GREG JENNETT:
Stephen Jones, you’re back with us once again on afternoon briefing. Thanks so much for joining us. Can I ask you about a moving story of the day that broke a little earlier? Jason Clare, your colleague, has announced the total foreign student caps for universities 270,000. Well, I should add that vocational education is included in that number as well. Wollongong, your hometown, is a strong university town. Are you aware of how it’s fared with its quota for 2025?
STEPHEN JONES:
Universities are receiving communication from the Minister as we speak about what their allocation under the cap will be. But an important point to make here is – this is all about ensuring that our migration system is sustainable. And we can’t have a situation where effectively universities are determining migration settings for the whole of the country, that’s not sustainable. So, we’ve got to get it under control. Jason’s announced the cap for the year ahead, and the allocation of that cap will ensure that regional universities, including the one that I went to and my hometown of Wollongong, won’t be disadvantaged.
JENNETT:
They’re actually going to have students driven towards them, aren’t they? By limiting the total numbers, foreign student numbers, at the big capital city institutions.
JONES:
One of the net effects of what Jason announced this morning is to ensure that regional universities who have been disadvantaged under some of the previous settings don’t continue to be disadvantaged. And my university, Wollongong University, and other great regional universities will be one of the beneficiaries of that. One of the good things about that is to ensure that regional universities get some of the benefits of having foreign students attend and regional towns get some of the benefits that they have from that. So, overall, getting the balance right and to ensure that we don’t have discrimination between those universities in the big capital cities and those in regional towns like mine.
JENNETT:
Yes, we’ll await the specific numbers for each institution. They are being communicated, as you said, Stephen Jones, now, scams week this week, I understand. Not sure exactly what that means for government policy. I do know that scams–
JONES:
Well, every week of the year, as you would know, Greg, is for me, a week where we can ensure that we’re keeping Australians’ money safe by raising awareness and raising the standards across the economy to keep Australians’ money safe from these criminals who are preying upon them.
JENNETT:
And yet the reality is that scams are flourishing faster than policy can keep up at the moment. However, to that end, we might talk about one element of it, SMS scams, we seem to get them at all hours. In my case, I do, through the middle of the night, which usually proves to me that it is a scam. But not widely reported, last week you had new laws passed that would set up a register for prominent Australian companies and if a text message didn’t match with their registered numbers, it wouldn’t be sent. How many firms are going to participate in that new register?
JONES:
Can I start with why we’re doing it? We’ve currently got a blacklist and that is when a number is reported as being involved in scam or suspicious activity, that number is blocked and we’re blocking about a million messages and calls a day. But as soon as we block a number, a new one pops up. It’s a game of whack‑a‑mole. So, the new approach will have an authorised list of numbers and names. And if you’re a big institution, and let’s face it, the scams are coming through attempting to impersonate a bank, a government agency, a toll road, a large business. And they’re the places where we’re going to start with this registry. Once established, we’re looking at expanding it out beyond there, but ensuring that if you’re getting a message from somebody that says the Commonwealth Bank, the ANZ, a government agency, you can be assured that that’s exactly who it is who has sent that message to you and that’s the force of the laws.
JENNETT:
So, that was legislation passed last week. But what about implementation? When might we notice a difference?
JONES:
Great question. So, the blacklist operation is still going, we’re still whacking those phone numbers on the head when we know that they’re involved in a scam. Over the course of the year ahead, we’ll implement the registry. A lot of technical work, it sounds easy to say, but a lot of technical work has to go in at the government level, in establishing the registry and at the telecommunications company and at the call originator level as well. So, a fair bit of technical work and consultation is going on to ensure we can implement that in a smooth way. What we don’t want to do is be blocking numbers and blocking calls that are bona fide illegitimate ones. So, we’ve got to get all of that design stuff right.
JENNETT:
Well, of course, yeah, I imagine it is complex work. Can we talk about something that’s not a scam? But we have been discussing it on the program. Member of the House economics committee and your colleague Jerome Laxale wants a greater examination of the total $4 billion in fees that are passed on to consumers through digital payment methods. Do you know how much of that $4 billion in fees currently charged is excessive or cannot be justified?
JONES:
Firstly, Jerome is doing a great job as a member of the House economics committee and as a good local member in putting a spotlight on this issue. He feels passionate about it. So, hats off to the work that Jerome Laxale is doing, the Member for Benelong is doing in that area. And we’ve got the Reserve Bank doing an analysis of the data, the charges, the costs that are involved in those surcharges at the moment, because we want to ensure that Australians aren’t being ripped off through these bank surcharges. Over 80 per cent, closer to 88 per cent of retail payments are now done through a tap‑and‑go method, whether it’s a phone or a card at a terminal. And we want to ensure that that cost, the cost involved in that is not passed on to consumers.
JENNETT:
So, the banks would say there are legitimate costs that we building up these systems and all the it that sits behind it.
JONES:
There are both costs, and here’s the point, there are both costs and savings to both the merchants and to the banks in that it means they’re not handling the volumes of cash that they otherwise would have to handle. So, there are both costs and savings to the economy because of that. We want to ensure that some of those savings are also passed on to the consumers.
JENNETT:
And so does the government have any visibility on what the potential saving is within that headline figure of $4 billion?
JONES:
And that’s what we’ve got the Reserve Bank doing an analysis of at the moment. And once we’ve got all of that material together and the recommendations from the payment systems board, we’ll be able to look at that. The payment systems board does have power in and of itself to be regulating these charges, and that’d be the first port of call. But if there’s a need for government to look at it, then we absolutely will.
JENNETT:
We’ll look out for that. Stephen Jones, now an election must be approaching because budget management debates are starting to percolate through. You may have noticed from the coalition side, it’s starting to work up alternative budget costings and savings. It’s identifying Labor initiatives it’d like to scrap and a lot of those are off budget. Multi‑billion dollar funds, Housing Australian Future Fund, National Reconstruction Fund, rewiring the nation, help to buy for the purposes of counting savings.
JONES:
Just say that slowly again – the coalition’s plan for the future of our economy is less energy and fewer houses and less investment in the enabling technology that is going to drive manufacturing and business in this country over the decades ahead. I wait with bated breath how that is going to add up to a stronger economy and a stronger budget. We know that it won’t.
JENNETT:
I’m just wondering, of those figures that attach to each of those funds, how many of them are fully built out, fully funded? That is, if they want to collapse them and save on the interest that attaches to those borrowings. Is Housing Australia Future Fund already at $10 billion? Is National Reconstruction Fund already having $15 billion in it? How established are they for these–
JONES:
The short answer is no. So, the savings that they’re allegedly going to gain from these, put aside the economic costs that the economy will bear because we have fewer houses, less energy, less transmission, what that will do to energy prices, what that will do to housing prices. Leave that aside. These are bogus numbers and they cannot build a balanced budget. We’ll be back to the bad old days where for 9 years they promised a balanced budget but delivered record deficits on these numbers. If that’s their pathway to a budget surplus, it’s a bogus and it won’t work.
JENNETT:
All right. Rest assured, Stephen Jones, we’ll be taking that up with Angus Taylor on the program today, but we thank you and we’ll talk again soon.
JONES:
Good to be with you.