PRIME MINISTER:
It’s good to be here at Ace Gutters. I want to thank Don Anderson and staff for making myself and David Coleman, the local member – the Member for Banks, so welcome here. This is a great Australian success story. It is a business that is employing some 160 Australians. It is in a tough marketplace. The job of government is to try to make it easier for people like this to compete and to flourish. That’s why we scrapped the carbon tax, we scrapped the mining tax, we're cutting red tape, we're building the roads of the 21st century and we're also in the process of creating a more modern apprenticeship and traineeship system.
Some of the initiatives are the apprenticeship support network which will focus on job matching as well as just on sorting out paperwork, the industry skills fund that will be available to businesses with innovative training ideas, the training for employment scholarships which will support young people and enable businesses to tailor the training that young staff need precisely to the needs of the business. So, these are all innovative measures that this Government is putting in place to support business, to support jobs. We are building a strong and prosperous economy for a safe and secure Australia and it's here at businesses like Ace Gutters which has a long history of employing apprentices and trainees, it's here at businesses like this that our policies are having the kind of beneficial outcomes that businesses deserve and workers need.
I'm going to ask David Coleman to say a few words and then I'll take some questions.
DAVID COLEMAN:
Thanks, PM. It's great to have you here at Ace Gutters today. As the PM said, this is a fantastic Australian success story; a family business that's taking on competitors from all around the world and employing more than 100 Australians and have been here for more than 50 years. Certainly, there's nothing more important to me than local jobs in Banks and a business like Ace Gutters is very reflective of the sort of economy that our policies help to build. So, thank you all for coming along today.
PRIME MINISTER:
Ok, do we have any questions?
QUESTION:
Prime Minister, doesn't the Immigration Department already have the power to refuse so-called hate preachers from entering Australia?
PRIME MINISTER:
There are all sorts of powers that are available. The important thing is to use them. Over the years there have been all sorts of people come in to this country to cause trouble, to make a nuisance of themselves, to stir up Australian against Australian and as far as I am concerned, this will stop. I say to people who want to come to this country from overseas to peddle their extremist ideology, to divide Australian from Australian, to give implicit, if not explicit support for terrorism – don't bother applying. Don't try to come because while we welcome people who want to come to Australia to join our team, while we welcome people who want to come to Australia to visit relatives, to have a holiday, to explore our fantastic country, what we don't want is people coming to this country to peddle an extreme and alien ideology.
QUESTION:
Will you ban people from coming to Australia?
PRIME MINISTER:
What we want to do is to ensure that known preachers of hate do not come to this country to peddle their divisive and extremist message.
QUESTION:
Are you going to be making any changes to the character test so that visas can be refused?
PRIME MINISTER:
What needs to happen is better coordination between our agencies, so that the Immigration Department knows who these people are, it can tag them should they apply for a visa, and it can refuse visas to people who are coming to this country to peddle extreme and alien ideologies.
QUESTION:
Prime Minister, troops on the ground in Iraq, how far off is that?
PRIME MINISTER:
We've got a very clear mission in Iraq and we've got a very clear mechanism for realising our mission in Iraq. Our mission is to assist the Iraqis to disrupt and degrade the ISIL death cult and our means is to make our strike fighter and other air assets available and our Australian Strike Fighters, Super Hornet Strike Fighters have been flying combat air patrols over Iraq for the last few days and they will continue to do so. As well, we have up to 200 Special Forces who will shortly be on advise and assist missions with Iraqi Armed Forces. Now, this is what we are doing as our contribution to the world's fight against ISIL, the ISIL death cult which has declared war on the world. So, that's what we're doing. I want to stress, though, that Australia, Britain, the United States, the other Arab countries which are now helping the fight against ISIL can't do this on our own. We shouldn't try to do this on our own. Our mission is to assist the Iraqi people to help themselves. That’s our mission.
QUESTION:
Will you do anything to stop the public meeting in Lakemba later this week?
PRIME MINISTER:
What I'm doing is declaring that we will henceforth have a new system in place which will ensure that preachers of hate can't come to Australia to peddle their extreme, divisive and alien ideologies.
QUESTION:
Didn’t [Inaudible] stir up Islamophobia [inaudible]?
