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Legislative Council - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2020-04-28 Daily Xml
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International Students

The Hon. R.P. WORTLEY (15:12): A supplementary: minister, the support package is obviously welcomed by international students who are struggling quite considerably at the moment.

The PRESIDENT: The Hon. Mr Wortley, ask your question.

The Hon. R.P. WORTLEY: Okay. Many of these students—

The PRESIDENT: The Hon. Mr Wortley, ask your question. No explanation. Ask your supplementary.

The Hon. R.P. WORTLEY: Do you think that the financial support given by the government is enough for international students who have lost their jobs and who relied on their jobs to pay their day-to-day food expenses and that sort of thing?

The Hon. D.W. RIDGWAY (Minister for Trade and Investment) (15:12): I thank the honourable member for his supplementary question. As I mentioned at the beginning of the question, we had a long amount of discussion and consultation with all education providers—StudyAdelaide, education institutions, student leaders—so we are pretty comfortable that we have the balance right to provide that support.

Of course, I remind the honourable member that it's in partnership with the three universities. They have put up a significant amount of money—Flinders University, $10 million; UniSA, $12.5 million; and Adelaide University, with a significant package. They didn't quantify it but I have seen in the media an amount of around $40 million collectively, so I assume, if you do the arithmetic, it's somewhere around $17 million. So there is certainly a significant amount of money that the universities have put up and we worked closely with them to make sure that what we provided was what they were asking for.

We don't know how long this crisis will go on. We think we have it about right. Of course, we have a $500 cash grant for international students so that they will apply for that. As to some of the assessment criteria, the team of my colleague the Hon. Michelle Lensink, the Minister for Human Services, will be administering it because StudyAdelaide is simply not a body that administers it. We heard in one of my colleague's previous answers that they have processed some 11,000 payments for another cohort of people, so they clearly have the capacity and the ability to process this.

We have 12,500 registrations of interest, so hopefully next week people can apply for those funds and we hope to see them starting to filter through the community support. As the honourable member acknowledged, they are a very important part of our economy, the state's largest export, and we want it to come back stronger than before.

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