HOST: Prime Minister, good morning.
PM: Good morning.
HOST: Welcome back to the Far North.
PM: Thank you.
HOST: Tell us where you'll be visiting today.
PM: I'll be with Senator Jan McLucas, who is with me now, and we will in Tully. We'll be talking to local community members. We'll also be talking to banana growers, local business people.
Yesterday, the Treasurer and Deputy Prime Minister, Wayne Swan, with Premier Anna Bligh, announced a new assistance package. This has been modelled on what happened with Cyclone Larry, but in a number of key respects it's better than what happened with Cyclone Larry - there are bigger concessional loans available, the amount of wage subsidy available is slightly higher, to help people keep their workers as they rebuild.
But I want to talk to local community members about how they're seeing the world through their eyes. It's an incredibly tough time and it's always good to be out on the ground, talking to people, gathering up their experiences and working through what we can do to help.
HOST: Will you be visiting Tully Heads, do you know?
PM: We're in Tully itself and Tully Heads, yes, I'm having that confirmed by Jan, who's helped us put all of this together, and I know that a range of people are coming to meet with us from the surrounding areas. We will be able to meet with people who are experiencing it in various parts.
HOST: Now, Prime Minister, when you first visited the region after the cyclone you said that the Commonwealth stood ready to help Far North Queensland recover. Now, why has it taken two weeks for this rebuilding package to be announced?
PM: Well, we were there from the very first days with money to assist communities. We made available the $1,000 emergency payment, which was so important when people were out of their houses, dealing with complete devastation, and now we've moved to the recovery package stage, which is why all of the details were announced yesterday by the Deputy Prime Minister and Premier Anna Bligh.
So, this is about the next stage of recovery - rebuilding your business, cleaning up your home, getting your banana plantation back on track. With this package and money that's already being paid, this is around $400 million to assist the region, and that's before we even get to the cost of the infrastructure rebuilding, which will be separate again.
HOST: Now, I'm sure you're aware it's not just coastal communities that have been devastated by this cyclone. A lot of inland communities as far west as places like Georgetown have copped the full brunt of even a Category 4 cyclone in some of those areas, yet the Etheridge Shire has been excluded from the relief package announced. Why is that?
PM: We've worked with the Queensland Government to identify local community needs, so there are a large number of councils that are getting some form of assistance, and then the most intensive assistance we try and focus on the hardest-hit areas. We understand that we've always got to be working with local communities and the Queensland Government to identify needs, so even having announced the package this week we will continue to work through, and if there are communities that need additional assistance then we will be working with those communities and working with the Queensland Government on providing that assistance.
HOST: So, there's the opportunity even on a case-by-case basis for people outside the areas that have been cut off, so to speak, could apply?
PM: Well, we'll work on an area-by-area basis, but we will work in consultation with local communities and the Queensland Government to make sure that areas with the greatest needs get the greatest assistance.
HOST: Primary producers have been hard hit by this. Small business as well, they need to get back on their feet, and what we've been hearing on the show is that what they need in many places, more than anything, is physical manpower - you know, they don't need it in three or four weeks' time, they need to get a lot of stuff moved right now.
In those sort of circumstances, is there still a role for the Army to be playing in Far North Queensland?
PM: There will be a continuing role. We've had up to 1,500 soldiers working on clean up and recovery. The number recently has been around about 1,000. What the Australian Defence Force is saying is that it will still be available to assist. There will be special advisers working with local communities to identify tasks, and then those tasks will be responded to, so the amount of person power that's going to take will depend on the number of tasks that the Australian Defence Force ends up undertaking.
Clearly, of course, the Australian Defence Force has its usual job to do of being ready to meet the national security needs of the nation, so we'll just be balancing that, but people should expect to see the Australian Defence Force, through special advisers, still available and meeting needs in communities, and they've done a fantastic job. I mean, having made available air assets to move food supplies around; having made available Naval assets to do what in war time would be called mine sweeping but obviously in response to a natural disaster is about identifying obstructions in waterways, as well as just the sheer physical grunt people have seen on the ground - getting supplies in and helping with the clean up.
HOST: It's certainly made a difference to people's morale, seeing a truck of Army soldiers coming through.
Now, just as an example, we spoke to one grazier earlier in the week, Shane O'Brien at Kinrara Station, which is about 90km south-west of Tully. Now, he's still got no water, no power, no road access to his property. He reckons the damage to infrastructure is close to 100 per cent on his property. No, the concessional loans might help in the future, but right now he needs to clear roads and fences to make way for rebuilding. Is that help available for him and people like him right now, and when could people like the O'Briens see help coming to them?
