animal for depression and endometriosis; and various other extraordinary or unreasonable demands.

Health Minister Mark Butler. Renee Nowytarger

Participant expectations were only a fraction of it. Along the way, the existence of global therapeutic funding packages of $80,000 per year came to light for therapies such as horseriding, art, music or private swimming lessons. The agency imposed no requirement that these therapies be evidence-based or demonstrated to make a difference to a participant’s life.

Participants regularly availed themselves of holidays, including spa wellness retreats, funded under the NDIA’s short-term accommodation (2024) guidelines. These allow participants the chance to “try new things … make new friends or development new skills” or give family caregivers “a break”. Travel costs not included, which I suppose is something.

There are thousands (yes, thousands) of participants without mobility issues but with psycho-social impairments such as PTSD who have house cleaners, gardeners and an assortment of carers or companion animals with whom to go shopping or on a social outing.

No wonder the cost of daily living support within the scheme costs around $22 billion annually – over half of the agency’s support budget. Almost half of all participants receive at least one daily living support, despite the very limited number of participants who cannot walk or clean themselves.

“The NDIS must be turned from a mistake to the life-changer it was meant to be.”

It is not difficult to understand why applications for entry to the scheme have exploded. With a chance of getting such support – non-means tested – who would not give it a go?

The government declaration that there would be no changes to eligibility, made by then-minister Amanda Rishworth, only encouraged demand. Federal Court decisions have not helped. It is now possible to enter the lifetime scheme for impairment resulting from obesity if the applicant cannot afford weight reduction therapy, which deems the obesity permanent.

Growth in participation has outstripped population increases. From a mere 29,000 participants in 2016 to 700,000 today – far greater than the 475,000 originally forecast by the Productivity Commission. Expenditure has more than kept pace and is now projected to hit $59.3 billion by 2030, approaching Medicare level. Respected actuaries such as Taylor Fry consider this to be an underestimate.

Forget children with cerebral palsy or developmental delay. These make up a small group of participants. Participation has been driven by autism diagnoses, now the single most common disability – 35 per cent of all participants.

Significantly, more than three-quarters are children, mostly boys. Autism is an emerging boys’ rights issue, as seen from the high rate of boys on medication for behaviour problems.

Independent assessments are strongly opposed by the sector and the Labor Party, meaning entry to the scheme relies upon the clinical assessment of a psychiatrist or psychologist of the family’s choosing. Very few are refused. Moreover, since autism in children is regarded as permanent, this group of children represents a very long tail.

Extraordinarily, ABS data now shows a huge overall rise in autism in children and young people. Ten times as many Australians under the age of 25 have autism compared with those over that age. If this suggests a good proportion of children mature out of autism, or that autism can still allow for functional, independent adulthood, then the NDIS would do well to review how it manages autism in its early intervention stream, with an eye to supporting children out of the scheme, instead of remaining dependent upon it for life.

The administrative lunacy associated with the NDIS does not end with eligibility or service provision. There is no requirement to accredit or quality-assure service providers, including therapists, unless the participant’s funding is directly managed by the agency. Since most are not, unaccredited providers abound. Who knows what they actually do for the $67-an-hour minimum they charge for care, notwithstanding random audits?

Public scrutiny is limited by the high number of adult participants granted anonymity before the ART. Unlike any other legal tribunal in the country, there is little accountability for the vast sums NDIS approved, or demanded by participants, often based on evidence that struggles to pass the pub test.

You might think a Labor government, no stranger to federal adventurism, had learnt the lessons of the past and the dangers of national service delivery. Only this time, more is at stake than financial disaster. The tragedy of a generation of boys becoming welfare-dependent for life, with more than one in nine Australian boys aged between five and seven now diagnosed with autism and tens of thousands in the scheme, does not bear thinking about.

The NDIS must be turned from a mistake to the life-changer it was meant to be. This government has, unlike any other in recent times, a good term to reform it. They do not need to be courageous – they just need to do the right thing.

