PM: This is our sixteenth Community Cabinet meeting around the country since our government was elected at the end of 2007.
The reason we do them is to keep in touch with the Australian community.
It's very easy for somewhere as remote as Canberra from this community of Geraldton and this region for governments, whatever their good intent, to simply become detached from the reality on the ground.
So our discipline from day one has been to go out every six weeks or so to a part of Australia and to bring the cabinet to town and it's the first time the Australian Government, the Commonwealth Government's done that and for us it's been a very important discipline.
And this discipline enables us to find out things we didn't know, find out things that are happening on the ground we didn't know about, programs that we thought we'd agreed to in Canberra are being implemented on the ground only to discover that it's happening in a different way to that which we planned to get that feedback and do things about it; so thank you for coming out in numbers tonight to provide us with that continued feedback to what this government is seeking to do nationwide.
When I was elected as Prime Minister of Australia, I said I wanted to be a Prime Minister for all Australians.
People from big cities and from small towns, from regions and from rural areas, people who work in the cities, people who work on farms, for Indigenous Australians, for non-Indigenous Australians and being here tonight is part and parcel of us reflecting our commitment to that principle. Whether people vote for us or whether they don't, we're elected democratically as the government of Australia and we're here to hear from you - the community - so we look forward to what you've got to say to us later this evening.