CARY: Mr Rudd, Good morning.
PM: Good morning Greg.
CARY: A bit to talk about. Maybe just on a couple of those things I was just talking about, Barack Obama today accepts his party's nomination for presidency of the United States. We have come a long way in a short time.
PM: I'll say. I had a conversation with Senator Obama last week and talked in part about where he had come from and where he is headed to. This is an extraordinary achievement for him as an individual, as an American politician. And should he win in the Presidential election, I think Australia will have a very good friend in the White House.
If Senator McCain wins, of course, he knows Australia well as well and we would be well served with that outcome.
CARY: How do you find him on a personal level?
PM: He is a very warm person. I have not, both my conversations with him have been on the phone because when I was in the United States he was elsewhere in the country and of course, last week I was here.
But we have covered topics far and wide. About our common interests here in the Asia Pacific region. Also a lot of conversation about climate change. And one of the encouraging things about American politics is that both Republicans and Democrats are now committed to significant programs of action on climate change nationally.
That is really important because we are in the midst of quite crucial negotiations with all the other countries of the world to bring about a reduction to greenhouse gas emissions.
CARY: On my earlier comments concerning the 14 year old girl, not obviously something that is your responsibility, but something as a father you will no doubt have a thought about. A 14 year old girl, goes to school, gets a prescription for the pill. How would you feel about that if you were the father.
PM: Well leaving aside how I might feel, the facts of the case I am not fully across. I have heard about them in an earlier interview from a Melbourne radio station this morning. But from the facts of the case at least as presented, to me it strikes me as off that a parent would be excluded from this discussion.
CARY: Is there something that should be done legislatively about that. Obviously the school sees that they have got a responsibility in the area but it is a balance of responsibilities and I would have thought it should come down on the side of the parents.
PM: I think this is where common sense in my judgement should prevail. And that is, on these sensitive matters, to deal with members of your family. The family should be brought into the loop. That, again based on the reporting that I have seen, is at a minimum what should have occurred here.
CARY: Ok, let's talk a bit about common sense and education. We should have talked a lot about this. We will get to the politics and the policies of education in a moment. But we have the situation in the north of our state where the school is actually banned the children from doing cartwheels because they might hurt themselves. Are we becoming a nanny state?
PM: I haven't heard that story Greg. I would have been kicked out of school early on, a) for having attempted cartwheels and b) for having failed most of the time. The cartwheels I tried to perform were pretty awful.
I am not across that. I think the key thing is in our education system, is just to get the balance right between kids ability to be creative, to be expressive, and have a bit of fun, and what I have been talking about this week as well, which is to make sure that the quality of their education outcomes from school, equip them best for life.
And we have got a increasingly competitive world out there with our competitive economies across Asia investing hugely in their education, skills and training systems. My great fear for Australia is being left behind. And that is why the Government is committed to what I have described as an education revolution. With the overarching, the overriding goal of transforming this country into the best educated, best skilled, best trained workforce in the world.
CARY: And you are prepared, obviously to get pretty tough about making sure that happens. People have talked about doing the kind of thing that you have talked about this week. What becomes the first step in actually making it happen?
PM: You are right there has been a lot of talk about what we describe as this new chapter of the education revolution which is about quality education. Namely, how do we boost teacher quality, how do we boost the resources going to the most disadvantaged schools. How do we strengthen school leadership and on top of that, how do we strengthen school reporting so that parents and the wider community know how a school is actually performing.
Now, take for example one of those practical elements of this quality education revolution that we are talking about. That is, more resources for disadvantaged schools. Our problem is that there are a whole lot of schools out there which are right up against it in terms of school communities where they have got 20, 30, 40 or 50 different language groups, kids arriving in the schools from refugee communities with no knowledge of English whatsoever.
And it is very, very hard for those schools therefore to you know, perform against, let's call them the most elite schools.
So it follows logically that we need a way of assessing what those individual most challenged or disadvantaged schools need. And we hope to see the first progress and those payments to those schools by the second half of next year.
On the rest of the quality education revolution, again progressively during the course of 2009, but we have got a very tough negotiation coming up first with the State Governments and Territory governments of Australia and we won't conclude that until years' end.
CARY: Why will you get that response from them? Why will the unions fight a lot of what you are taking about? One of their arguments of course is how do you identify an excellent teacher?
PM: Well that is true and they raise some fair questions. But you know, they, therefore where they then go to with that argument is therefore that you shouldn't reward excellence, or more particularly this: that when you have an excellent teacher who gets to the top of their profession, that in order to stay in the field, they have either got to become an education bureaucrat if they are going to be further promoted or leave the system all together if they want to earn more money.
Now we have got to make sure that we have got a system in place that provides financial incentives for those teachers to stay on in the classroom where they perform a fantastic job for the country.
So that is the first one, second one of course, some of the unions object to but not all of them, is proper public reporting by schools about how they are performing. You can't have arbitrary league tables which compare, for example the school that I went to on the sunshine coast, Nambour High school, with Geelong Grammar, which is one of the most elite private schools in the country.
I mean, they are just different schools with different circumstances. What you can do is compare the performance of schools like Nambour with comparable schools in comparable parts of Australia, comparable parts of Queensland, if you have got a standardised way of testing that. And parents I think have a right to know how their school is going when measured against comparable schools.
CARY: I would have thought it is a no brainer, you know, nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. All the response we are getting, and I imagine it is the same around the country side, is behind the kind of thing you are talking about. Just on that, how much should a great teacher get?
PM: (inaudible)
CARY: How much money should a very good teacher be paid, an excellent teacher?