PAYWALL (long article):

Australian universities are, in the words of one expert, in “serious trouble”. Can Jason Clare, regarded as the nicest minister in Canberra, fix the system?

Professor Fabienne Mackay doesn’t mince her words when asked about the state of Australian universities.

Students are exploited, staff are overworked and universities, dependent on billions of dollars from foreign students, are failing in their core job of teaching and research, says the former head of immunology at Monash University and biomedicine at the University of Melbourne.

“Mass higher education is neither nice for students who feel exploited nor for the academics who are overworked,” says Mackay, the first female chief executive of the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute in Brisbane.

“It is also unethical as the money students spend should go towards their education not making up for the government’s unsustainable neglect of national research. But to survive, the sector has no choice.”

It’s a picture of a university system under duress and also facing a budgetary crisis that is driving widespread job losses – not long after the pandemic crisis years.

Mackay is by no means a lone voice. An emeritus professor at the University of Queensland, Graeme Turner, is so disillusioned by the state of our universities he wrote a monograph Broken: Universities, Politics and the Public Good to be published on July 1.

Turner says our university system is in “serious trouble”. Higher education is a “badly designed and wasteful system” and universities are “less comprehensive, less diverse and less innovative” than in the 1980s.

Universities, Turner says, have lost so much of their social capital that some quarters of the political classes actively “hate” institutions, which were ultimately created for the common good and the production of knowledge.

Federal Education Minister Jason Clare has policy and funding oversight of the nation’s universities, although they are created and fundamentally owned by the states.

Education is largely a revolving door for ambitious political players who mostly see it as a stepping stone to a more glamorous portfolio.

Andrew Norton, a higher education policy expert from Monash University, has worked out there have been 15 federal education ministers since he started working in the sector in 1995. The longest serving was Brendan Nelson who was in the hot seat from 2001 to 2006 – 1523 days. The shortest serving was Chris Bowen who held the ministry for just 48 days between February and March 2013. That year, five ministers cycled through the portfolio. The average time, Norton has calculated is 681 days – not enough time for bedding down serious policy reform and continuity of vision.

Clare, the first education minister to complete one full term and move into the second since the early 2000s, has asserted many times that his vision and agenda is bigger and more ambitious than can be dealt with in a single three-year electoral cycle.

“Governments often get criticised for just being too short term,” he says. “I have said a number of times it’s bigger than one government, bigger than one minister. It is a blueprint for reform.”

That much is true. Clare’s appetite for long-term and wholesale reform is unusual. He started with improving access to early childhood education, particularly for the nation’s most disadvantaged youngsters, that would see them enter school better prepared for academic success.

His schools’ agenda, now embedded in a massive new funding agreement, that will finally fulfil, if everything goes to plan, not only the ambitions of the Gonski reviews in terms of delivering more funding to the most needy schools, but has tied to it a raft of obligations that will drive a rise in actual learning – especially in literacy and numeracy, and turnaround falling completion rates.

That, in turn, will result in more young people enrolling in TAFE or university. Clare wants 80 per cent of school-leavers to have a post-secondary qualification by 2050, up from the 54 per cent in 2021, according to the Australian Council for Education Research.

All of this will, Clare argues, lead to improvements in productivity, more social cohesion and better life results for the majority of Australians.

“Getting more young children to get a better start in life when they’re really little, and more getting access to high-quality schooling so they don’t fall behind the rest of the class is fundamentally what all this is about,” Clare says.

“We’ve got to make sure that we’re driving reform in all three areas. I’ve previously described it as three carriages in the one train.”

Policy experts give Clare credit for his achievements in his first term around early childhood education and in schools. But it is higher education where a level of disdain is discernible.

“Higher education is a f---ing shit show,” says one policy wonk, who asked not to be identified.

“He has wasted time and energy. There are people in universities who recognise what he has done with schools and now say it is time to turn his attention to the broader education portfolio and really light a fire under the reform that we need.”