PRIME MINISTER:
I welcome and I rejoice in the presence in this country of people of all faiths and none and I think all of them can make a tremendous contribution to this country. The point is, though, that the ISIL movement, as people like Prime Minister Najib of Malaysia – a pious Muslim himself – have made clear, the ISIL movement, it's against God, it's against Islam and it's against our common humanity. ISIL has nothing to do with true Islam. ISIL is neither Islamic nor a State in any meaningful fashion and that's why I say it's a death cult. Nothing but a death cult and I refuse to call it by a term which frankly insults Islam and mocks the notion of the duties that a legitimate State has towards its citizens.
QUESTION:
Prime Minister, with the Iraq commitment and other factors like falling commodity prices and tricky Budget measures, how difficult will it be to hit that Budget surplus in 2017?
PRIME MINISTER:
We are determined to do so. We're absolutely determined to do so and I just wish that the Labor Party, having created this mess in the first place, was prepared to shoulder some of the burden for fixing it. Now, we've put forward the measures that we think are right and necessary and proper to address Labor's debt and deficit disaster. We've put forward our measures; the Labor Party needs to tell us what its measures are. The Labor Party, now that we're into the second year of a three year term, cannot continue to deny any responsibility for creating this problem and it cannot continue to run away from any suggestion as to how it might be fixed.
QUESTION:
The South Australian Premier has today released figures which show the impact of the Budget measures on families in South Australia and it quotes something like $3,700 which a single family would be worse off. Do you think those figures are accurate?
PRIME MINISTER:
No, I don't and what we're doing is saving the families of Australia from $25,000 per man, woman and child of Labor debt hanging around their neck. Let's never forget that when the Howard government left office in 2007, Australia had no net debt. We had no net debt. In fact, we had some $50 billion in the bank. What we got under Labor was six years of deficits, we got almost a quarter of a trillion dollars of deficits from Labor, we got projected deficits of $123 billion over the next four years, we got projected debt of $667 billion under Labor. Right now, thanks to the Labor Party, we're paying a billion dollars a month in interest, every single month and that's just the interest in Labor's debt. So Labor created this sinkhole of debt and deficit. Our challenge as an incoming Government is to fix it because that's what people elected us to do – to fix it. The tragedy for our country right now is that the Labor Party were incompetent in government and they're wreckers in Opposition.
QUESTION:
What do you expect from tomorrow's unemployment figures?
PRIME MINISTER:
I don't offer a running commentary on statistics which can bounce around on a month to month basis, but the best thing we can do to bring unemployment down on a sustained basis is to get taxes down, it's to get regulation down, it's to improve our training system, it's to boost trade, it's to boost infrastructure and these are all the measures that the Government is putting in place. We've abolished the mining tax, we’ve abolished the carbon tax, we've scrapped already some 10,000 pages of redundant regulation. We're cracking on with infrastructure like WestConnex and NorthConnex here in Sydney, we've got the Japan free trade deal finalised, we've got the Korea free trade deal finalised, we're not far off a China free trade deal. This is what's necessary to ensure that there is downward not upward pressure on the unemployment numbers.
QUESTION:
Prime Minister, I just wanted to get your view on Canberra being named the best city to live in the world?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well, Canberra's a lovely city, so's Sydney, so's Melbourne, so's Adelaide, so's Perth, so's Brisbane. They're all great cities and I spend a fair bit of time in all of them.
QUESTION:
One last question about the Islamic threat to Australia – what are you offering potential disaffected Australians as an alternative to potentially going and fighting for these forces and do you have any plan to get them meaningfully involved in Australian life?
PRIME MINISTER:
Could I with great respect take issue with the question? That question implies that religion is a threat to Australia. Religion is no threat to Australia. Extremism is the threat to Australia and no-one does Australia or indeed Islam any favours by conflating Islam with extremism, Islam with the kind of tragedy that we are seeing in the Middle East right now. As I keep stressing, what the Government is doing is targeting crime not any particular group. What we are against is extremism not religion. Religion has been a force for good in the world. There are some extremists, some foolish and misguided people who do terrible things but whatever they say they're doing, they are not rightly doing anything in the name of religion. One of the changes that I hope might come, one of the realisations that I hope might dawn, as a result of the carnage that we're seeing in Northern Iraq and Syria right now is an understanding by people of all faiths, all cultures, all countries that it is never ever right to kill or to mistreat people in the name of God.
Thank you.
[ends]