Ladies and gentlemen, Councillor Nancarrow, Don Randall, my other parliamentary colleagues. It's a great pleasure to be here.
It's certainly my first visit to this particular part of the Canning electorate, and it's an opportunity to do something that I tell school groups that visit me in Canberra - and they come on a regular basis when Parliament is sitting and they normally come straight after Question Time, and we have a photograph in the Prime Minister's courtyard and then I invite them into my office and they stand around the office and I explain the history of the Prime Ministerial desk and how it was used by many of my predecessors - by John Curtin during World War II and by Bob Menzies, and then I invite them to ask me questions. And almost unfailingly, the question they ask me most frequently is what's the best thing about being Prime Minister of Australia. And I say the best thing about being Prime Minister of Australia is the opportunity you have as part of the job to get on the road and to meet different groups within the Australian community, to listen to what they have to say - sometimes to agree with them, sometimes to disagree with them, sometimes to argue with them, but always be willing to communicate as effectively as possible in order to [break]. And the opportunity it gives me to move around the country, to listen to people, sometimes to be able to say things they like, sometimes to say things they don't like - but it's all part of the great democratic process.
And this is the first day of a four day visit that I am paying to Western Australia. I come here regularly and the visit will take me to different areas including on Thursday to Kalgoorlie. And can I say what a marvellous, energetic, indefatigable federal representative you have in Don Randall. There is not much doubt, ladies and gentlemen, that Don does advocate the interests of his constituents. He knocks on doors and if they don't open, he keeps knocking. When they do open, he doesn't leave until he gets essentially what he wants. And Don is a great dogged representative of the people of this electorate and I think he understands how important the diverse needs of a community, which is a mixture of outer metropolitan and rural people, it is an electorate that needs that kind of personal attention.
Today is quite significant in Australia because it's the first day of the operation of many of the changes that we have made to improve the Medicare health system. From today, medical practitioners who bulk bill concession cardholders and children under the age of 16 will receive a five dollar increase in the rebate, which is paid by the Government. That particular measure did not require the approval of the Senate and in addition to that, and I mention this particularly in the context of welcoming Peter Wallace to this gathering - and Peter was the Rural Doctor of the Year throughout Australia for 2003 - a particular honour for this part of Western Australia. And not only is the increase in the rebate operating with effect from today, but we're also bringing into effect a large number of measures that are designed to improve and assess the provision of medical practice in the rural and outer metropolitan areas of Australia, including the introduction of something that I know doctors and particularly the Rural Doctors Association of Australia have wanted for a very long time and that is large numbers of additional practice nurses with their own MBF schedule who will be able to take over much of the routine work of a medical practice and thereby enable doctors to be freer to focus on the sort of general practitioner services that all communities including rural communities need. Much of the debate about the challenges to our health system revolves around the availability of general practitioners and part of the solution of that problem is to have more general practitioners in areas of shortage, but it's also to have practice nurses to free the general practitioners to do the things that they are really trained to do and that is to consult, to diagnose and to treat patients.
So today is quite an important day in the development of the changes to the Medicare system and I hope that when Parliament resumes next week, the very first thing that the Senate will do will be to pass our new safety net health legislation which will provide a safety net for out of pocket expenses, not only in relation to GP consultations, but also in relation to all other out of hospital out of pocket expenses because as so many of you will know if you have an illness it is not only perhaps the out of pocket expense that might be involved in going to the GP, but if you have to have a specialist consultation where the bulkbilling rates are not particularly high you also incur out of pocket expenses and that safety net, which we can't put in to operation until it's approved by the Senate, that safety net is very important to addressing that issue.
Don mentioned, as did the Mayor mention, the importance in a community such as this of roads. And I am very pleased to remind you that only two weeks ago, the Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson announced that the Government would extend for another four years the highly effective 'Roads to Recovery' programme which has provided several hundred million a year over a period of four years to upgrade local roads. And one of the good things about this programme is that the money is paid directly by the Federal Government to the local council. You don't have to go through the state government, you don't have the additional layer of bureaucracy, it's a deal between the Federal Government and the local councils and the same thing is going to apply in relation to the extension. And that extension of the 'Roads to Recovery' programme will mean that there will be the same amount of money over a four year period available, some two to three hundred million dollars a year over the next four years in order to continue to improve and upgrade the local roads and this is a very important project for outer metropolitan and rural areas and an extremely valuable and important project for local councils.
And it's also the intention under the Auslink programme for the Government to provide additional funding for other of its road responsibilities and there'll be more said about that by the Deputy Prime Minister and the Treasurer as we approach and as we reach the delivery of the budget in May of this year. We understand that in a big country such as Australia roads are very important. And we have certain responsibilities. The Federal Government for the national highways, the State Governments have responsibilities for state highways. We've had a responsibility for local roads and I'm very pleased at the investment that my Government has made through local councils in the maintenance and the development of local roads. And, could I say, that Don has been persistent in his advocacy in relation to other road funding and I can assure you that his arguments will continue to be listened to very very carefully and very very attentively in relation to that.
There is one other matter that I wanted to briefly touch on and that is I'm aware of the support for and the interest in preserving the history of the railways of Western Australia. Railways were very important to opening up all of the remoter parts of this country, but particularly in a state as large as Western Australia, there's no denying that in the era before road transport large tracks of Western Australia would not have been developed without access to rail transport and the contribution that the railways of Western Australia made to the development of this state and to the development of our entire nation is very important indeed. And I'm aware of the efforts of the rail heritage foundation of Western Australia to complete the redevelopment of infrastructure at the Pinjarra Railway Yard south east of Perth. Here we are and to construct in the same region, the Boddington Railway Station and Broadwalk.
