PM: It's a great pleasure to be here at Wirreanda High School as you can see behind me with their banners, with Amanda Rishworth, the Member for Kingston.
I'm still here in South Australia and very much enjoying my visit. And we've come to this school today to launch reachout.com, which is a new resource for young people who might feel that they are struggling with issues in their lives.
During teenage years into young adulthood, for many young people it can be a time of stress and strain and they don't always know who to go to to ask for help.
We want kids talking to their parents, we want them talking to their teachers but we know that there are times when they feel there's something that's on their mind that's quite difficult to raise with an adult in their life.
Which is why I'm pleased we've been able to provide $4.2 million to the Inspire Foundation to resource reachout.com.
It's another resource for our young people to help them with their sense of wellbeing.
Here with Amanda, the local member for Kingston, I'm standing in a community where Amanda has worked hard as local member to bring new services to help support people with their health care needs, including a Head Space, one of the new models of health care for young people who might be worried about mental health issues.
An open door, a person you can talk to, an informal environment all based on the model of former Australian of the Year Pat, McGorry.
And Amanda Rishworth too has worked hard to honour our promise to construct a GP Super Clinic in this area, in Noarlunga to help people with their GP needs and some after-hours access, as well as investing more in primary care across this electorate. So I'm very pleased to be here today.
I'll turn now to some comments from Amanda and when she's made some comments I'll say something about the circumstances with Victorian health care.
AMANDA RISHWORTH: Thank you Prime Minister. I'm very pleased to be here at Wirreanda and I'd like to commend Wirreanda and the Inspire Foundation for really putting wellness and resilience of young people at the forefront of their agenda here.
I think today's launch of the Inspire's resources that will be used here at Wirreanda - in fact at many schools across the nation - really focuses on ensuring that young people are healthy, they're happy, and with that comes a great opportunity for learning.
So I would like to congratulate everyone involved, thank the Prime Minister for coming here today and really, as she's pointed out, delivering a lot of great health services for our local area including the GP Super Clinic and including the local Head Space that has had many, many young people through its doors since it opened.
PM: And thank you very much to Tony, the principal of this great school, for hosting our visit today.
I did too want to stay something about health funding in our country.
I struck an agreement with premiers and chief ministers to increase health funding, to make sure the Federal Government became a 50 per cent partner in the growing costs of health care, of hospital care.
I struck that agreement because I wanted to end the blame game and the politics played between federal governments and state governments and territory governments about health care.
This is an agreement that is delivering more funds; $1.1 billion more delivered this year than if we'd stayed with the health agreement of the former Government, that of course is the health agreement of Prime Minister Howard and then Minister for Health Tony Abbott.
And each and every year health funding under this agreement will grow. To look at Victoria's circumstance, health funding will grow by $900 million.
This is an agreement that works on funding formulas that were agreed between me and premiers and chief ministers.
It's an agreement where the Federal Government pays money upfront and then as necessary adjustments are done through the formula.
Unfortunately Premier Baillieu has decided in Victoria to pursue a very dishonest campaign about health care funding.
Whilst Federal Government investment is going up $900 million, he is cutting by $616 million. Despite this, he has tried to pretend to the Victorian people that an adjustment under one of the agreed formulas is somehow a cutback from the Federal Government. The amount in question is $107 million.
If Premier Baillieu properly managed his hospitals then he would be able to keep that money flowing to hospitals. Instead of properly managing his hospitals and keeping that money flowing, he's chosen to play politics with health care needs in Victoria.
So I have decided that because of this incompetence and politics from Premier Baillieu, that we will go around him. That we will send money direct to local hospital networks.
We will send $107 million direct to hospital networks in Victoria.
That money won't pass through Premier Baillieu's hands, it will go straight to local hospital networks.
And what we will do to balance the books is we will cut $107 million off other sources of funding to the Victorian Government and we will immediately implement a $55 million cut of reward money that the Victorian Government was hoping to get under one of our arrangements for modernising our economy.
They've let us down, they've let the nation down by not doing the right thing to modernise their economy and they won't receive that $55 million.
And we will look to recoup the balance against other future grants to Victoria but not in a way that will affect front-line services.
In addition to conveying that decision to Premier Baillieu, I have written today to premiers and chief ministers around the nation. I have reminded them of the spectacular benefits of the new health care agreement to them and the people of their state.
The huge extra resources we are putting in compared with Prime Minister Howard and then Health Minister Tony Abbott.
I have said to premiers and chief ministers very clearly that the Federal Government is not going to tolerate the continued playing of politics with health.
So if we see any other premier playing this kind of politics the way that Premier Baillieu has, then there is a very clear message to those premiers.
We will go round you, we will deal direct with hospitals and local hospital networks and we will rearrange your budget for you.
So to reemphasise that; if we see this kind of politics emerge then, as a Federal Government with health care funding, we will go around state governments, direct to local hospital networks.