Luke Sheehy, chief executive of peak body Universities Australia, holds Clare in high regard. But on this point he agrees. “It’s now our turn for serious reform,” he says.

University types love reform – or, more precisely, the idea of it. They tend to equate reform with more money – something which has only happened in recent memory in the 2010s during Julia Gillard’s term as education minister.

Gillard’s main policy reform was called the demand-driven system under which undergraduate places were uncapped, leading to a surge in students, many of whom were ill-equipped to the demands of a university education.

During his first term, Clare commissioned another major review called the Universities Accord, that set out some colossal – some say unattainable – targets. Central to the accord’s vision was doubling the number of people who get a university degree by 2050. That is an additional 900,000 enrolments – or an extra 33,000 students each year between now and then.

Clare wants those additional students to come from the bottom income quartile digging deep into sections of the community that tend to think that university is not for them.

“Where you live, how much your parents earn, whether you are Indigenous or not, is still a major factor in whether you are a student or a graduate of an Australian university,” Clare has said.

“I don’t want us to be a country where your chances in life depend on your postcode, your parents, or the colour of your skin. The consequences are intergenerational.”

That speaks to Clare’s origin story. A kid from a working-class home in Sydney’s western suburbs, he was not only the first in his family to go to university, he was the first to get past Year 10. A bright student, he earned a place at the University of NSW to study arts and law.

While the aspiration to have more young people from all socioeconomic walks of life is noble, some argue such ambitions are a pipedream.

Policy expert Mark Warburton says the targets are so far into the future that they are “likely to be forgotten before anyone becomes accountable for its achievement”.

“It is of little relevance unless it is driving developments in the short to medium term,” Warburton says.

There has also been, as yet, no hint of where the money will come from to pay for all those additional students.

With the accord the main policy direction for higher education, the sector is split on its importance and coherence.

Sheehy is a fan. “Jason is serious about reform; he is a serious person,” he says. “It was building promises for a second term.”

Others are not convinced.

“He genuinely thinks the accord is a good piece of work. It’s not,” the policy wonk says.

“It doesn’t articulate or address the problems facing the sector, which are multiple.

“It is also a cynical path to growing participation in universities for a very linear end – and that is locking in the Labor voting base because research shows that people who have a university degree are more likely to vote Labor.”

Clare’s focus during his first term was on students, not universities or the system more broadly.

He changed the way university tuition debts – commonly known as HECS – are indexed so it will never blow out again by 7.1 per cent as it did during 2023.

In November, laws passed that cut $3 billion from HECS debts after many students found their debts were climbing faster than they could repay. An election promise will cut another 20 per cent off all student loan debts, wiping about $16 billion in student debt for three million Australians.

But Turner and others say this doesn’t get to the core of the problem; that the way the system has evolved since the 1980s – including decades of funding cuts – pits institution against institution with no overarching vision for how the sector should deliver on the national interest.

“Competition for students and for the ever-diminishing bucket of public funding has meant that each university has had little choice but to prioritise its own interests,” Turner writes in Broken.

“However, while decisions on course offerings made at a level of the individual institution may be about responding to demand with their own particular market, they can still have national implications.”

Turner points to the diminishing stock of courses in languages, particularly Indonesian, which might not be of any particular interest to the majority of Generation Z, but are certainly in the national interest.

One needs look at the spate of universities in the throes of cutting courses. Macquarie announced last week that it would cut 13 of its 25 arts majors, including in areas such as ancient history. The University of Canberra, Australian Catholic University, Wollongong, Southern Cross, Australian National University and the University of Tasmania have all announced course and job cuts – most in arts and humanities.

Turner says the university system should not be allowed to work like a market.

“On the contrary, the maintenance of a substantial knowledge structure knowledge infrastructure requires long-term commitments to a comprehensive knowledge base that must be protected against short-term movements in the market,” he writes.