And I'm pleased to announce today that the Federal Government will commit $845, 000 to preserve the future generation, the part of Western Australia's rail history through the redevelopment of a number of facilities at Pinjarra and in the surrounding regions. That will be on the understanding of matching contributions from the state government that I'm sure will be forthcoming and it's an earnest of our desire to support local projects of this kind and it's in very direct consequence of some very persistent and, might I say, very effective lobbying by your local member.
The last thing I want to talk about is of general application to all of us as Australians. As a Government, we have three broad goals for our country and we think they are goals that most Australians share. We want the country to be strong and secure. The first responsibility of any Government is that of national security. That includes not only very strong defence forces, but it also includes a very effective police force at both a federal and a state level. And this morning I had the opportunity rather of having a detailed briefing from the Australian Federal Police in Perth about the ongoing success of our cooperation with the Indonesian National Police in tracking the operations of the terrorist organisation Jemaah Islamiyah in Indonesia. I also had the opportunity of being briefed on the effectiveness of our activities against those who would seek to import drugs into this country. It's an ongoing battle, that is fighting drugs, and it's not a battle that you could ever claim as being won. We are having success. We do have a zero tolerance approach to illicit drug use. We don't believe that it's something that should be tolerated and we are uncompromising in our attitude towards the drug menace in this country. And we are seeing gains being made, we've invested a lot of money at a federal level, around $1 billion over the last few years in our Tough on Drugs strategy, we are now seeing for the first time, and it's been sustained over several years, a reduction in the heroin death rate. Some of that is due to a shortage of supply, some of it is also due to the very effective law enforcement operations and also to many of the rehabilitation programmes that in co-operation with state governments we are very, very keen to promote and support.
So national security has a lot of dimensions, it has a defence dimension, it has the dimension of having strong and effective border protection policies and ensuring that people who choose to come here illegally are not allowed to do so, it also has policies which are very effective in fighting international drug cartels.
The second of our great objectives is of course to have a strong economy, a strong economy is the foundation of people being able to have happy and secure family life and I'm very happy to say as we move into 2004 that for the first time in 35 years this country has an unemployment rate below six per cent and inflation rate below three per cent. When I became Prime Minister of Australia our unemployment rate was 8.5 per cent, it's now 5.6 per cent. Now it's not perfect, we'd like to see it even lower and it's not uniform throughout the country, there are still some areas of Australia that have higher unemployment that we would like. But lower unemployment is the great human dividend of successful economic policy, economic policy is not just a mass of statistics, it's what you are able to produce by way of opportunities and initiatives and a better way of life for individual people. So keeping the Australian economy very strong is very important.
Right at the moment we're locked and it's coming to quite a bit of a climax, we're locked in a negotiation with the United States administration about securing a Free Trade Agreement, I don't know what the outcome of that discussion is going to be. I spoke yesterday morning for about an hour and a half with Mark Vaile, my Trade Minister, and I had further discussions last night and the negotiations are getting very much to the business end of the discussion. All I can say to you is that we will sign a Free Trade Agreement with the United States if there's enough in it for Australia, we're very hard headed and very pragmatic, if there's not enough in it for Australia we won't sign it, we're going to persist and in the long run there can't be enough in it unless there are significant concessions made by the United States in relation to agriculture. But if we are able to secure a Free Trade Agreement with the United States it will be an enormous boost to our economy, the American economy is by far the biggest in the world, it's going to grow stronger in the years ahead. And if we can on a satisfactory basis lock ourselves into a Free Trade Agreement with that economic powerhouse that can only be of long term benefit to this country. But it has to be on conditions that are very, very satisfactory to Australia and deliver real benefits. But we are getting very much to the climax in those discussions and if it can be achieved then it will be of great long term benefit to this country and we'll be able to achieve it in an environment that doesn't affect our trading relations with other parts of the world, including of course China and you as Western Australia would be aware because of the importance of the resource industry in this state how important China is to the long term economic strength and benefit of Australia.
And the final goal that we seek for this country is of course the goal of social stability. With all our problems, and we have them, all nations do, we are a remarkably cohesive and a remarkably stable and a very tolerant Australian community. And all of us want to make a contribution towards the preservation of that and the foundation of social cohesion of course is strong family life and anything that any government or any local community can do to strengthen family life is something that it ought to do because the family remains without question the greatest source of education, of social development, of emotional security and emotional stability that you can find in any nation and a strong functioning united family remains the most effective social welfare system that anybody has devised and an infinitely more effective system than any government can devise. We need to provide our people with choice, we need to provide them with effective choice in relation to the education of their children, we need to all we can as local communities to build tolerance and acceptance of people from different ways of life.
This country is very proud of its history, we're very proud of what we all understand to be the traditional Australia, we're also though very proud of the fact that since World War II in particular we have accepted into our midst millions of people from different parts of the world and above everything else they have overwhelmingly become wonderful Australians and have made a wonderful contribution to the development of our country and part of the social cohesion that we now have is to continue to preserve that great tolerance.
It's an incredible privilege to an Australian and it's an even greater privilege to be Prime Minister of this wonderful country and I never wake up in the morning without thinking how fortunate I am to have that privilege and resolve to do everything I can each day to try and better not only the country collectively, but also the opportunities and the lives of the 20 million individual Australians for which I feel a particular affinity and a particular obligation.
Now to all of you of the Pinjarra and field district, thank you for having me, these are very important interactions between a Prime Minister and different groups of Australians around our country. Finally and again can I commend to all of you the remarkable energy and efforts of your Federal Member Don Randall who does a great job for all of you and I am absolutely delighted to be with him and to have the opportunity of meeting you.
Thank you.
[ends]