PM: Oh, there is a really tough question. What I have been told is that in most states and territories of the country, if you are a classroom teacher, your salary at the most senior levels within a school, doesn't get much beyond about $75,000 a year. Now we think that because this is such a critical profession for the country's future, we have got to set up a better set of incentives for that.
The second thing we would say about quality teaching is this: the other part of the problem we run into is how do we attract the best and brightest university graduates into teaching in the first place.
And what we have done there is studied what has been happening in the United States, the United Kingdom where they have a program called, Teach America and in the case of the UK, Teach First.
What does that mean? It means that the best and brightest university graduates, often in partnership with concerned large corporations wanting to do their bit for the community, will help sponsor one of these graduates with a shortened education degree, or education training, following the first degree that they have studied, whether it is in science, whether it is in maths, whether it is in English, to go into the school system, often for a limited period, three to five years. And then, with a guarantee of being able to pursue a career in the company concerned.
But what happens is that a number of those bright graduates are actually choosing to remain as teachers because they love the profession.
So our practical challenge at the beginning stage of all this is to get the brightest and best graduates back into teaching as well, and we have got to be creative about the way we do that.
CARY: It is one of the most important jobs in our community isn't it? Is there a single teacher who you recall who helped lead you down the road, to the seat you sit in now?
PM: Before I name them, which I won't, because that will offend every other high school teacher I had -
CARY: Not necessarily. I think for all of us there is one of two that stand -
PM: Yeah I think that is true. I mean there were I couple of teachers I had at Nambour High School who took a particular interest in me, my performance, how I was going, occasionally gave me an intelligent clip under the ears and said, you know, read this if you think you know everything.
And that was good. I mean people really taking an interest in a young kid's educational development.
What I want is right across Australia, for every school kid to have that experience. Where it is not just one or two teachers but most of their teachers, you know, greatly focussed on those kids educational achievement.
Our teachers now are doing a fantastic job, but we have got to make it easier for them, and we have also got to make it easier for parents to have information about how their kids are going at school through publicly understandable reporting. And how the school as a whole is going against comparable schools in the state, in the region, and certainly across the country.
CARY: Prime Minister, just two final questions, one of health, you would be across the problems we have been having here in Queensland this week, it is something you have addressed at previous conferences with our Premiers. Health Minister Robertson says we are not in crisis. I think most people here at the moment would seem to think that we are, you are obviously keeping an eye on it. Your thoughts?
PM: Well the key thing for the Australian Government to do is to make sure that we are effective long term partners with State Governments like the Queensland State Government in providing the funding necessary for them to do their job.
What is the challenge in Queensland? Rapidly growing population and an ageing population across the country and through innovations in medicine, people are living longer and with more complex diseases to manage.
Now, some of those challenges are really good challenges to have, but they are real which means that governments, state and federal, have to be investing a lot more in health.
The problem with the previous Liberal Government is that despite all those pressures on the public health system of Australia, Mr Howard's Government pulled $1 billion worth of funding out of the public hospital system. In one year, we have committed an additional billion, and on elective surgery waiting lists, provided an additional allocation of $600 million to the states in order to bring forward the number of elective surgery procedures.
But we have got a big negotiation again with the states at the end of this year on the future of the Australian Health Care Agreement and we will be wanting to do a lot more there, including for the first time, a national preventative health strategy.
Because if we don't act there, that is, preventing people from developing chronic diseases which are avoidable, then in the future we will probably end up spending every taxpayers dollar on health. (Inaudible)
CARY: Yeah I think we are spending about, just about five per cent at the moment, isn't it, on preventative? So you would be looking to up that significantly?
PM: Yeah we have got to make a real dent on this in terms of lifestyle choices because look what is happening with diabetes. I mean, there is a real, real challenge here. And if you look at the cost intensity of treating people once they have diabetes as opposed to the cost challenges of preventable courses of action with certain categories of diabetes, then for me it is a no brainer that we have got to be investing more.
But again, despite 12 years in office, we have had 12 years of neglect on the part of the previous Liberal Government on an effective national preventative health care strategy.
CARY: Okay. I am talking to Francis Collins, Dr Francis Collins in a couple of hours from now. You would be aware of him, he is in an eminent scientist, eminent theologian. And he looks at all the arguments against God and counters them. And it is a very interesting book, philosophical, religious, very interesting book. Can I just ask you, whether you think the single biggest argument in favour of God's existence is?
PM: You really know how to conclude and interview don't you? We started with teen pregnancy, now we are moving on to the existence of God.
CARY: The single biggest reason in your mind? The single biggest argument?
PM: Well as you know, I am a believer, I have never pretended not to be, and I respect those who have no religious belief. It is a free country, freedom to believe, freedom not to believe. For me, it is ultimately the order of the cosmos, or what I would describe as the creation. You can't simply have, this is my own judgement, creation as simply being a random event, because it is so inherently ordered. And the fact that the natural environment has been ordered in a way where it can properly coexist over time.
If you were simply reducing that to mathematical probabilities, you've got to say, it probably wouldn't have happened. So I think there is an intelligent mind at work. And so that is not a unique view in my part, that has been the view of theologians for about 2000 years.
CARY: Okay. I will finish on a lighter note then, I know you have -
PM: I have got to say Greg, in every interview that I have had, I have not been asked to prove the existence of God. But you on 4BC have a world first.
CARY: Well I might be the first to ask you this as well. We have been having a competition throughout the year for our listeners to pick the winner of a nominated footy game.
I know you are going to the Bulldogs versus the Broncos and that is going to be our nominated game. So our listeners need to pick the winner and pick the score. Broncos versus Bulldogs, who is going to win and what will be the score.
PM: Oh, the ‘Broncs' to win and, I am too smart to pick the score. See you later.
CARY: Prime Minister, enjoy your day.
PM: See you mate, bye.