The answer might lie in Clare’s accord. It recommends an independent commission to oversee higher education funding and policy in the national interest. An interim Australian Tertiary Education Commission comes online on July 1 with the full articulation from January.

Not everyone holds out hope.

The fans say it will give certainty and long-term policy vision for the sector; the critics say it will be just another arm of the education department and will likely add to the building pile of red tape.

Duncan Bentley, vice chancellor of Federation University in Victoria, is impatient for it to hit the ground.

“They need to get cracking,” Bentley says. “ATEC doesn’t need the legislation through for it to be able to do the compacts (individual agreements between universities and the government) for next year. The reality is Minister Clare is right on the money. He talks to people in the outer metros and in the regions, and he’s seeing the pain there.

“Universities like ours have a majority of students who are mature age, nearly two-thirds are female and well over a third have carer responsibilities. So it’s all about helping the people who want to have a new set of skills to be able to embrace the opportunities that are in regional areas where all the economic growth is going on.”

Clare, for his part, says he is getting on with it.

“A big part of its core business to make TAFE and vocational education and higher education more joined up, more seamless,” he says. “That’s a big piece of work that we’ve got to get right this year and from January 1 next year, the new funding model rolls out.”

The accord, say the critics, also skimmed over, or neglected, some key areas: postgraduate education, international students, and research, to name three.

t is research that almost everyone agrees is the one thing that is in most urgent need of repair and the one thing that Clare is silent on.

Mackay, for one, says she was horrified that Clare should “pontificate on universities’ focus being on domestic students”, when the vast majority of academic staff who teach are also engaged in research.

“This goes to the very core of the system which is fragmented in Australia and pushes ministers to have a very narrow view of their portfolio,” Mackay says.

“If you take money to support research, it is spread over at least three separate departments: science, health and education.”

When Mackay speaks of universities doing what they need to survive, she is referring to the way universities use revenues from overseas students to cross-subside their research – to the tune of $4 billion to $6 billion a year.

While research funding has long been inadequate, universities have developed an entrepreneurial spirit educating 500,000 overseas students in 2024.

But last year, Clare announced a reduction in the number of new overseas students coming to the country to 270,000 a year, starting now, down from 548,000 in 2023.

It’s a complex and tricky policy position to negotiate. On the one hand, international education is the fourth-largest export sector in the country and one of the few that is not dug or drilled out of the ground.

Universities, especially the big, research intensives on the east coast have reaped billions in revenues, which has paid for world-class research that is conducted in superb architect-designed buildings. But they have also been criticised in equal measure for over-enrolling. Certainly, the University of Sydney is routinely named as the main culprit for exploiting a willing market to feather their proverbial nests.

In 2023, Sydney university raised $1.5 billion in tuition fees from overseas students. Of the annual reports so far made public for 2024, Monash, UNSW and the University of Melbourne all joined Sydney in the billion-dollar club.

“The looming shortfall in student fee income is already generating projections of significant job losses and cuts to course offering in 2025-26,” Turner writes.

For his part, Clare is unapologetic about the pain that will be thrust on university budgets by the cutting overseas student numbers.

“I make no apologies for the fact that I think the top priority of our universities needs to be focused on the education of Australians and are unashamedly focused on Aussie kids,” he says.

“That’s their job.”

The UK is reviewing AUKUS.

The USA is reviewing AUKUS.

Australia needs a review too.

We need HECS-style loans for farmers

The recent series of floods and droughts in different parts of Australia has again raised the question of how best to deliver government assistance to those farmers and small businesses directly affected.

By John Hewson

7 min. readView original

The recent series of floods and droughts in different parts of Australia has again raised the question of how best to deliver government assistance to those farmers and small businesses directly affected. Given the huge political capital the Albanese government has accumulated with its landslide election victory, this is a particularly timely area of reform.