HOST: As part of the package that's been announced, there's is clean up money available of up to $25,000, so what I would suggest to anybody who's in that circumstance is please ring the special assistance number or make contact with Senator McLucas to talk through your entitlements.
The special assistance number is 180 22 66, but as part of the package there's clean up money which is separate to the concessional loans.
HOST: OK, I'm speaking with Prime Minister Julia Gillard on ABC Far North, nineteen to nine.
Now, at the same time as the worst-affected areas are crying out for help, as you know, there's been some criticism, including from the local Federal Member in this part of the world, of the eligibility criteria applied to the $1,000 relief payments from Centrelink.
Do you think 48 hours without power is enough to justify assistance?
PM: I thought it was important that the eligibility criteria used for the flooding and the cyclone, all of these natural disasters that have hit Queensland so hard, that the eligibility criteria was the same as has been used for earlier disasters.
Indeed, the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Abbott, issued a public call to me to make sure that the criteria were the same, and so we rolled it out the way it's been rolled out in the past. So, I'm a little bit surprised that Mr Entsch would be taking that view, and he might want to have that discussion with his Leader, Tony Abbott, because Tony Abbott certainly said to the Government ‘please make the eligibility criteria what they've been in the past', and that's what we did.
HOST: You may be aware that the Cairns Base Hospital was evacuated the day before the cyclone to avoid the potential impact of the storm surge, which could have hit the Cairns Esplanade. Do you think it's acceptable for a region of more than 200,000 people to be served by a makeshift hospital set up at an indoor sports stadium?
PM: I'm certainly aware of the evacuation of the hospital, because the Australian Defence Force played such a great role in getting that job done, as well as Queensland Emergency Services personnel, the air ambulance and the like. I mean, that's a really difficult thing to do, to evacuate a hospital and keep everybody safe, so full credit where credit is due - a remarkable job done.
On the future of the hospital and what would best meet the needs of this region, that's really a question for the local government to work through with the State Government.
People would be aware than on the weekend I struck a new funding deal for health and a new reform deal for health with Premiers and Chief ministers around the nation, including Premier Anna Bligh, and what I can say as a result of that agreement is Queensland will have more money, more beds, more doctors, more nurses, than Queensland has had in the past. So, there are real benefits in this package, but decisions about capital infrastructure - where hospitals are, what they look like - remain as decisions for the State Government.
HOST: And can you just give us a sense of how things will be better at Cairns Base with this health reform?
PM: Well, the thing that's really put pressure on hospitals right around the country, including locally here, is that State Governments have been trying to keep up with funding demands as health costs have risen and risen, and at the same time, under the Howard Government, the amount of money going in from the Federal Government was going down as a percentage. So - growing health costs, Federal money not keeping up, State governments trying to do their best in those circumstances.
What's happening now, under this new agreement, is we will step up to being an equal partner in growing health costs with State governments. So, it won't be a question of health costs are growing and the Federal Government saying ‘do your best' to State Governments. We'll be there as an equal partner in growth.
We will also be driving reforms. We want to make sure our hospitals are efficient. We don't want to see waste. Compared with the earlier health agreement we've cut out a lot of bureaucracy. We don't want money being eaten up by red tape, so this is an important development for the hospital here and for hospitals and health care right throughout Queensland.
HOST: Now, before I let you go, Prime Minister, the other national issue today is the decision to send asylum seekers who've just attended a funeral of their loved ones in Sydney back to detention on Christmas Island, including a 9-year-old child. Do you think that's a compassionate decision?
PM We want to show compassion to people in such difficult circumstances, and I think many Australians would be thinking about that small child and the grief that we've seen displayed on our TV screens and would be very focussed on the needs of the small child involved and community members who are grieving the loss of others.
We, as a Government, stand by mandatory detention policy, but we are working to make sure that the circumstances in which children and families are held are better circumstances than they've been in the past.
Now, we've got to be balanced here. We need to make sure we've got strong protection of our borders and we've got more assets patrolling our borders than ever before, but as human beings I think we respond to others in grief and distress and having community members come, family member come, from Christmas Island to mourn their loss and attend funerals was the right thing to do.
HOST: Prime Minister, just finally, in your visits to Tully and places like Tully Heads today, what will you be saying to people on the ground?
PM: I'll be saying to people that this is going to be a long, tough road ahead. There's no point pretending anything else. It's not going to be easy and there are going to be moments of very great pressure and strain on individuals, but during all of that re-building, that hard journey ahead, we will be there, working with the local community, working with local community members, to help them re-build.
There's nothing that the Federal Government can do that's going to wipe the slate and take all the pain away. People are going to be looking at what they've lost.
What we can do is we can work with them in the rebuilding, and that's what we intend to.
HOST: Prime Minister, thank you for coming in today.
PM: Thank you.