Canberra
QUESTION: Prime Minister, Everald Compton. I'm delighted with the initiative that you and Wayne Swan took in identifying the ageing of the population and how that should be turned into an asset and not being a liability.
And I see based on your remarks about the Asian Century a great opportunity for aged care services in Australia to be exported to China where the demand will be enormous, and I think it could even get to the point of becoming a major export for the country and I wondered what you thought about that?
PM: Thank you very much Everald, and thank you for the contributions you've made to our policies too.
Everald's been working with us on a set of participation policies to make it easier for older Australians to continue to work.
So many of our public policy settings have made assumptions about when full retirement is, and in modern Australia where we need to lift participation and where so many older Australians want to continue in work, Everald's played a very leading role making sure we get those things right.
I also agree with your analysis about our potential to export aged care and health care and education services, financial services to Asia.
This is going to be such a big part of our future, including the export of public policy services. We are good at public policy.
Things like compulsory superannuation, Medicare, carbon pricing; these things are rightly studied in our region as models for advanced economies as to how you manage ageing populations, how you manage social welfare, how you manage to reduce carbon pollution.
So I think all of that Australian expertise and those leading-edge services can be a source of income and prosperity for us in this Asian Century.
QUESTION: Prime Minister, Baden Firth from the Mitsubishi Corporation. If you could give us your comments on the achievements that you feel you've delivered through the Fair Work Act to date, and then what sort of agenda platform you'll be taking to the next election around industrial relations, I'd be very grateful. Thank you.
PM: Sure. Certainly we're very proud of the Fair Work Act and whilst it's going to I'm sure be the continued topic of lively conversation with the business community, here again I think it's important that people get the facts on the table.
We are seeing rising productivity. We are seeing wages contained. In terms of levels of industrial disputation we are below the average of the Howard years.
And indeed much of the industrial disputation in recent statistics has arisen from state government bargaining disputes with state government employees like teachers and nurses.
So this is the set of achievements of the Fair Work Act.
We've recently passed some changes to Fair Work which have been about better balancing work and family life and addressing modern problems like bullying.
We believe we've basically got the settings right. We will not go to the election with a big program of change.
We will go to the election saying this is a system that is working for Australia.
And we will certainly go to the election resisting the alternative - whether it is frankly put or only quietly spoken - an alternative that takes us to the very divisive conflict of the Work Choices years.
QUESTION: Good morning Prime Minister, Ken King, CEO of the Pilbara Development Commission.
I'd just like to ask you for your comments about northern Australia. Particularly northern Western Australia, the Northern Territory and the north of Queensland as regions that provide great opportunities to drive the economy from the resources sector in particular.
And I think more importantly, not just about extractive efforts, extractive industries, but more importantly, your policies around encouraging people to live as well as work in northern Australia.
PM: Thank you very much for that question. I'm in the business of saying we should get things done. I do note that that's not necessarily embraced by all.
We've seen a bit of a flim-flam pamphlet come out on the future of northern Australia which promises rounds of endless reviews and meetings but not much content.
We've taken a different view; we've just got up there and got things done.
So whether it's been our record investments in the Kimberley to open up that region, whether it's been the huge investments we've made in the Northern Territory and in the north of Queensland, the investments we're making in infrastructure, the investments we're making in education to encourage people to aspire to the highest levels of education.
These are practical changes for northern Australia.
We've been working well with local government representatives in northern Australia. We actually work well with the Barnett Government on the strategy for the Kimberley.
We worked well with the Northern Territory Government to do things like secure the INPEX investment and to build the associated training facilities, which means that people will get jobs.
We've had our moments with the Queensland Government, but our big investments in the north of Queensland continue. And they will make a long term difference.
Northern Australia has the opportunity to benefit from many of our policy settings, including our settings for a clean energy future - we're talking about parts of the country where clean energy development is going to be a big part of their future and their future prosperity.
So we're out there on the ground doing practical work every day, and that's the approach that we'll continue to take.
QUESTION: Good morning Prime Minister, Gloria Jacob from Regional Development Australia in the Pilbara. Following on from Dr King's question - I was wondering what your position would be on encouraging more people to live there, certainly in northern Australia, but especially with regards to the special economic zone?
PM: Look I think you've got to be very careful about some of these economic suggestions.
We do have a zonal tax rebate for people who live in remote regions. I don't want to get into the work of constitutional lawyers - that's not my bag - we've got constitutional lawyers who do that for the nation.
But there is of course a lively discussion about whether or not such a proposal - the one we have in operation now and any proposal to build on it - would survive constitutional challenge. So that's on the income tax side.
On the business side - what I believe is if you get the underlying conditions right, then you will attract private sector investment.
And the underlying conditions are about traditional infrastructure, where we are a Government that is investing more in roads and rail and ports than any government in the nation's history.
We've radically upped investment since the days of the Howard Government.
If you can build new communications technologies - part of what has kept people from living in northern Australia or in more regional or remote Australia is the sense of isolation - the NBN and all of the technologies associated with the NBN can end that for all time.
Part of what has dissuaded people from living in those areas is the sense that they wouldn't be able to get quality services for their family. There wouldn't be quality in the local schools.
There wouldn't be quality in the local health care facilities. There wouldn't be the opportunity to go on to higher education.
We have worked to transform that. What I want to achieve in this parliament this week with the new school funding and new school improvement plan would radically lift the quality and resources of schools in regional and remote Australia.
The investments that we've put into universities that work in regional and remote Australia are working at transformation too.
So if you can get all of that right; the infrastructure, the human capital, the access to information, the sense for people that they could live lives supported by appropriate services in those parts of the country, then I believe individuals will respond and the private sector will respond as well.