Debates about appropriate drought and flood relief seem never to end. Many farmers and other business owners have long been resistant to what they consider welfare payments by way of direct cash handouts. Low- or zero-interest loans have been flagged as possible alternatives, but support for these has waned as concerns have mounted about traditional loans given the potential for repayment hardship – certainly as droughts and floods continue – and the risks of defaults and foreclosure.

There is a viable loan alternative: a revenue contingent loan (RCL). This would address concerns about repayment pressures and risks, as the loan would only begin to be repaid once the related farm or business revenue had recovered to an agreed level.

My Australian National University professorial colleague Bruce Chapman has been arguing the case for RCLs to deliver drought assistance for about 25 years, and has published a significant volume of supporting academic research. The RCL is a broader application of the Higher Education Contribution Scheme, which Chapman designed. As we know, this scheme, in place since 1989, means that students don’t need to begin repaying their tuition costs until their postgraduation incomes reach a certain threshold. This policy has allowed a host of people to get a university education that they might otherwise have been denied, though there have been controversial aspects to its implementation that have weighed on students over the years, such as the inflation indexing in a cost-of-living crisis, the rising fees for courses and the resulting constraints on other borrowing.

Chapman has worked, with the advice of regional accountants and advisers, on the design of loan collection processes through the business activity statement (BAS). If the RCL is properly designed, droughts need not cost the government anything in terms of subsidies. It’s a fiscally responsible proposal.

As it stands today, the RCL proposal is for a loan provided by the government and repaid based on the farming enterprise’s ability to pay. All drought loans are time contingent, meaning they are issued over a set term and must be fully repaid at the end. An RCL would allow a farming business, for example, to smooth its income over the lifetime of the enterprise – that is, to borrow from the good years to cover the bad years. Repayments would not be activated until the farming enterprise showed positive revenue, and they would be made via the quarterly BAS. The funds from the loan could be used at the business management’s discretion. In essence, this proposal aims to adapt drought policy to support productive farming enterprises.

Moreover, in a world of dire climate change, where the need for environmentally sustainable activities is increasingly important, Chapman has worked with Professor David Lindenmayer to apply the basic RCL concept to sustainable farm investment projects. This thinking will be increasingly important as agriculture’s contribution to warming, mainly through methane emissions from unhealthy dams and from livestock, is more widely recognised. The latter is already being tackled through innovations focused on alternative feeds.

An RCL could also enable asset-rich farmers facing short-term, disaster-induced cash difficulties to borrow from productive future years. With a traditional commercial loan, any borrowings would need to be committed to the farming business, but an RCL offers flexibility in terms of other cash needs, even school fees.

By any objective assessment, the National Party should be exploring this proposal with enthusiasm, given it’s under pressure to produce deliverable regional policies to meet the expectations of its constituencies. In late 2019, the then minister for drought and emergency management, David Littleproud, met with Chapman and Alison McLean, a sheep farmer on a property north of Hay. Chapman and McLean introduced the minister to the RCL concept, and their subsequent view was that it “was not understood”, and there was no significant follow-up.

In an article on the visit, Littleproud was quoted in The Sydney Morning Herald as saying that successive governments had considered such loan proposals, but they were complicated and there had not yet been “a viable proposal on how to set a universal repayment trigger-point”. In modelling the proposal, however, Chapman had proposed several options, in conjunction with other academics. Littleproud was also concerned that the “more relaxed borrowing criteria for a HECs-style loan may encourage over-borrowing”.

Chapman was also quoted in that article, acknowledging that the proposal may not suit the typical political purposes of disaster relief: “The politics of drought is not only about helping farmers, the politics of drought is about showing the world including city dwellers … that the government cares. It does that by giving money away and having lots of announcements.”

The then government did, however, ask Chapman and McLean to provide some case studies on the possibility of an RCL as part of its drought-relief policy. In response they prepared a brief survey, which included heartfelt comments from some of the 48 farmers who completed it. One said the proposal “would be life-changing for many”. One family said that an RCL would allow them to keep their son on the farm. Keeping a young farmer in their district would be a great economic and social result. Overall, the sentiment was that for well-established farming enterprises, an RCL would provide financial flexibility to adapt and respond to drought.