We will rearrange state budgets by cutting them back in other areas.
We are not going to allow state governments to play politics with health under an agreement that they signed up to and under an agreement which provides new benefits to patients with more doctors, more nurses, more local control and more money than there has ever been in health care in the past.
So I'm happy to take questions.
JOURNALIST: Are you angry at having to fix this problem?
PM: This is a grand act of incompetence by Premier Baillieu which will be judged by the Victorian people.
He could have kept money flowing to health. He deliberately decided not to do it.
Well if he's going to play that kind of politics I'm not going to see patients suffer so we've gone round him.
JOURNALIST: Is it legislatively complicated, or do you have to (inaudible) red tape?
PM: It's done. We create a special account, we put the money in the special account and the money flows from the special account direct to local hospital networks.
JOURNALIST: This presumably is a big stick being waved at either Premier Baillieu or anyone else. Is that a deliberate policy now leading up to the federal election?
PM: It's a policy because of the campaign we've seen in Victoria which is just so dishonest.
Let's look at the options here, and I've outlined the options very clearly to premiers today. I entered a new agreement to give people record health funding.
If they don't like that agreement they are go back to the old agreement, Prime Minister Howard's agreement, then Minister for Health Tony Abbott's agreement, and lose billions and billions of dollars which we will then fund direct to hospitals.
We pay in advance and when you pay in advance inevitably under formulas there needs to be adjustments over time. That's common sense.
If you prepay in advance, then there are adjustments over time. Premier Baillieu has campaigned against one of those adjustments.
Well, if premiers don't want to be paid in advance, I'll pay them in arrears after the health care work is done, with all of the consequences that will have for state government budgets.
But the better thing to do would be for everyone to cut out the politics and get on with the job of implementing this health care agreement.
JOURNALIST: But is this is a deliberate collision course with Victoria that you've set yourself on?
PM: There's no collision. There's us, there's hospitals, and there's Premier Baillieu over here. We will now give money direct to hospitals. Premier Baillieu won't even see it.
JOURNALIST: Is paying that money directly to hospitals in breach of the national agreement?
PM: It's Premier Baillieu who's kicked up about the terminology in the national agreement, so I don't think he or anyone else can start kicking up about this approach that we're taking.
We're taking this approach because Premier Baillieu has been out there playing politics with the terms of the agreement.
JOURNALIST: You seem to be blaming Premier Baillieu for the situation but at the same time saying you don't want to play the blame game.
PM: Well, we're fixing it. We're fixing it. Let's actually go through the chronology here and anybody who's seen the chronology could not come to the conclusion you've just put to me.
We were there, new health care agreement, more money than ever before. Stepping up to being an equal partner in hospital costs. Doing away with the old agreement under Prime Minister Howard and Tony Abbott which would have seen the Federal Government share of hospital costs go down and down and down.
That's what we were prepared to do, honouring the agreement every step of the way.
The agreement has got various funding formulas in it, objective formulas, using things like population data, not things that politicians do. You get the data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and you feed it into the formula.
Against that backdrop, Premier Baillieu has started a political campaign. Well, I've said today that political campaign is irresponsible, it shows great incompetence in running Victorian hospitals, and I'm not having Victorian patients suffer because Premier Baillieu isn't doing his job.
So I will deal directly with Victorian hospitals.
I would of course prefer that Premier Baillieu and every other premier and chief minister around the country didn't play this kind of politics and just honoured the agreement.
That's what I'm prepared to do.
JOURNALIST: The State Government here in South Australia has objected to the use of that particular data and believes we have been short-changed. So it's not just a political game is it?
PM: Well the game that is being played in Victoria is a game where Premier Baillieu has directly administered cuts to hospitals and sought to blame them on the Federal Government. We do not see that conduct here in South Australia.
JOURNALIST: The South Australian Government has also questioned the data being used by the Federal Government. Is that not the case?
PM: It's one thing for people to raise technical questions about data. The information flow between the Federal and State Governments across funding in health, in education, in all areas of work, is of course huge.
Every day we have federal officials and state officials who are working through complex problems with oceans of data in front of them.
Running Government is a complicated thing. I do not in any way dismiss that in those discussions, from time to time, officials will look at data from the ABS or someone and say they think technically there should have been a collection this way or there should have been a seasonal adjustment of the data that way across the whole range of activities that we do. Of course there will be technical questions about data.
What that shouldn't result in is direct cutbacks to patients and the playing of politics like we've seen in Victoria.
JOURNALIST: Is this a failure of the health and hospital funding model?
PM: No, it's nothing to do with the model. It's to do with the conduct of the human being involved in the model, and that human being is Premier Baillieu.
JOURNALIST: Is your jobs package now sunk now that the Greens say they won't pass it unless the Government fixes the mining tax?
