PRIME MINISTER:
It’s great to be here at the Australian War Memorial this morning to help launch Dr Peter Pederson’s book, Anzac Treasures. It is a really splendid work. It is a fitting commemoration of the epic deeds of the original Anzacs. I do want to congratulate Dr Pederson for this labour of love. Our history matters and our historians matter, too. It’s not just our stories, but it’s the way they’re told which helps them to live and which helps them to invigorate current and future generations. So, this is a very important time and this is a very important contribution to it.
QUESTION:
Prime Minister, on future military matters, what hurdles remain to be cleared before special forces can go into the ground in Iraq and begin their work?
PRIME MINISTER:
Our forces are ready to go. We are finalising the legal documentation. I hope that can be done very quickly because it is an absolutely critical mission upon which our forces will be embarked: to advise and assist the Iraqi armed forces as they regroup and regather and, hopefully, are able to retake control of their country. That won't just be of benefit to the people of Iraq, it will be of benefit to everyone all over the world because ISIL is a death cult. It's not Islamic. It mocks the duties of a legitimate State. It is an affront to civilised people everywhere, regardless of their religion or ethnicity or culture. It's a death cult that has declared war on the world and it's important it be appropriately resisted.
QUESTION:
What's very quickly? Could that be as soon as today or are we talking a few days' time?
PRIME MINISTER:
I'm not going to put a time limit on it. Our forces, as I said, are ready to go. We are already flying combat air patrols in the skies over Iraq and that's as it should be. Our special forces are ready to go. We just await the finalisation of the legal documents.
QUESTION:
What are those legal documents that need to be finalised? Do you have any update on what actually needs to be done in finalising those preparations?
PRIME MINISTER:
We've written to the Iraqis, the Iraqis have written back to us and we now need to consider their response, to finalise our considerations and as I said, our forces are ready to go because it is absolutely imperative for the world that we disrupt and degrade the operations of ISIL, which is an assault not just on a country but on civilisation.
QUESTION:
Prime Minister, just in regards to the funding of the conflict, there's been debate over the weekend about exactly what the price tag could be and how the bill's going to be paid. Can you rule out any tax increases or tax hikes to pay for the conflict?
PRIME MINISTER:
Yes, I can. This is a Government which believes in lower taxes, not higher taxes. We will pay what we must to do our duty by our country and by the wider world. Just at the moment, national security and international security are indivisible. We think we can afford it. But obviously we are in the business of getting the Budget back under control and that's something that the Treasurer, the Finance Minister and myself wrestle with every day. I just wish that the Opposition and the minor parties were as conscious of the fiscal challenge that our country faces as the Government is.
QUESTION:
If more funds are needed to fund this fight against ISIL, or the apocalyptic death cult, where are those going to come from if you’re ruling out tax increases today? Where might we find this money that we need?
PRIME MINISTER:
You’ve got to keep all these things in perspective. Now, the original estimate was something like $250 million for six months. That’s a significant amount of money, but in a Budget of something like $400 billion a year, we can manage these things. Now, as I said, I do not want to underestimate the budgetary challenge that we are facing, but I do think that you should see the costs of this commitment in perspective and they are manageable.
QUESTION:
You and the Treasurer have both criticised the previous Labor government for overestimating the amount of revenue you would collect. Has the Coalition run into trouble itself having had iron ore figures and other tax revenue similarly not come out as you might expect come MYEFO?
PRIME MINISTER:
We’re running an honest Budget and a responsible Budget and as soon as we get the figures we update the Budget. We don’t cook the books. We are going to make careful and cautious predictions; we’re not going to make inflated and overoptimistic predictions because we want the fiscal consolidation that needs to be achieved to be a real fiscal consolidation and not a fantastical one and that was the problem under the former government: every forecast they made turned out to be wrong because every forecast they made was based on impossibly optimistic assumptions and we are not going to make impossibly optimistic assumptions.
QUESTION:
It must be an embarrassment though for the Government to admit that 40 job applications a month was a bad idea?
PRIME MINISTER:
I’m proud of the fact that this Government when it consults with people is serious about the consultation and consultations that can’t change anything aren’t fair dinkum. The only fair dinkum consultations are consultations that can and do result in some refinements and where necessary some changes and that’s what we’ve done. We’ve made some significant refinements, not to the intent but certainly to the practicalities of the employment services tender, and I just want to stress that the best form of welfare is work and our employment services are about motivating and incentivising people to get out there and claim the jobs that are there. There are jobs out there. What we need is motivated and active jobseekers and that’s the best way to ensure that employers looking for work are matched up with workers looking for jobs.
QUESTION:
Prime Minister, you say this halving is a result of consultation with the community, but do you accept that it might be a backdown from your original proposal?
PRIME MINISTER:
Surely the whole point of consultation is to refine and, where necessary, adjust what you’re doing and some people might like to put a pejorative on it. I would like to say, isn’t this the whole point of consultation? Consultation that can’t result in any change is meaningless and the consultations that this government has will be fair dinkum and that is why these things are the first word – not the last word – from the Government.
QUESTION:
Given what we’re seeing in the United States on Ebola, what is the Government doing to prevent similar circumstances happening in Australia?
PRIME MINISTER:
As you know, on top of the $40 million that the Australian Government gives to the World Health Organisation every year, we have provided $18 million specifically for the current Ebola outbreak in West Africa. We initially provided $1 million, then we provided an extra $7 million and at the conference a week ago we provided a further $10 million and the UN said that this is exactly the kind of “swift and timely response” that the world is looking for and asked other countries to do exactly the same kind of thing that Australia has done.
So, we are very significantly contributing to the international effort to combat Ebola in West Africa and we are carefully screening all people arriving in this country from West Africa and our public hospital systems in every state are geared up to deal with any Ebola cases that might eventuate here in Australia.
Like the Americans who have actually had some cases in the United States, we believe that not only are the chances of people getting here with Ebola low, but the chance of an outbreak here arising from an infected person coming here is very, very low indeed because we have strong public health systems, we have strong infection control procedures, we have very strong and well-practiced quarantine procedures – that is why people can be confident that our country is well placed to deal with any eventuality in this area.
QUESTION:
Is the Budget position today worse than when you came into Government?
PRIME MINISTER:
It is honest today in a way that it was fundamentally dishonest when we came into Government and what we are doing is taking the kind of necessary steps to bring our country back into broad balance by 2017/18 and the tragedy is that we know there is a problem, the people know there is a problem, but the Labor Party is still in denial about the debt and deficit disaster that it created.
[ends]