MELISSA PRICE:
Thanks for being here. It’s an absolute pleasure to be in the Kimberley sun today and to be able to show the best of the Kimberley. Today, we’ve been to Broome and now we’re here in beautiful Kununurra. As the only federal representative in the North West, it’s critically important for me to be able to bring the PM, in particular, to see what we’re growing in Kununurra and to see what the Ord River development has actually done. I’m really proud of the Federal Government with our Northern Australia White Paper. For me, it shows that we’re really fair dinkum about the North and Tony Abbott will definitely be known as the Minister for the North once we start rolling out some of the White Paper. Thanks very much for being here today and I’ll hand you over to the Prime Minister.
PRIME MINISTER:
Thanks very much, Melissa. It is good to be here in Kununurra. I was in Broome earlier today and obviously I’m off to Thursday Island, the Torres Strait and Cape York this evening.
It is good to be here, in what I now call ‘The Great North’ – not our last frontier but our next frontier. There is so much potential here and I guess what we see behind us here is not just a vast expanse of arid and inhospitable country, but a vast expanse of productive land and to make this land productive, obviously we need water. There’s an abundance of water up here in the wet season, there’s nothing much in the dry season. The Ord River scheme has made this bountiful and one of the many elements of the Northern Australia White Paper is $5 million towards a feasibility study for Ord Stage 3 and that’s part of a $200 million Northern Australia allocation of a $500 million water fund which we’ve set up to try to break the ‘damphobia’ which has afflicted out country for far too long.
I’m really excited about the potential of Northern Australia. Northern Australia is some 40 per cent of our land mass but there’s just a million people living here. Those million people nevertheless are in part responsible for 50 per cent of our exports. So the more we can develop Northern Australia, the better we develop all of Australia and that’s why I’m so pleased about everything in our Northern Australia White Paper.
There’s some $700 million for roads, there’s money to try to ensure that we are able to more productively use our land, to use pastoral leases for agriculture as well as simply for grazing, to try to ensure that Indigenous land is an economic asset as well as just a spiritual and cultural one, to try to ensure that on Indigenous land communal title can be translated into individual title and it was good to talk in Broome this morning to Pat Dodson because this was one of the very first places in our country where communal title has become individual title, where native title has become freehold land and people are now able to buy homes on land that until recently was subject to native title applications.
So, there’s a lot good happening here. A lot of very good things that are happening here and I’m delighted, if I may echo what Melissa said a moment ago, to be amongst other things a Prime Minister for Northern Australia.
QUESTION:
Prime Minister, Tom Edwards from ABC Rural, thanks for taking a moment to answer some questions. The producers here are really keen not to lose this momentum that’s focussed on the north of Australia at the moment. The expansion of the Lake Argyle dam is seen as a key component of that. How quickly can we see that project move forward?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well, Tom, one of the things that we’re very keen to do is to bring this forward as quickly as possible and that’s why there’s $5 million in the White Paper for the feasibility work to be done on Ord Stage 3. Plainly, there’s the usual environmental and other issues that need to be worked through but what you’ve seen from this Government in the last week or so is an absolute determination to try to speed up these processes, an absolute determination not to let, amongst other things, green vigilantism stand in the way of sensible developments.
Development which has passed strict environmental standards must be allowed to go ahead. Development which is beneficial to Aboriginal people, with their consent, has to be allowed to go ahead. So the key to everyone’s prosperity, the key to better jobs and a better standard of living for everyone, is more development and there is so much potential for development here in our Great North.
QUESTION:
A red flag is always brought up by industry as an impediment to these kind of infrastructure projects. What’s your Government doing to accelerate that progression with the expansion of Ord Stage 3 into the NT? Are you talking to that government? Is it going to happen soon?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well, obviously we are talking to both the West Australian Government and to the Northern Territory Government. Both of those governments are, together with Queensland the Commonwealth, a part of our alliance for northern development, our strategic partnership for northern development and look, we flagged this week in the Parliament moving to take out of the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, the EPBC Act, Section 487.2 which has become a kind of ‘activists’ charter’ to endlessly frustrate sensible, environmental quality development and that’s what we want to do, we want to see development pass the strictest environmental standards but once it has met those tests, it must be allowed to go ahead.
QUESTION:
Prime Minister, tell me what you’re doing in the Torres Strait?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well thanks, Tyson. Look, I made a commitment prior to becoming Prime Minister that I would maintain in office the practice that I’ve developed in recent years of spending a week every year in a remote Indigenous part of our country, to try to become as practically familiar with the real issues in Indigenous Australia as possible. To spend just a week a year, just one week in 52, focussed on Indigenous issues is not too much, it really isn’t too much, given that that section of our population have to a considerable extent been neglected for the last couple of hundred years. So, there’s a sense in which Aboriginal people are finally getting the attention they deserve and that’s certainly going to be the full focus – my full focus and the Government’s full focus – over the next week or so.
QUESTION:
What are you hoping to achieve while you are there?
