Journalist: I believe there are some new measures proposed to strengthen Australian citizenship.

Karen Andrews: Let me put it into some sort of perspective and that is that the terror threat in Australia has never been higher. The Federal Government has taken some action to continue to protect our citizens here .

Shortly, we are going to be introducing legislation into the house to revoke the citizenship of dual national who are involved in terrorism.

The new powers will apply to dual citizens who fight with or support groups such as ISIL or Daesh as well as the so called lone wolf terrorists.

What we are looking at doing is stripping those dual nationals of their Australian citizenship.

We have also released a discussion paper, I would encourage all of the 4CRB listeners to go on line and have a look at that discussion paper which is at citizenship.gov.au and just have a look at the paper that's being proposed on citizenship. Have a look at some of the questions that we are proposing and let us know your views on a range of things to do with citizenship.

Things such as do you believe that Australian citizenship is currently valued, how is this demonstrated, should we perhaps tighten some of the rules around the eligibility requirements for citizenship.

Should people have to have a longer period of permanent residency before they get Australian citizenship. Then of course there are issues about the privileges that are associated with citizenship and whether they should be suspended in the case of terrorism activity.

Journalist: So a great chance for people to get involved in that discussion, can you just give that website again?

Karen Andrews: yes, it is http://www.citizenship.gov.au/ and submissions close on the 30th of June.

Journalist: OK, wonderful. Now Karen I was at a meeting of my child's high school the other night talking about year 11 and 12 and English is the only compulsory subject for year 11 and 12, but I just wanted to ask you as the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Industry and Science, how important do you think the teaching of math and science in later years of high school is?

Karen Andrews: It is very important and it's important for a couple of reasons that I am happy to speak with you about. It’s certainly a part of the skills that will be needed for the jobs of the future.

Now we are not in a position to predict what the actual jobs will be but we do know that there are certain skills that will be needed to fulfil jobs of the future. Those are the ability to analyse data, a strong understanding of statistical analysis and the third one is the ability to write computer code.

Now those skills require are strong maths background at least and science would certainly be helpful for those.

To put it into a bit of perspective about the unknown with the jobs of the future and that is ten years ago, jobs such as search engine optimisers, app production they weren't even known of, so in ten years’ time we don’t know exactly what those jobs will be so we have just got to look broadly at what skills are going to be required.

For students at school, they are facing a future that is very much going to be dominated by technical developments and technology. The maths and the science skills are so important to that and to the jobs of the future.

There has certainly been a lot of discussion of late about having to have a maths and possibly a science subject compulsory all the way up to year 12. My very strong view on that is that we have for a long time had a focus on numeracy and literacy.

English is compulsory up to year 12, but certainly in some States maths isn’t compulsory, so we seem to drop the numeracy part of the equation before we get our students through their schooling all the way up to year 12.

I think it is time for us to revisit that and say well if English is compulsory, we certainly should be looking at a maths being compulsory.

I was actually speaking to a senior person at a South Australian university just the other day and she alerted me to a report that indicated that the students who are transitioning from school to university, the ones that do best, are the ones that have taken a maths or science subject through to year 12, because that gives them some skills such as critical thinking and problem solving and that is very useful as they transition into university.

For those that want to go on and study, even if they don’t want to take up a university education with maths and science, having at least done that at school gives them a very good start to their tertiary studies.

Journalist: Final question I wanted to ask you, we have talked a number of times on air about small business on the Gold Coast, cutting red tape and things like that. What about if those with entrepreneurial skills come up with a great idea, what support is there to get started for someone who has these great ideas?

Karen Andrews: There are a range of Government programmes that are available to assist and of course there is AusIndustry that can provide some frontline support to all of our businesses on the Gold Coast.

There is a programme, the accelerating commercialisation program, and it is particularly targeted towards your entrepreneurs and your researchers, inventors, those start-ups that are looking for some guidance on how to commercialise there products.

I think this is a great opportunity for our local businesses to go and have a look at the business.gov.au website, which is pretty much a one stop shop for business support and go through and have a look the accelerating commercialisation part of that website and just have a look at what support there will be to put you on the right track.

Often a lot of our entrepreneurs have come up with great ideas but they miss the step to take them through to fully commercialising their product. So what this programme will do is put them in touch with the right advisors to set them on the right path to commercialising and fully developing their products.

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