Thank you Don, Mr Mayor, ladies and gentlemen. It is a pleasure to address some of the active and prominent citizens of Armadale here in Western Australia and to share a few moments with you, and I hope a few thoughts about some of the things that are important to communities all around Australia, both now and the years immediately ahead.
Australia is a very big country geographically and there is no state in Australia of course larger and more conscious of that geographic size than Western Australia. Yet for all of that, we are paradoxically a people who tend to live in a fairly limited area of a very large country, and we have a very elaborate system of government. We have a federal government, we have state governments, we have two territory governments, and we have local government. And one of the things that I find the most challenging of all is to even establish in the minds of the public generally speaking an idea of who is responsible for what.
Quite understandably, citizens say well I don';t mind who does it, as long as it gets done, and that is a perfectly legitimate thing to do. I mean I can go for a walk down a street and I say hello, and they said “I';ve been waiting for you. My gutter was blocked last night and you ought to do something about it.” And then when there is a bit of crime, they will say “well what are you going to do about it Prime Minister?”. And when something goes wrong with something that is the responsibility of another level of government, you often get asked. Now I don';t think that is ever going to change quite dramatically, but we have to work our way through and try from time to time to just remind ourselves of who is primarily responsible for what.
We talk a lot in our nation about rights and responsibilities. One of the things that I have always found in the time I have been in national politics is that the different levels of government are never reluctant to assert their rights, but sometimes if something goes wrong, some levels of government will not accept the responsibility and say it really belongs to somebody else. And I hear that, I have to say, quite a lot from certain state governments around Australia – in fact all of them – and when something goes wrong they say “oh look we want to do it, but Howard won';t give us enough money”. So that really leads me to say that one of the things that we have worked very hard to do in the time that we have been in government is to create a situation where the states have an increased share of revenue. Now I';ll bet a lot of people in this room don';t realise that every last dollar of that thing called the GST, over which we had such a debate a few years ago, every last dollar of that GST goes to the state government. I don';t keep any of it and Mr Costello doesn';t keep any of it. Every last dollar of it goes to the state government.
And we have our responsibilities, states have theirs and local government has theirs. But of course what we all have to do at the three levels of government is to try and work together in a very cooperative fashion, and I';m delighted that the Mayor mentioned the Roads to Recovery programme. Now I think local roads in Australia were in a terrible state a few years ago. I think some local roads are still in quite a deplorable state. Now we have some responsibility historically for helping local government with local roads and that is why we';re going to extend the Roads to Recovery programme, and we';re very keen to do that. And we';re also going to allocate some additional revenue, and the details of it will be progressively announced by the Deputy Prime Minister under what is called our new nationally integrated transport system called AusLink.
Now they are our responsibilities and we';re going to try and do them, and we';re going to try and do them effectively. I listened Mr Mayor to some of the things you said. Don has told me about them. Don is very good in passing on the requests of the people who he represents. He is known by ministerial colleagues as somebody who will sort of haunt every ministerial office until he gets a positive answer, and he';s very, very good at pushing the case for his electorate and I';ve heard of some of these things before. I won';t try and give a response on the run. Some of them obviously fall into the area of responsibility of state governments, and we obviously would not be disposed to assist. Others may fall into other categories and we understand how all of them are very important.
And I was particularly interested in what you had to say about the tertiary education places. One of the things we have to do with the new arrangements for university funding, and I know they were controversial and they were debated – I find one of the most interesting things in politics is comparing debates that go on in this country with debates that go on in other countries. Mr Blair, the British Prime Minister, has just secured the passage of legislation through the British Parliament which establishes an education funding system which is very similar to the one that we have here in Australia. And he in fact, as a Labor Prime Minister of Britain, quoted with approval the policy that we had introduced, which was opposed in Britain by our political – I';m a Liberal – our political allies, the Conservatives. But here, just to sort of complete the confusion, it was opposed by his political allies here in Australia. So you know if that doesn';t confuse people who try and draw international comparisons in relation to political parties, nothing will.
But I think it is important that the distribution of tertiary education places around Australia be done in a way that is fair to different parts of Australia. We can no longer pretend that you can ever go back to the days of totally free tertiary education. This country could never have afforded that in the longer-term and it really is necessary with something like tertiary education to establish a system where there is a fair contribution made by the taxpayer and there is a fair contribution made by the person who gets the benefit of the education after that person has left university and that person is earning a certain level of income. And in the case of the new arrangements, you don';t start paying back your HECS debt until you earn at least $35,000 a year of income.