PRIME MINISTER:
There’s nothing like being the man on the spot. We can read all the briefing papers in the world, we can read the books, we can talk to the experts, but there’s nothing like being present on the spot to see the good and the bad and to see a way forward. We all know that remote Australia, principally remote Indigenous Australia has employment issues, has health issues, has education issues, has community safety issues, but there’s also so much potential. As I said earlier today in Broome, talking to Pat Dodson and some of his team, it was terrific to see a strong, famous Indigenous leader who is actually turning native title into freehold title; who is turning communal title into individual title; who is turning a cultural asset into an economic asset. Now, this is very promising and I know that processes for making these things happen are often long and torturous, but the fact that they have been made to work by Pat Dodson and his community in Broome, the Yawuru people, is very, very promising and so that’s I guess the first insight that I’ve gained as part of this week in remote Indigenous Australia and once I get to Thursday Island and other parts of the Torres Strait, once I get to the tip of Cape York, I’m looking forward to learning some more.
QUESTION:
Prime Minister the cashless welfare cards are proposed to be trialled in Halls Creek and Kununurra. Why do you think they are a good idea? Will they work?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well yes, I’ll shortly be meeting up with Ian Trust and some of his colleagues to talk about their enthusiasm for the Centrelink Debit Card. As you know, the Centrelink Debit Card was one of the principle recommendations of Andrew Forrest’s report. It started off as a report into employment but it’s become a report into all of the various factors which drag Aboriginal people down; in fact, which drag welfare dependent communities down wherever they are and whoever comprises them and the problem is that if people have got nothing to do, they can often blow their dough on things which are quite counterproductive, which are quite harmful, and what we need to do is try to ensure that as far as is possible, people in communities which are subject to serious dysfunction, are spending their money on what’s going to help them rather than harm them. So it’s great that we’ve got agreement from the people of Ceduna, black and white, if you’re in Ceduna, as part of the first trial, you’ll be receiving some 80 per cent of your taxpayer provided income through this debit card, which can only be spent on the necessities of life and we’re very much hoping that, soon, some of these Kimberley communities will also be part of that trial and that’s what I’ll be talking to Ian Trust about shortly.
QUESTION:
How optimistic are you that it will go ahead in the Kimberley?
PRIME MINISTER:
I’m very optimistic. Parliamentary Secretary Alan Tudge has been doing a lot of work with Ian Trust and his team and all the indicators are that they want this because they want to lift their people up by the bootstraps; they want their people to face the future with confidence and pride and this debit card will help that to happen.
QUESTION:
That may be correct and that’s what the elders say. I interviewed an Aboriginal grandmother from Halls Creek yesterday and she said that she feels persecuted by this. While that is probably not the intent, what’s your response to that assertion?
PRIME MINISTER:
I think there’s sometimes a tendency of people to think that nothing good can come from Canberra. I think if you’ve seen a whole lot of programmes start and fail, if you’ve seen a whole lot of promises which never really materialise, a certain amount of scepticism is understandable, but this is quite a dramatic break from the past. We all know that back in the ‘60s, Aboriginal people didn’t have much money, they didn’t always receive the respect that they deserve but they were in the real economy and they did have pride. Then, of course, the welfare economy came in and that has done untold damage to a couple of generations of Aboriginal people. All of the serious leaders of Indigenous Australia know that sit down money has been poison. All of them know that chronic welfare dependency can lead to very serious personal dysfunction. This debit card is not the whole answer but it’s a very important part of a better future for Aboriginal people and indeed for welfare dependent communities right around our country.
QUESTION:
Prime Minister, on Syria, what is the legal basis of becoming involved in that conflict, and are you comfortable with getting Australia involved?
PRIME MINISTER:
What I want our country to do is contribute effectively to international efforts to disrupt, degrade and ultimately destroy this death cult because as we have seen on our TV screens there is a barbarism loose in Northern Iraq and Eastern Syria which is almost unimaginable. Not for hundreds of years have we seen such evil, such boastful evil. You go back to the dreadful things that were done in Pol Pot’s Cambodia or in Hitler’s Germany – at least they were embarrassed enough about the evil they did to try to hide it. This Daesh death cult publishes its atrocities on the internet every day. Every day, they’re trying to work out new and more horrific ways to kill people.
Just last week they beheaded an 80 year old curator of the antiquities of Palmyra – an absolute atrocity – because this man loved what he had preserved and protected and for some reason these evil people thought that this was at odds with their version of Islam. Now this is just diabolical. It has to be stopped and Australia should play its part. Now, for quite some time the United States, Jordan, Saudi, the Emaraties, have been flying airstrikes into Syria. As you know, we’ve been conducting very effective airstrikes in Iraq for almost a year now. Our Wedgetail Control Aircraft and our KC30 Tanker have certainly been assisting with airstrikes into Syria. They’ve been assisting with air operations throughout the theatre but up until now we haven’t actually conducted strikes into Syria.
The United States has given us a formal request. We’re carefully considering it. They believe that there’s a perfect legal entitlement for airstrikes into Syria. The legalities are a little different. We’re obviously operating at the request of the Iraqi Government in Iraq. There’s no real government in Syria that can make this kind of a request but while the legalities are a little different, the moralities are absolutely the same on both sides of the border.
The terrorists don’t respect the border, so why should we?
We’ll be carefully considering this request in the next week or so and then after appropriate consultations, we’ll be making an announcement and making a decision.
Thank you.
[ends]