Key events
Good morning
Happy hump day to those who celebrate.
Thank you to Martin for getting us up to date and starting us off this morning – you have Amy Remeikis with you for most of the day now.
It’s a three coffee morning with maybe a cupcake for breakfast kinda day. Hard to say for sure yet, but the coffee is a must.
Ready? Let’s get into it.
Sarah Basford Canales
The federal government has given disability advocacy and support groups a $50m funding lifeline for 12 months to continue offering critical information and support for the wider disability community.
On Wednesday, the NDIS minister, Bill Shorten, and the social services minister, Amanda Rishworth, announced a total of $140.3m would be guaranteed for the Information, Linkages and Capacity Building (ILC) program – a program considered a precursor to a planned wider system of disability services – or “foundational supports” – for those outside of the National Disability Insurance Scheme in the coming years.
It comes as the federal government prepares its response to the NDIS review in the coming months, which recommended the fast-growing $44bn scheme be overhauled to re-focus on supporting functional impairment, rather than diagnoses.
Shorten has already expressed his support for the review’s proposal for a five-year plan to build up mainstream disability services outside the NDIS for those who cannot access the scheme.
Of the figure guaranteed for disability organisations in Wednesday’s announcment, $50.3m will offer 130 organisations a one-year extension to continue their work supporting people with disability, and the broader community, to access information and services.
The remaining $90m has recently been finalised for the program as part of the ILC’s competitive grant round.
Shorten said:
We’ve awarded funding to these organisations so they can help people with disability and their supporters learn about and confidently advocate for their rights.”
The announcement follows concerns raised by disability community groups about the looming funding drop-off at the end of June.
It’s expected the foundational supports infrastructure will begin from the middle of next year, offering services to those with “less severe” disabilities in an effort to curb the NDIS’s exponential growth. Around 650,000 Australians are currently accessing the scheme but Shorten has warned it cannot continue to grow at a rate of 20% per year.
Last year, national cabinet agreed to an annual growth rate target for the scheme of 8% from 2026.
Some estimates have placed the cost of foundational supports for federal, state and territory governments at around $2bn per year.
Marles notes foreign nationals joining ADF would eventually need to take citizenship
Richard Marles also said any foreign nationals who joined the ADF would undergo the “same vetting” that Australian citizens. They would need to become Australian citizens within 90 days:
You are not accepted into the Australian Defence Force unless you are able to complete a thorough security check and the same threshold will apply to any of these non-citizens.
Marles said the government believed the offer of ADF membership would be an “attractive offer” to New Zealanders, and also to those from the Pacific, “but there is more work that needs to be engaged in to get to that point”.
Marles added that opening up the military to foreign nationals was “something other countries do”, and it was necessary due to retention and recruitment challenges:
We do need to open up the field of who can serve in the Australian Defence Force … This is a Rubicon that has been crossed by other countries – Britain recruit out of Fiji and out of Nepal, the Gurkhas [of Indian], the US recruit[s] out of Micronesia, the French have the French foreign legion.
Marles clarifies which non-Australians will be able to join ADF
The defence minister, Richard Marles, has said only foreign nationals from New Zealand and the Five Eyes alliance will initially be eligible to join Australia’s defence force, though the government will consider opening the program to the Pacific in future.
The government revealed yesterday that eligible permanent residents from New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the US and Canada could soon sign up to Australia’s defence force, but the defence personnel minister, Matt Keogh, had added said those from “other countries” would also be able to join.
Speaking on ABC 7.30 on Tuesday night, Marles said the government did have “an eye beyond that to the Pacific”, but said the current “slow and considered” pathway was for just New Zealand and the Five Eyes countries.
Asked if the government was also opening the program to other permanent residents, Marles said:
That not on the agenda and is not happening.
There are all sorts of scare campaigns going but other than that. This is New Zealand, Five Eyes [countries] and we have a more medium term, a view to the Pacific.
Keogh’s comments prompted criticism from the Coalition that the policy was “half-baked”, with questions about whether people from China or Russia may be eligible.
Pressed if Keogh had misspoken on Tuesday, Marles said only that the government’s position was “crystal-clear … I’ve just articulated it and Minister Keogh did this afternoon as well”.
The Coalition’s spokesperson, Andrew Hastie, lambasted the plan on Tuesday, but Marles noted he supported opening up the ADF to foreign nationals in the past.
Caitlin Cassidy
‘Short-sighted’ international student crackdown risks jobs, uni spokesperson says
The tertiary sector could lose 4,500 jobs as a result of an ongoing crackdown on international education, the CEO for Universities Australia will warn.
Speaking at the ITEC24 Higher Education Symposium on Wednesday, Luke Sheehy is expected to slam the federal government’s approach to international education as “policy chaos”, starting with last year’s rollout of stricter visa processing arrangements, according to notes released in advance.
Framed as measures to shore up the sector’s integrity, we now have every reason to believe these changes were a cap by stealth on international students. And it has only gotten worse … seldom has another major export industry been treated as a political plaything in the way international education is right now. This bipartisan attack on international students is short-sighted and politically expedient.
Sheehy will forecast a collective shortfall of more than $500m in 2024 due to slower visa processing times and high cancellations, lamenting the sector’s dependence on international students as “the cards we’ve been dealt with through more than a decade of successive and consistent changes to policy and funding settings”.
Inevitably, this will lead to cuts. Cuts to infrastructure … cuts to research and development funding … a funding shortfall of $500m could claim as many as 4,500 jobs across the sector.
Welcome
Martin Farrer
Good morning and welcome to our rolling news coverage. I’m Martin Farrer and here are some of the best overnight stories to keep you going until my colleague Amy Remeikis gets into the main action.
The prime minister is hoping to use the offer of a seat on a powerful new defence committee as leverage with independents in future crossbench negotiations. Our top story explains how Anthony Albanese has left room to appoint an independent to a new defence committee which will scrutinise defence strategy, funding, procurement and operations.
Two top Australian universities have risen up the global rankings with the University of Melbourne reaching a historic high of 13th in the world, up from 14th last year. The University of Sydney rose one place to 18th and the University of New South Wales remained at 19th in the QS world university rankings, run by the global higher education specialist Quacquarelli Symonds.
Meanwhile, a senior university leader says the government’s international student cap is driven by polling numbers rather than economic benefits. Universities Australia’s chief executive, Luke Sheehy, will deliver a damning speech outlining why the Albanese government’s plan to reduce international student numbers will hinder rather than strengthen the nation. More coming up.
The federal government is fighting for the right to destroy documents when it loses office after a judge warned the practice of shredding paperwork to keep it from incoming opponents is possibly criminal and must stop. The attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, is appealing a federal court ruling in a freedom of information case that a minister must preserve a predecessor’s documents if an FOI access application remains unresolved when the minister leaves office. It found this applies whether the job changes hands through an internal ministerial reshuffle or an election.
And the defence minister, Richard Marles, has clarified which foreign nationals will be eligible to join Australia’s defence forces, after another minister, Matt Keogh, seemed to imply it was broader than had been announced. More on that soon.
