Thank you to the Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers' Association for the invitation today to launch your 39th annual conference.
I've spoken to this conference before.
But this is my first time as Prime Minister.
And I want to congratulate PANPA's ongoing efforts in fostering excellence, innovation and professional development within the newspaper industry - for one single reason, and that is, the state of newspapers is central to the health of Australia's democracy. It still remains its principal arteries.
Much has been written about the changing media environment in which you operate.
The media landscape, of which you are an important part, is being transformed as communications become more diffuse.
This is having a profound impact on your profession.
Just as it is having a profound impact on my profession and on the whole way in which we collectively conduct our democracy.
Consumers' habits are changing as people increasingly access news and information on laptops, Blackberrys and iPhones.
Today there are roughly 80 million blogs, and nearly 200 million people connected through the internet on Facebook and MySpace.
And the corollary of this shift online is a change in the way in which news is created and the way in which news is consumed.
You know better than most that this change represents challenges to traditional media, including newspapers.
The closure of the Bulletin magazine after 128 years and, the Sunday Program after 28 years, are evidence enough of the great changes which are now afoot.
But this doesn't mean abandoning quality journalism, or quality ideas or quality debate.
In fact, I believe today that there is even greater demand for quality news and quality debate.
And that's because our communities, both local and global, are tired of the same old political script.
Our communities, both local and global, are instead looking for new solutions to the new challenges they confront - from family disintegration to pressures on local communities, to climate change.
That is why each government must work harder to engage the community directly, rather than governments simply going to the polls every three or four years and then returning to some level of political or community engagement three or four years later. It hasn't worked before. It doesn't work now. It won't work into the future.
Earlier this year we convened the 2020 Summit - to get the best ideas on Australia's future from Australians from all walks of life.
Hundreds of submissions were received. Thousands of Australians participated through local school summits, local summits and local community forums.
What struck me was that we had 500 secondary schools across Australia participate in this process - that is nearly one fifth of the nation's secondary schools - and they ran their own local school summits.
Australians at all levels are wanting to participate in a continuing discussion about Australia's future.
We have also for the first time begun holding Community Cabinet meetings across Australia to give people direct access to Cabinet Ministers.
Within the first 12 months of government we will have held Community Cabinet meetings in every State of the nation.
We're learning a lot from these meetings about the day to day concerns of Australians.
The challenges of raising adult children with profound disabilities.
The challenges of living on the single age pension.
The challenge of getting to work without proper public transport.
The challenge of climate change to our farmers and the river systems on which they have depended for more than a century and on which they can no longer depend.
Community engagement also requires a practical response.
Both now and most critically, for the long term.
That's why, for example, we will respond to each and every one of the recommendations brought forward at the 2020 Summit as promised, by year's end.
Saying yes to things we can do.
Saying no to those things that we can't do - and explaining why.
As well as indicating those things that will need more work.
This I would argue is part of a continuing dialogue between the Government and the community which we represent and therefore our intention is to conduct our relationship with the Australian people in this way.
Today I want to discuss the core objectives of the Government and the policy agenda we have embarked upon to achieve them - including our agenda for a revolution in Australian education.
Australia, like other nations, faces tough times ahead because of the state of the global economy and the challenges of a rapidly changing world.
That is why the Government has a plan to build a more secure Australia, a stronger Australia and a fairer Australia - to see Australia through the challenging times that lie ahead.
That means tackling long term challenges - not just putting them off into the never never.
That also means doing what can practically be done to help working families, pensioners and carers in the here and now.
Australia faces new national security challenges ahead, some of which will require new responses.
That is why the Government has a plan to strengthen our defence force for the future, enhance our relations with our friends and allies and tackle new longer term challenges for our nation, like energy security.
We are already bringing new rigour to our defence planning through the preparation of a new Defence White Paper.
We have committed to give our Armed Forces the resources they need to do the job, by providing 3 per cent real growth in defence spending for the full decade ahead.
We are combining this commitment of resources with a new strategic foundation for our defence planning.
The starting point will be a new national security policy outlined in the near future in a National Security Statement which will be released to the Parliament in the near future.
It will be the first time Australia has had an integrated National Security Statement.
