Sunrise
HOST: Good morning, Prime Minister. Poll results indicate your visit to the western suburbs is futile and not going to change voters' minds. Why are you there?
PM: I am not worry about any of that, Kochie. I am here for the same reasons I've come to western Sydney in the past.
This is a big region, home to 1.6 million people, 120,000 businesses. If you carved it out it, it would have the third biggest economy in Australia and just like when I've come in the past, it's an opportunity to immerse yourself, to get to say hello to people, see what is on their minds, and also talk to them about what the Government is doing in this region and around the country to build their future.
HOST: Prime Minister, we are getting a lot of feedback from viewers out here. We're sort of checking the pulls of western Sydney as well.
Cara sends in this question and health and education seem to be two of the biggest issues here.
She says, why do you have to wait two and a half hours to see a doctor and why does her children's school have to hold fundraisers to get money for air-conditioning?
What is your response to that?
PM: I am happy to go through both of those because they're hugely important issues.
We have been investing in health care services here and we needed to to make a difference; they'd been neglected for a long period of time.
So we have invested, for example, $130 million in the Nepean hospital and we've created two GP super clinics, including in Blacktown where I'm standing now. So that is getting more services into the community.
I want people to be able to see GPs. I want them to be able to get the hospital services that they need.
And that's why there is more money in health care than ever before and more doctors and more nurses and more ability to have a say locally over what your hospital is doing.
On schools, we've pumped more than $1 billion into the 650 schools in western Sydney; that's for school capital.
On top of that, we are pumping in extra resources for our national partnership schools. That's all about reading and writing and teacher quality and those important things. And of course, I am fighting hard to make sure that we better fund schools from the start of the school year next year.
HOST: Okay and another question from Richard which questions the economic management of the Government saying, why does Labor always manage to get our finances into the red? What do you say to him?
PM: Well, there was this huge economic shock in the world called the global financial crisis.
It's probably the biggest economic crisis you and I will live through, Kochie, we are not old enough to have been around during the great depression but we have lived through the global financial crisis.
So that's what has hit our economy including hitting into government revenues and therefore the Government's budget.
We had to find ways of having our nation stand strong during the global financial crisis, so we invested in jobs.
And unlike the rest of the world, that means we have now got relatively low unemployment, low inflation, a growing economy.
But there is pressure around including here in western Sydney because the strength of our economy and the resources boom means our dollar is very high.
People are rightly saying what will we do when the minerals run out, and that was one of the questions I talked about last night.
What we'll do is we will innovate; we will be the best at what we do. We will tap into the growth in the Asian region. We will still be a region here in western Sydney and a nation that makes things, that manufactures things.
So a diverse strong economy is our future but we have to get all the decisions today right to get there.
HOST: And to be fair, we are one of the few countries in the world still to have a AAA-credit rating which is pretty amazing.
Cost of living concerns is a really big issue we are getting here. While unemployment is low, because so many companies are reducing the hours of workers, we have enormous under-employment; people not being able to work as much as they want to to pay the bills.
How can you ease that issue?
PM: The cost of living is a real pressure on people Kochie and I understand that.
That's why we have brought some new benefits to try and help people with just the day-to-day costs of getting by.
The Schoolkids Bonus, for example; $410 for a primary school-aged student; $820 for a high school student; worth $15,000 across two kids in school during a family's journey through school.
These are practical measures to make a difference to cost of living. As well as increasing the tax free threshold, which is a complicated way of saying you now don't pay a cent of tax until you earn more than $18,200.
And just to use western Sydney as an example, that's benefited more than half a million taxpayers here.
These are practical things. They are under threat and they will be in contest at the next election.
HOST: Julia Gillard, thank you very much for joining us. Enjoy your five days out here in Sydney's west. I appreciate your time.
PM: Thanks very much.
[ENDS]