BRETT WHITELEY MP:
Welcome, everybody. It’s a great day, a beautiful day in Braddon and any day the Prime Minister of Australia is in Braddon is a great day.
So, it’s my pleasure to be here with the Prime Minister to be reinforcing the messages of the Budget about jobs and child care and for me to publicly thank the Prime Minister for his support for the Living City Project in Devonport – $10 million in the Budget to drive private investment and jobs in the whole region, not just the city of Devonport.
Thank you, Tony, for the strength of support you put behind the enhancement of the Tasmanian Freight Equalisation Scheme – $200 million over the next four years which is going to be a huge boom for our economy.
So, it’s lovely to have you here, Prime Minister.
PRIME MINISTER:
Thanks so much, Brett.
It is great to be here in Ulverstone, it's great to be with Brett Whiteley, the local Member. I want to say thank you to Lyndon and Jo Walsh for making us both so welcome here at the Discovery Early Learning Centre. This is a great Tasmanian success story – a young couple who saw a need, they're now providing child care services right around the great state of Tasmania. It's obviously a private sector child care centre. Private sector child care centres are an important part of this whole sector as are community-based and other child care centres. But yes, this is a tremendous example of young people seeing a need, meeting it and it's great to see child care thriving right around Tasmania but particularly here in Ulverstone this morning.
This is a Budget which wants to encourage people to have a go – encouraging small business to have a go, encouraging families to have a go and if you want to have a go by working, obviously if you're a mum you need to have child care. That's why this is a very important part of the Budget. The child care improvements that we're proposing as part of this Budget will make child care more affordable, more accessible, more flexible and above all else simpler because we want a simpler, more user-friendly system.
I'm really proud of the fact that as a result of these changes low and middle income families that are using the child care system on average will be $1,500 a year better off. So, this is a Government which is investing in people and in businesses who are having a go. I think there is a whole lot of latent energy in our country right now we want to unlock that potential, we want to harness that enthusiasm, whether it be small business, getting out and investing with the instant asset write off or people going back into the work force or working more because of improved child care. We want to say to the people of Australia: if you are prepared to have a go, your Government will back you.
So, it's really good to be here and again I want to thank Jo and Lyndon for making myself, Brett and also Senator Colbeck who is here today so welcome.
QUESTION:
Prime Minister, Indonesia says the signatories to the refugee convention should shoulder the burden in the current people crisis – what do you say in response to that and do you stand by your language you used yesterday?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well, I certainly do because there is no way that any country should be encouraging people to take to the sea in boats. It is very dangerous. Hundreds of people have died in our region. It seems that thousands of people have died in other parts of the world taking to the sea in boats. So, I will say or do nothing to encourage people to take to the sea in boats and any suggestion that there is some kind of special resettlement programme here in Australia for people taking to the sea in boats just encourages people smuggling. So, it would be utterly irresponsible of me or anyone to suggest for a second that we will reward people for doing something so dangerous.
QUESTION:
Prime Minister, 80 jobs are going at Cadbury in Tasmania – aren’t these a direct result of them not getting the $16 million you promised?
PRIME MINISTER:
No, they're not, and the company has made that absolutely crystal clear. They are becoming more efficient and this slimming down of their workforce is part of the efficiency drive inside the company. We're disappointed that the proposal that we announced during the election campaign was ultimately withdrawn by the company. We thought it was a very good proposal. It was a tourist infrastructure proposal, at least as much as it was a business proposal, but sadly in the end Cadbury's decided not to go ahead with it.
Yes, it's disappointing when any company decides to shed jobs, but the great thing about the Tasmanian economy right now is that there is a lot more dynamism, a lot more confidence, in Tasmania now than at any time in the recent past. In fact, there are more job vacancies in Tasmania right now than in the whole of South Australia which has almost three times the population.
QUESTION:
Has your Government bowed to pressure from the big miners to not to go ahead with an iron ore inquiry and have you left the door open for it to occur in the future?
PRIME MINISTER:
We made a decision that there was no need for it at this time. Obviously, there were some very public calls for an inquiry about a week ago. We carefully thought it through. We talked to all the various players in the sector and in the end came to the conclusion that a parliamentary inquiry would do more harm than good. Of course the last thing we want to see is any predatory behaviour in any market, particularly a market that's so important for our country and for our long-term future as the iron ore market, but we do have the ACCC which is very good at policing that kind of misbehaviour.