We are also working to strengthen our alliance with the United States and to build our security cooperation with regional partners including Japan, the Republic of Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore - all of whom I have visited during our first six months in office.
We are also re-building our relationship with the Pacific Island countries to begin to turn around decades of strategic drift.
To help shape the future of our wider region, we have also begun a regional dialogue about an Asia-Pacific Community for the future - to begin to foster a culture and to fashion an institution to encourage the habits of security cooperation not confrontation.
And we are engaging again with the wider world - including through our nomination to the UN Security Council, our commitment to the Millennium Development Goals for the world's poorest nations, and the establishment of the International Commission for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament and our ratification of Kyoto.
We believe we have a simple choice - either we try to shape our regions and our world order or we simply allow our region and our world to be shaped indiscriminately by events. That's the stark choice.
For these reasons, the Government intends to prosecute an activist foreign policy, an activist defence policy and an activist security policy for the future.
We are re-engaging with the international community by deploying Australia's potential for creative middle power diplomacy - to enhance our long term security and that of our wider region.
Our second core priority as a Government is to build a stronger Australian economy.
Australia, like other nations, faces tough economic times because of the state of the global economy.
That is why the Government is committed to responsible economic management anchored in a strong budget surplus.
That is also why the Government has a plan to boost long-term productivity growth through a comprehensive economic reform program.
That reform plan starts with an education revolution with the long-term objective of building in this country the best educated, best trained, best skilled workforce anywhere in the world.
That must be our ambition as a nation.
Our reform plan also includes a $76 billion nation-building plan to tackle the nation's infrastructure bottlenecks, the single biggest nation-building plan in our country's history.
The Government came to office at a time when Australia was facing some of the most challenging global economic conditions in almost a quarter century.
In the past year:
* A global financial crisis has been triggered by a wave of defaults in the US housing market, with the most recent manifestation of the crisis being the takeover by federal regulators of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac which together hold about $5.4 trillion of debt, around half of the United States' entire mortgage debt.
* The global economy has seen the greatest oil price shock in more than thirty years.
* Industrialised nations have seen inflation almost double.
* Five out of the seven largest industrialised economies have experienced zero or negative growth in recent months.
* Global share markets have fallen by an average of 20 per cent.
* Global consumer confidence levels have fallen to their lowest levels since the early 1990s.
We must face these global economic facts. These are tough global economic times.
And Australia is not immune.
But the Government is committed absolutely to steering Australia through these tough economic times to ensure our economy emerges in strong shape for the future.
We have delivered responsible economic management, with a conservative Budget grounded in a $22 billion surplus.
The surplus was designed to put maximum downward pressure on inflation and interest rates - to give the RBA maximum room to make interest rate cuts.
The Government has also embarked upon the most comprehensive microeconomic reform program that Australia has seen since the early 1990s.
We are committed to building long term prosperity by investing in five key platforms for future productivity growth:
* an Education Revolution to which I have referred;
* a nation-building infrastructure plan including roads, rail, ports and most critically, a national high-speed broadband network;
* investing also in innovation;
* creating a seamless national economy through an ambitious program of business deregulation, and
* long term tax reform.
We have laid out an Education Revolution for Australia's future - ranging through early childhood education, school education, vocational education and training, universities and research.
The Education Revolution isn't a slogan, it is a driving vision for the Government.
It's at the heart of building a 21st century economy.
Australia can't compete against the rest of the world by driving down wages and conditions.
The low-cost economies of our region can always beat us at that game.
And we can't expect our resources sector alone to shoulder the burden of building our future prosperity.
We must invest in knowledge and the knowledge-based industries for the future.
In our first Budget we allocated nearly $20 billion to the Education Revolution over the next four years.
We have begun allocating funding from our $2.5 billion Trades Training Centres program for Australian secondary schools, our $1.2 billion digital education revolution for Australian secondary schools as well.
And we are working for the first time in the country's history on a national school curriculum covering English, maths, the sciences and history.
We are funding 630,000 training places for the Skilling Australia for the Future program.
And investing an additional half a billion dollars from our first Budget to begin rebuilding our university infrastructure.
The Government's commitment to the Education Revolution is matched by our commitment to nation-building infrastructure.
The Government's nation-building program is now in motion.
