JOURNALIST:
The Prime Minister yesterday indicated that the Solomon Islands may not be the only Pacific nation where Australia is prepared to intervene. Mr Howard said the Australian-led interdiction force will send a signal to other countries in the region that help is available if it is sought. Mr Howard said Australia have a desire to help all the peoples of the Pacific in having conditions of law and order and hope and peace, and he said if you let criminals take over a country it lets in drugs and guns and other smuggling operations and that';s a threat to the entire region. The Prime Minister';s on the line. Good morning.
PRIME MINISTER:
Good morning Alan.
JOURNALIST:
Thank you for your time. Do you think people would have been surprised by that comment? Many were wondering what are the criteria for offering support, for example, given the problems that Fiji and Papua New Guinea have faced in recent times.
PRIME MINISTER:
Alan we haven';t set down criteria for offering support. I was making the comment that our intervention should be seen in the context of the willingness of Australia to play in cooperation with other countries in the region a supportive and stabilising, and where our help is sought, a more interventionist role. Now we';re not looking for business if I can put it that way. We';re certainly not. But what I want people to understand is that that this is very much our patch. Australia is the largest and strongest country in the region and quite properly the countries around the world expect Australia to shoulder the burden and we do. And it';s not only our patch but it';s very important for our future because this is where we live and we do want countries to feel that we';re there to help, but of course they should also understand that the first requisite is countries have got to help themselves and one of the big problems in many of the countries we';re talking about is instability, you know disorder, corruption, that is a big problem and I';ve made it plain in the past that in future Australian aid could be conditioned on countries being a lot less corrupt. I don';t like to see Australian taxpayers'; money go other than to help people. I don';t want to see a cent of it go into the pockets of people who are behaving corruptly and that really applies to anywhere in the world.
JOURNALIST:
While we';re in the region PM, North Korea.
PRIME MINISTER:
Well North Korea is the biggest single security threat to our region. I';m very cautiously optimistic that the Chinese government is playing a very constructive role. China has more influence on North Korea than any other country in the world for historical reasons and there';s some evidence that China is willing to talk with the United States and with other countries in the region and gradually exert pressure on North Korea. I don';t want to overstate it, it';s very fragile, but I have always thought that China held the key to a more lasting solution to that problem because it';s not in China interests for North Korea to break out.
JOURNALIST:
Do you think we';re better off than they we were so when I spoke to you a couple of weeks ago?
PRIME MINISTER:
No. I think we';re about the same.
JOURNALIST:
Right.
PRIME MINISTER:
These things don';t change in a couple weeks. They change very incrementally.
JOURNALIST:
Where ever you look though and you read every day, I mean there';s Liberia now, Zimbabwe, I';ve asked you this before, North Korea, where';s the United Nations fit into all of this or are we wasting money funding the United Nations?
PRIME MINISTER:
No we';re not wasting money but the United Nations sometimes simply doesn';t work and the point I';ve made about the United Nations is that our approach should not be an ‘either or';. We should be willing to work with the United Nations where that will produce the best result, but we must be willing, as we did in Iraq, be willing to act as part of the coalition because sometimes for a combination of reasons and rivalry between the major countries and the United Nations, the most powerful that is, the United Nations is just unable to act. You can never put your blind faith in an organisation like the United Nations but you shouldn';t denigrate the good work it does in a lot of areas particularly in refugee work and also in examples like East Timor it did work very effectively albeit because we were there ready shoulder our burden.
JOURNALIST:
PM, Japan, the last time you were there 15 months ago Prime Minister, Koizumi said that the two countries should aim for - quote - a free trade agreement. Yet come August 1 the tariffs on chilled beef imports are going to go from 38.5% to 50%. Why, I know I';ve asked you this before, but why do we have WTO agreements and all this nonsense about free trade when Japan and the United States of America just please themselves?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well Alan what Japan is doing is in fact authorised by the WTO and that of course is our complaint. The World Trade Organisation rules at the moment are not only loaded against agricultural producers like Australia, they';re loaded particularly against countries like Australia because they have exemptions and permissions in them that benefit the United States and Japan….
JOURNALIST:
Because the WTO does their bidding.
PRIME MINISTER:
Well it does, I agree and that';s one of the reasons why in the case of the United States we';re trying to negotiate a free trade agreement. What Mr Koizumi said was not in my meeting with him 15 months ago, but rather a comment he unilaterally made and then subsequently didn';t repeat before he left to visit Australia last year. But look, we have a wonderful trade with Japan. We';re one of the few countries in the world that has a huge trade surplus with Japan because Japan buys a lot of our raw material. But we would like to sell more and the beef quotas are quite wrong because the quotas themselves were meant to attract tariff penalties if there was a surge of imports. There hasn';t been a surge of imports from Australia. What happened was there was a fall off because of Mad Cow Disease. And now that that disease threat has gone and the imports are returning to more normal levels… they';ve been returned to more normal levels….
JOURNALIST:
They';re been treated as an increase and that';s…..
PRIME MINISTER:
Yeah that';s right. But the system is loaded against Australia and that is why we';re trying to get around it.
JOURNALIST:
But see you';ve got the US farmers, I mean the US Senate passed a bill earlier this year to give US farmers $330 billion over the next ten years in farm subsidies. Now they';ve only got 400,000 farms, there';s only two million people in the farm population, so every farm worker in America is subsidised by US$9,000. Now many people that write to me say, well actually, listen, we quite agree with that, they should be looking after their own people. Why don';t we? And that';s what they say, why don';t we look after our sugar and our dairy produce and our dairy farmers and our sugar farmers and our tobacco farmers? They do.
