Colleagues, it’s good to be here this morning for COAG following on from our very productive Leaders’ retreat yesterday.
I really did think that yesterday was an historic occasion.
We do, as Jay has often pointed out, have a strong and successful federation, but the fact that the Federation has served us well for a century doesn’t mean that it can’t be improved and I thought that the discussion we had yesterday about how we could reconsider and improve the roles and responsibilities of the Commonwealth, the states and the territories was a really good discussion in a really good spirit.
Obviously, we have got amongst the very best schools and hospitals in the world, but the challenge is to maintain and, wherever possible, improve those services in the years and decades to come and the kind of issues that we were canvassing yesterday were about long-term change to ensure that our schools and our hospitals really are world-class for our children and for our grandchildren.
It is all about delivering a better outcome for the people of Australia. It will be so much easier to deliver a better outcome for the people of Australia if our economy is as strong as possible, but as was frequently pointed out yesterday, reforming schools, reforming VET, reforming our health system is also microeconomic reform. Better schools, better VET, better hospitals will produce a stronger economy.
Obviously, a more efficient tax system is also an economic reform. If we do have a stronger economy it will be easier to afford the better services that we all want and need without increasing the overall tax burden which, of course, is something that’s very close to the heart of this particular national Government.
I thought yesterday was a very, very constructive start to what will inevitably be a long and at times complex process, but rightly, we do have big ambitions – we have big ambitions for our country.
We want to be absolutely sure that we are not the generation of leadership which lets our people down.
So, we do have big ambitions and the spirit in which yesterday’s discussions were conducted, the spirit of solving problems rather than starting fights, is exactly the spirit that we need in the months to come.
Today, of course, we’ve got three very practical issues before us: how do we protect our country and our people against the threat of violent extremism; how do we deal with the dreadful scourge of ice – the worst drug problem which we’ve yet faced; how do we better deal with domestic violence, because the one place where people really should be sure of their own safety is their home and yet all too many women and children live in fear in their own home.
So, these are urgent practical problems and I think together we do have some important ways forward and I’m looking forward very much to the discussion.
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