In just nine months, we have committed $76 billion in these critical areas of infrastructure bottleneck.
These long-term investments will help build the foundations of the nation's future prosperity.
On the deregulation agenda, through the Council of Australian Governments which has come back to life, we are working on 27 areas of regulatory reform with the single objective of building a seamless national economy.
It's time for the Federation to enter the 21st century.
I will work with every State and Territory Government towards that goal and I don't intend to allow politics to get in the way.
Finally, we have established the Henry Commission as the starting point for long-term reform of the tax, welfare and retirement income system - another crucial element in building a stronger Australian economy for the future.
As well as the challenge of building a stronger Australia, the Government is committed to ensuring that all Australians can participate in an inclusive society.
The Government believes passionately in a fair go for all, based on equality of opportunity, a humane safety net and acting on entrenched disadvantage in new ways.
We're delivering on our commitment to tax relief for working families, with a $46.7 billion tax package, a $4.4 billion Education Tax Refund, the first in the country's history, to help with the kids' education and an increase in the Child Care Tax Rebate from 30 to 50 per cent.
We've also provided $7.5 billion in additional payments to pensioners and carers in the Budget and begun a detailed review of retirement incomes with a view to placing pensioners on a more secure footing for the future.
The Government has also begun to act on the homelessness agenda with the first White Paper on homelessness in our nation's history.
It is for me, simply obscene that in a country as wealthy as this, we still have according to Census date, 100,000 Australians who can still call no place home. It is time we put a stop to that.
The package of housing affordability measures is also now being implemented, including our First Home Saver Accounts to provide concessional taxation treatment for young Australians saving for their first home.
The Government has also committed to closing the gap with Indigenous Australians, including through our support of the Employment Covenant initiated by Andrew Forrest and other Australian employers, to generate tens of thousands of new opportunities for employment for Indigenous Australians.
As well as meeting the challenges of building a more secure, stronger and fairer Australia today, the Government also recognises that Australia must prepare now for the challenges of the future.
What will be the shape of China, what will be the shape of India, what will be the shape of the Asia Pacific region. And how does Australia carve intelligently its future in the midst of this ocean of change.
Like other nations, Australia faces long-term challenges, including climate change and water, the ageing of our population and long-term food and water supply.
That is why the Government has a plan to act on climate change, to tackle the long-term needs of the hospital system as well as a plan of action on the future of the Murray-Darling Basin.
We are acting on these challenges.
After a long period of inaction, we have drawn a line in the sand on climate change.
We recognise it as the greatest economic, environmental and moral challenge of our time.
That's why the Government ratified Kyoto on the day we came to power.
It's why we will be implementing a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme to achieve the lowest cost reduction in carbon emissions for Australia.
It's why we are supporting an energy efficiency strategy for the nation.
It's why we will introduce a new national renewable energy strategy for the nation.
And we applaud the leadership being shown by many media organisations and other organisations on reducing carbon emissions and embracing sustainable business practices.
What we do as nations must be matched by what we do as households, what we do as corporations. The planet, at the end, is at stake.
We have begun on a long-term strategy to reform also the health and hospital system and end the blame game between different levels of government.
We have established the National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission and the National Preventative Health Taskforce, and we have invested in our public hospital system and in the reduction of elective surgery waiting lists. This task has just begun.
And through COAG we are negotiating now a new Australian Health Care Agreement, a major step in our long-term program of health reform, to take effect mid-2009.
The Government has also made new forms of community engagement one of our long-term national objectives. The Government that I lead believes that Canberra doesn't always know best, and that we must work hard to always keep in touch with the community.
To do that, we must be open and accountable to the community as well.
That is why the Government has introduced the Lobbyists' Register and Code of Conduct.
That's why in May this year we introduced amendments to the Commonwealth Electoral Act to ban foreign political donations.
It is why we also legislated to reduce the disclosure limit from the $10,000 brought in by the Liberals to $1,000 - although the Liberals are now obstructing this in the Senate.
Before the election we also made commitments to reform Freedom of Information legislation.
The Government will deliver on those commitments.
As Senator Faulkner announced in July, the Government's FOI reforms will be implemented in two stages.
We will be introducing legislation to abolish conclusive certificates in the current sittings of Parliament. Conclusive certificates deny people the right to challenge decisions not to release government documents.