PRIME MINISTER:
Well each of those industries is a bit different. But could I just deal with American farms and then I';ll deal with your question. The test of whether we can get concessions on agriculture out of the Americans will come very soon in the Free Trade negotiations. If we can get some significant additional access to the American market it will be a huge step forward because the American market is so big, America is a country with a very big population. So even in aggregate American terms a small step forward for Australia is a very, a small concession by them is a very big step forward for us because of the size of the market. The problem of saying well let us match the subsidises is that because of the size of the American economy it can always out-subsidise the next bloke. That';s the problem. So in the long run it is far better to try and get greater access for Australian exporters into a big market than to imagine that you can, because of our relative strength vis a vis the United States, compete in the subsidy game.
JONES:
Okay, Prime Minister in the last election you promised to increase ethanol consumption to 350 million litres a year by 2010. Will you mandate the use of ethanol in petrol and put an end to many of the lies that are being told about it?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well what we promised was to aim to a figure of 350 million litres I think it was of alternatives, but not just bio-diesel, bio-fuels rather, not just ethanol, although ethanol is the principle alternative. We are not in favour of mandating at this stage, we';d prefer to provide other methods, other incentives, including of course a concessional tax treatment for the next five years, and that';s a very important incentive…
JONES:
Is that for ethanol from wheat or ethanol from sugar?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well it';s just generally, it';s a concession generally for another five years, and it';s a very important concession. Now what we aim to do is to provide these incentives, there has been a lot of distortion, there have been a lot of lies told about the impact of ethanol. On the other hand we do have to be absolutely certain that we give accurate information to motorists about the impact of ethanol enhanced fuel on their engines and the science of it seems to, like the science on so many things to be moving quite rapidly, I saw some material the other day that suggested that with very new engines that it was a real plus.
JONES:
But it';s also an health issue isn';t it? Japan doesn';t even produce ethanol but it';s got a three per cent ethanol target set by the government because of the benefits of cleaner air and greenhouse…
PRIME MINISTER:
Even on that issue the body of opinion is still of the view that it';s better for the environment, but even that is not as unanimous in recent times as it has been in the past. One of the problems that policy makers like myself find in areas like this is that the science does keep changing and there';s always a great deal of argument.
JONES:
But you see we';ve got the sugar cane farmers, we come back to the same point don';t we, US sugar cane farmers get a subsidy of about 640 bucks a tonnes, our poor farmers just get the world parity price of $720 a tonne, you go out the door.
PRIME MINISTER:
Yes, but Alan on the issue of ethanol you have that huge tax concession and that is a very important thing.
JONES:
Do you envisage that some point down the track your government would mandate the use of ethanol in petrol?
PRIME MINISTER:
I wouldn';t want to commit myself to that because I think there are a lot of arguments for and against, but at the present time we are against mandating it and we';ve looked at it quite recently and we took a decision not to mandate it. We didn';t promise in the last election, we promised to aspire towards a particular target of 350 million litres of consumption of alternative fuels.
JONES:
Right, Medicare, there';s a Senate inquiry into Medicare, are you concerned that we may be, down the track, facing a major social problem in terms of the availability of doctors while ever the Medicare rebate is 25 and a bit dollars, doctors are not going to bulk bill and doctors if they think that';s all that';s available to them will choose, the best minds will choose something else or if an obstetrician is forced to pay $140,000 a year in professional indemnity insurance you won';t get obstetricians. Do you think we';re facing a crisis in the adequate provision of medical health care because of doctors ceasing to be doctors?
PRIME MINISTER:
Alan, I don';t believe we';re facing a crisis, I think the talk of crisis in the Australian health system is wrong, it';s misleading and when you think of the comparison of our system with the system of other countries it';s still a vastly superior system. That having been said we have a shortage of doctors in some parts of the country, and that is the issue that we';re trying to address and that more than anything else is creating a difficulty with bulk billing. Bulk billing rates which are now somewhere like 68 per cent of all consultations, not 68 per cent of all patients, 68 per cent of consultations, bulk billing rates are really a product of the availability of doctors.
JONES:
What about the 25 buck rebate, would you get vomited on for $25 or pull wax out of someone';s ear all over you for 25 bucks?
PRIME MINISTER:
Yes, but Alan the Medicare system originally introduced by the Labor Government had a number elements, and one of those elements was the payment of a universal Medicare rebate and when it was introduced by the Labor Party way back in 1983 the Labor Party said at the time that it would always be open to a doctor to make a decision about the fee to be charged. Now we think bulk billing rates should be as high as possible and we';re providing incentives to ensure that they remain high for particular categories of people. But like all of these things the availability of doctors, the forces of supply and demand will have a big impact and the big problem is in the outer-metropolitan areas and the country areas where there are fewer doctors. It is not a problem in most of the metropolitan areas where in fact I';m told in some parts of the metropolitan areas there is still very strong competition between doctors and that is not really the issue.
JONES:
PM, you';re now the second longest serving Australian Liberal Leader and it';s your birthday tomorrow, you seem to have the energy and the commitment for the job, people are ringing this programme and right here we would want to see you in the job for some time to come. On the eve of your birthday can you give them a commitment that that will happen?
PRIME MINISTER:
Alan, I will give the commitment that I';ll always try and do the right thing for Australia.
JONES:
Well you';ve done that very well in the past. Have a happy birthday tomorrow.
PRIME MINISTER:
Thanks Alan.
[ends]