PM: Well, thank you for that question. Our plan for Australian jobs announced last weekend is funded by asking one per cent of companies, our biggest companies, to forego a current tax benefit in favour of 99 per cent of business.
Now at this stage we have the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Abbott, saying that the Liberal Party will vote against Australian jobs. They'll vote against this package.
Well, in some ways that's not surprising because they've marched into the parliament and voted against Australian jobs in the past.
Mr Abbott voted against 200,000 Australian jobs by voting against stimulating our economy at the time we faced the worst of the global financial crisis.
But there will come a day of voting in parliament and Mr Abbott will truly have to say to the Australian people is he intending to vote against Australian jobs?
Now the votes of the Greens are only relevant if Mr Abbott votes against Australian jobs. If he does that then from what the Greens political party is currently saying, we've got the spectre of them going into the parliament to vote to protect the tax breaks of some of Australia's biggest companies, including mining companies.
How does this add up? On the one hand they say to us, the Greens political party, they think mining companies should pay more tax, and then apparently they're going to walk into the parliament to increase the tax breaks for mining companies or to keep the tax breaks for mining companies.
Well, I'll let the Greens political party explain that contradiction if they're able to do so.
JOURNALIST: What is your reaction to the loss of 650 jobs through Telstra's Sensis division?
PM: This is really bad news. Any day a worker loses their job in a circumstance of redundancy is a difficult day for that person and their family.
And then when we see figures like this obviously it does cause a great deal of concern and there will be a lot of people who are thinking what am I going to do next? How am I going to keep my family budget going? What's the next opportunity for me?
We'll certainly be working through our employment services and the like to support people during this difficult time in their lives.
JOURNALIST: Can I ask about the funding for the independent schools sector. They've called for some clarity on the funding model that they're likely to face with news they could lose up to $5,000 per student. Are you able to give them some clarity?
PM: We've given a continuing guarantee that no school will lose a dollar, and no school will lose a dollar.
We are working hard with the independent schools, Catholics, state and territory governments on the most recently available data and the funding model.
There was a census collected, there is information that is released from the census periodically.
We are working with some of the most recent data releases to give people the sense of how the model can work - various iterations of the model can work - and we are going through that information process at the moment.
So we'll continue to collaborate closely with independent schools in that, but there is no cause for concern by any Australian school. We've got a long-standing guarantee no school will lose a dollar.
JOURNALIST: Back on the health system, would you like the Federal Government to take over running the hospitals altogether to stop the duplication and the blame game?
PM: We've been through this debate before and of course when it comes to something as big as that, you're talking about a change that could only be implemented over more than a decade, and it would require cooperation from state governments.
It would require recutting of current tax arrangements between the Federal and State Government. It would be a huge thing do.
I've always thought that states do have an obligation to step up to their role as systems managers. Whenever I sit with premiers and say do you want to manage your health care system, they say yes.
Well if they want the responsibility they've got to acquit the responsibility, and that's why Premier Baillieu's conduct is so disappointing.
JOURNALIST: Do you think it's almost libellous, your description of Premier Baillieu?
PM: In what sense?
JOURNALIST: Well you're saying he's dishonest, he might object to that very strongly.
PM: Well, how else can you describe a campaign that has been out there day after day getting people false information? It's a dishonest campaign.
What is being said is not the facts. I don't hear Premier Baillieu walk out the door and acknowledge $900 million up from us, $616 million down from him. That's a fact.
So when he's not dealing with the facts, and he's trying to manipulate things, then I think that's got to be called for what it is.
JOURNALIST: Why is the Government not sending anyone down to monitor or police the situation with the Sea Shepherd in the Antarctic waters?
PM: Look, we go through this each year and Mr Hunt from the Opposition goes out and makes his calls and various others and they don't answer the next question. To do what, under what authority, and with what powers?
When did we become the nation that apparently has got the capacity to police every ocean in the world?
JOURNALIST: So you feel no responsibility?
PM: That's not what I said. That's not what I said. What we've done in the past is we've sent a vessel to monitor, to collect information for the International Court of Justice case. That's what we've done.
In circumstances where we've got conduct on the seas with Japanese vessels and with the Sea Shepherd and the Brigitte Bardot, we are not empowered to be there, somehow putting an Australian boat or Australian vessel between these two ships. We are not empowered to do that.
What we are being asked to consider and do would put Australian personnel at risk.
The way in which we are dealing with whaling is we collected the information we needed and we are pursuing the International Court of Justice case.
I'm really going to have to get on the road. Thank you very much.
JOURNALIST: Just one more on the health funding. Do you expect other states to follow Victoria's example and mount political campaigns to try and secure the funding and are you open to redistributing some of that funding directly to hospitals in other states?
PM: Let me be very clear. If we see this conduct from another state we will go around them, we will deal direct with hospitals and we will cut them back in another area.
[ENDS]