As a result of our reforms, Ministers will no longer have an unchallenged power to rule out the release of documents.
Decisions refusing access to a government document will now be subject to full independent review on the merits.
Secondly, we will be releasing an exposure draft of legislation addressing our other FOI commitments.
The draft legislation proposes to establish a Freedom of Information Commissioner, who will be an independent statutory officer.
Consistent with our commitments, the exposure draft will also address other recommendations made by the Australian Law Reform Commission and Administrative Review Council in their joint report on Open Government.
The exposure draft is expected to be released for public comment in late 2008 or early 2009.
That will give PANPA and other interested parties the opportunity to scrutinise and comment upon the proposed reforms.
Our strong commitment to these reforms does not mean that we won't from time to time have disagreements with some FOI applicants. That is normal.
Robust and effective internal government processes do require confidentiality.
Just as robust and effective internal corporate processes also require confidentiality.
It is a question of balance. We take the strong view that the previous Government got that balance wrong.
And we're determined to get the balance right - while recognising that from time to time there will be argy bargy.
The task of developing model whistleblower protection legislation has been given to the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs, which is chaired by Mark Dreyfus QC.
They will be reporting back to the Government by February 2009.
In fact I understand that a number of media representatives are participating in a roundtable that the Committee is holding today.
A further item on our agenda is journalist shield laws.
The Government does not believe that journalists should be prosecuted for publishing material that is merely embarrassing to the government of the day.
The Attorney-General is considering options to strengthen protections for journalists and their sources in reporting the news. These are real, concrete reforms. They will take a while to do, but we are determined to implement them.
And they will help make government more open, more accountable and more responsive to average Australians.
Before closing, I would like to return to a core element of the Government's long-term reform agenda - the Education Revolution.
For me, a first-class education is both a matter of basic fairness as well as being a national economic imperative.
We have committed as a Government to lifting school retention rates from 75% to 90% by 2020. We are doing this so that nine out of every ten children have the choice of a job, learning a trade or completing a university degree.
We know completing schooling to Year 12 level is important not just as a pathway to further education, but because without it Australians are significantly more likely to be unemployed.
Each additional year of schooling is associated with around a 10 per cent increase in earnings.
Children who receive a better education are less likely to commit crimes in later life.
Low educational attainment is also associated with inter-generational poverty and social exclusion. The individual, social and economic benefits of high quality schooling are inseparable from each other.
Education is critical to people's life chances, to our future economic growth and to our community life. The Government's revolution must be both quantitative and qualitative.
In our first Budget we allocated $19.3 billion to education initiatives over the next four years.
But we are also implementing a set of qualitative reforms:
* We have invested $20 million and are developing a national curriculum in English, maths, the sciences and history for all school students by the end of 2010.
* From 1 January 2009 we will be investing $625 million to encourage more students to study maths and science and pursue related careers including teaching. We need to act on the crisis of maths and science teaching in our schools.
* We are investing also $62.4 million to re-establish a National Asian Languages and Studies Program so that more students have the opportunity to learn the language and civilisations of our closest neighbours. And again a mission of the Government is this: to make Australia over time into the most Asia-literate country across the collective West.
The most China literate country across the collective west, as this region of ours - the Asia Pacific region - becomes the geo-political, geo-strategic and geo-economic centre of the world in the 21st Century.
Two weeks ago at the National Press Club I set out our quality education agenda for Australian schools.
I announced the three central pillars of reform that the Commonwealth will be seeking to achieve in partnership with State and Territory Governments through COAG:
* Firstly, improving the quality of teaching;
* Secondly making school reporting more transparent, and
* Thirdly lifting achievement in the most disadvantaged schools in our communities
There was a great deal of focus on some specific elements of what I had to say a couple weeks ago, particularly the consequences in individual cases of pursuing these reforms.
Some reacted strongly to the idea that if we set higher standards, we should insist on them applying in every community.
Our view is, that if despite our best efforts over the long haul, we cannot make a difference to student outcomes, strong action should be expected by parents, teachers, governments and taxpayers to make things right. And I stand today by what I said back then.
But those proposals should not be seen in isolation but as part of an overall agenda to reform and to invest.