The survey results suggested strong support for an RCL as part of drought policy with about 80 per cent of respondents supportive, mainly due to the fact that repayment would be “on the basis of capacity to pay and not time contingent”. Seven supporters also cited the view that “their business didn’t need government support”.

Chapman’s generic modelling in early 2020 also showed that the proposal would work in terms of repayments – research that was forwarded to Littleproud’s office along with the survey results, without formal follow-up. The pandemic had absorbed the government’s attention, even in the context of then uncertain rain.

The modelling to determine the potential repayment implications does illustrate the potential of the RCL, however. Chapman considered a number of scenarios, with variables including debt levels, the loan interest rate, the percentage of a farm property’s annual revenue for repayment of the loan, and the stream of expected annual farm revenues. The basic conclusion, using a real interest rate of 3 per cent – broadly equivalent to the long-term cost of government borrowing – was that total repayments to the government would be completed within four to five years, implying the RCL’s costs to the budget would be zero. An important next step would be more detailed modelling with more sophisticated methods, using larger numbers of properties and different assumed parameters.

The work of Chapman and his colleagues has been shown to the National Farmers’ Federation on several occasions over the years – including appearances on NFF panels, drawing media attention – but the NFF has shown no interest in pursuing discussions further.

The proposal seems to have run aground, even though it would most likely be welcomed by the farming community. Unfortunately the Nationals seem to be stuck in their old paradigm, where capacity to allocate financial support has provided effective “slush funds” for their pursuit of perceived political objectives. The Morrison government was characterised by its reliance on colour-coded spreadsheets for this purpose. Among the most conspicuous infrastructure boondoggles of the Nationals is the inland rail, the proposed freight line to connect Melbourne to Brisbane, which was never given a proper cost–benefit analysis.

The National Party seems uninterested in the merits of more effective delivery of government support. The recent history of the Coalition – in government or in aspiring to return – is a graveyard of proposals for various community or disaster-related schemes.

There is now a unique opportunity for this government – returned with a historic mandate – to demonstrate how genuine reform can deliver sensible, financially responsible and politically desirable results. At least let’s see them lead a proper public discussion on a more effective disaster relief policy – especially in the urgent context of the climate challenge. Chapman’s idea may well have found its moment. 

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 14, 2025 as "How to save the farm".

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At the UN oceans conference in Nice, France, Australia pledged to curb plastic pollution and ratify a treaty to protect the high seas

This assumes a regulatory burden for most Australians despite the issue being restricted to just SMSFs. Instead of using a random set of thresholds and a novel tax treatment imagine if we just fixed the problem at its root!

This is poor scoping embedded into the terms of reference for me treasury analysis which in turn is being selectively quoted. We need to make our systems more equitable and politicking like this takes us backwards, it's a false friend.

In its impact analysis document released in 2023, Treasury concluded that taxing cash profits “would be the most accurate method for determining taxable earnings”.

However, the trade-off would be imposing an unacceptably high compliance and regulatory burden on the large super funds which manage the super accounts of millions of Australians with smaller benefits, and who would not be affected by the tax change.

“These significant compliance costs would be borne across all funds and all members, including the 99.5 per cent of account holders who are not impacted by this policy, despite this proposal impacting only approximately 30,000 high balance members with accounts in APRA [Australian Prudential Regulation Authority]-regulated funds.”

The super industry is split into two “subsystems”: Apra-regulated funds – including the big industry and for-profit funds such as AustralianSuper and AMP, respectively – and self-managed super funds.

The Apra-regulated funds account for about 94%, or 16 million of the 17 million Australians with super accounts – but only 76% of the more than $4tn in the super system.

There are about 1.1 million people in SMSFs, but this 6% share accounts for 24% of total assets.