QUESTION:
So you no longer have concerns about transparency issues?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well, as I said, we were attracted to an inquiry, no doubt about that, but we talked to the various people in the sector and came to the conclusion after the sort of consultation which sensible governments do, that a parliamentary inquiry was going to generate more heat than light. So we've decided not to go ahead with it.
QUESTION:
When are you going to reallocate that $16 million that was going to Cadbury?
PRIME MINISTER:
We're constantly investing in a better future for Tasmania. Since that time we've put $60 million into a major new irrigation scheme here in northern Tasmania. We've put $200 million into improving the freight equalisation scheme so that it will apply to goods leaving Tasmania and going beyond the mainland for the first time. Just this morning we've had the presentation of a $10 million cheque to Devonport City Council for the Living Cities project which is going to revitalise the Devonport waterfront and CBD and in the end attract hundreds of millions of dollars of private sector investment. So, we are constantly investing in Tasmania. I expect you will see more investment in Tasmania, last night, for instance, we announced $10 million to keep the John L Grove rehabilitation centre going for the next couple of years. So, we are constantly investing in Tasmania.
QUESTION:
Will that include money for the Mersey Community Hospital?
PRIME MINISTER:
We're talking to the state government about the future for the Mersey but you can be confident we are not going leave the Mersey in the lurch.
QUESTION:
Will we hear about that before [inaudible] state budget?
PRIME MINISTER:
You will hear about it at the right time but I'm pretty familiar with the Mersey Hospital. I was the Health Minister back in 2007 that rescued the Mersey when the Mersey was about to be closed by the then State Labor Government. We want to see the Mersey continuing to operate. We'll have more to say soon.
QUESTION:
Car travel times in our biggest cities are expected to double in some cases in just 20 years. Without a lot of money, spare money, to be spent on infrastructure what's the Government planning to do about it?
PRIME MINISTER:
We are spending, massively on infrastructure. In last year's Budget we announced some $50 billion of Commonwealth spending on infrastructure. The biggest infrastructure spend in the Commonwealth's history. This Budget we announced $5 billion in concessional loans for new infrastructure projects in Northern Australia. I've often said that I hope to be the infrastructure Prime Minister. Our country plainly needs better infrastructure as the Infrastructure Australia audit that is being released today demonstrates. We've got to get building because if we don’t get building we won't stay moving.
QUESTION:
Prime Minister, are higher road tolls the only way to do that though?
PRIME MINISTER:
There are a whole range of ways of funding better infrastructure. Tolls have their place and government has its place and what you will see is a judicious mix of increased government spending and elements of user charge.
QUESTION:
You promised to duplicate the Midland Highway within 10 years, isn't that going to be a broken promise?
PRIME MINISTER:
No, that work is well under way and it goes on.
QUESTION:
Will it be built by 2025?
PRIME MINISTER:
In the end, it's going to be a partnership between the state government and the Commonwealth and I expect that that's exactly what will happen.
QUESTION:
[Inaudible] coastal shipping reforms and do you have a message to the crossbench senators?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well, the interesting thing about the changes which the former government made is that they were bad for jobs and they were bad for costs. They hurt business because costs in coastal shipping went up and up and up. They were bad for jobs because the number of Australian ships involved in coastal shipping went down and down and down. Back in 2007 there were 30 major operating ships engaged in coastal shipping. Today there are only 15. So, what we want to do is restore the situation that existed in 2007 when Australia's coastal shipping was much healthier than it is now.
QUESTION:
Labor says its changes to superannuation levels only impact the wealthy, why won't you support that?
PRIME MINISTER:
Look, what we don't want to do is see the kind of attacks on people's savings, on people's money which we've come to expect from the Labor Party. In fact, it's very good that Labor is at last breaking cover. Labor is breaking cover – showing their true colours.
What the Labor Party wants to do is bring back the carbon tax, start up a super tax, put the people smugglers back in business and if they get a chance they will whack a mining tax back on as well. So, there's really a very clear contrast between the Coalition which is for jobs, for opportunity, for lower taxes. We're for jobs – they're for taxes. We're for opportunity – they're for taxes. We're for giving incentives – they're for more taxes and I think the contrast is becoming clearer and clearer and clearer.
There is going to be a very clear choice on offer between the Coalition which is about incentive, which is about enterprise, which is about more jobs, which is about trusting the people and the Labor Party which is about hitting people with more and more taxes – if it moves tax it. That's the Labor Party's attitude and I reject that and I think the people will too.
Thank you.
[ends]