I think those sort of issues have to be faced by any community, and particularly by a community as affluent as Australia, and a community also such as Australia where something in the order of 65 to 70 per cent of young men and women who leave school do not go onto university, but they go onto some other kind of education. And we have to keep a sense of proportion and a sense of balance because everybody when they get into the workforce contributes, through paying their taxes, to the funding of things like universities and of course you have to pay some regard to the people who never aspire to and never enjoy and never benefit from a university education, the taxation burden that might fall on them.
Always in a country like Australia, one of the challenges which is so ongoing is who in the three levels of government is responsible for what. But at the end of the day you as citizens of Australia are really far less interested in who is responsible for what, you are far more interested in whether it gets done and whether it is done by the federal government, state government or the local government, as long as it gets done you';re happy.
Australia at the present time is by any measure in a very strong economic position. We have for the first time in 35 years we have what I';ve described as the golden double, we have inflation below three per cent and we have unemployment below six per cent. When I became Prime Minister unemployment was 8.5 per cent, it is now 5.6 per cent. And that in a way is the important great human dividend of economic policy. That doesn';t mean to say there aren';t people who are disadvantaged, there are. No matter how strong an economy you have there are always people who fall through the cracks and it is the responsibility of government, particularly at a national level, with income support to provide assistance to people who need help. That of course means that if you are going to be in a position to help the people who are really needy you have to make sure that you don';t make provision and provide government resources to people who don';t need that assistance and that is part of the ongoing debate.
Can I say that the aim of my government in the time that we have been in office is to provide as strong a support as we can for local government. Local government, of course, is controlled by state governments. Local government units can be made or unmade overnight by state governments. We have no constitutional power or control over local government units. But in a number of areas both through general financial grants and also in relation to programs such as Roads to Recovery we have sought to establish a direct relationship with local governments. And one of the good things about the Roads to Recovery programme, as I am sure the Mayor and his colleagues will know, is that it is a program where there is a direct relationship between the federal government and local government. We don';t involve the state government, we deal directly with local government and we respond as much as we possibly can to the individual concerns and the individual whims of local government units.
The last thing I want to say to you my friends is that I am very proud indeed to be in Don Randall';s electorate again. Don is a great local member. He works very hard, he is one of those people who does attend to the grassroots, he does listen to what people have to say, he is very direct. If he thinks I am doing something wrong he tells me. If he thinks that the government is handling things very badly he gets up in the Party room and says so and he has been on his feet a few times over the years. I can assure you and I am quite sure for the remainder of this year and into the future he is going to be on his feet again, but he does have your interests at heart. He doesn';t have tickets on himself, he recognises that he is there to help you and you are not there to keep him in Parliament and that is the right attitude for a local member to have.
I am a great believer in responsive democracy. I think the idea that serving in Parliament is a noble thing to do is the right idea. I believe very strongly in our system of parliamentary democracy. It has got its critics and it is easy to take pot shots at people who are occupying elected office, but at the end of the day it is a better system than any alternative in operation around the world. And one of the things we should remember as Australians is that over the last 100 years you can count on the fingers of both hands and still have one or two over, the countries that have been continuously democratic during that 100 year period and Australia has been one of them. And that is something that we ought to be very proud of.
We pioneered many of the democratic things now taken for granted around the world and I think Australian democracy with all its imperfections and with all of the criticisms that are made of it and all of the cynicism that exists in the community about it, it is fundamentally a very good system. And in the end that interaction and interrelationship between the public and the people they elect to Parliament be it national or at a state level or in the case of local government at a municipal or shire level, that relationship is very important. And if we lose it then we lose something that is very important to the Australian identity.
So can I say to you Mr Mayor, to the members of your Council and to the citizens of Armadale, thank you very much for having me. Its a time that I am spending some four days on this visit in Western Australia and going to a number of areas in Perth and then to Kalgoorlie on Thursday.
I always enjoy coming to Western Australia, it is great to be back in Don';s electorate and to have him as my host on this visit.
Thank you very much.
[ends]