As I said when I released my outline of the Education Revolution in January of last year, that is, the month after I became leader of the Parliamentary Labor Party, this revolution requires a substantial and sustained increase in the quantity of our investment, and the quality of our education outcomes.
This is required at every level of education from early childhood to advanced research.
We need to set for ourselves a new national vision - for Australia to become the most educated country, the most skilled economy and the best trained workforce in the world.
In our reform agenda and collaboration with the States, we are proposing two distinct pools of reform funding.
To support reforms that advance quality teaching within schools, we will introduce new National Policy Partnerships with the States. These partnerships payments are up-front payments that help drive reform and payments that are made on outcomes achieved.
In the case of disadvantaged schools we have proposed a separate policy partnership with the States to provide more resources to achieve better and measurable outcomes.
Our goal is to see an average sized school in a disadvantaged area receive in the order of an additional $500,000 per year to use flexibly to lift student outcomes.
This might enable a school to employ additional teacher aides, pay high performing teachers who help lift student outcomes to top up on their regular salary - or fund after-school homework or reading classes.
Over time, reward funding would also be available for the schools that make real progress in these difficult challenges.
We are prepared to support those reforms up front that can make a difference. And we are ready to reward schools that go the extra mile to make sure they continue to improve.
While the priorities and the payments are distinct, their delivery needs to be integrated together so that it has the maximum impact on student learning.
We will judge each element on the evidence of its effectiveness. But in reality, none of the reforms we propose - school transparency, teacher quality and lifting attainment in disadvantaged school communities - can be undertaken without the other.
In short, reform is required to identify the weaknesses and then to target additional investment and to measure improvement.
One of the best example of quality schooling lies in Finland. Finland is the highest performing nation in the OECD when it comes to student outcomes.
Finland recruits the top graduates to teaching - in fact the top 10 per cent of university graduates become teachers and admission to teaching degrees is tightly controlled.
But they also ensure that every child excels. They employ one specialist education teacher for every seven regular teachers.
This means that children who are at greatest risk of falling behind receive additional one-on-one tuition.
In contrast, in Australia, we find the pool of children failing to meet reading, writing and numeracy benchmarks growing as children move through the primary years - 3, 5 and 7.
The Preliminary Paper for the 2007 National Report on Schooling in Australia shows that on reading and numeracy, the proportion of our children meeting the benchmarks is declining.
* Between years 3 and 7 the proportion of students meeting reading benchmarks declines by four percentage points [93.4 to 89.3]
* Between years 3 and 7 the proportion of students meeting numeracy benchmarks declines by thirteen percentage points [93.2 to 80.2]
The results for children from disadvantaged backgrounds are even more stark.
That is why we need therefore a concrete plan of action.
Like Finland, we want to recruit the best graduates to teach in our schools. That is why we are prepared to offer reform payments to schooling authorities which are prepared to recruit top graduates into teaching, reward our best performing teachers and give them incentives to teach in underperforming schools.
Like Finland we want to ensure that students who need additional support to succeed can get that support.
That is why we are prepared to offer additional assistance to schools which on publicly available data are underperforming compared to similar schools.
This could involve:
* attracting high performing principals and teachers to underperforming schools;
* providing funding for intensive learning activities and additional coaching for those students who are falling behind; or
* providing incentives for individual schools to extend their reach through longer opening hours, after-school study support, sports and other activities to help keep students engaged in their studies.
We want to give school leaders such as the local school principal the tools to confront the challenges they face on the ground. This is a necessary part of an effective national reform program.
In a few weeks' time I will mark the tenth anniversary of my own election to the national Parliament. In my first speech in Parliament, I called for an education revolution. That was ten years ago.
Within weeks of becoming leader of the Federal leader of the Parliamentary Labor Party, I set out a detailed case for the Education Revolution.
Now, in government, I am determined to implement that Education Revolution.
It will require tough choices, tough decisions, tough reforms.
But without significant change and significant new investment we will not achieve the best we can in the future. Therefore, this Education Revolution is necessary in 21st century economy, necessary to give our kids the best possible start in life, and necessary also for overcoming entrenched disadvantage.
The Education Revolution is central to building a stronger, fairer Australia and one that delivers a better future for all Australians.