School Principal: It is now my pleasure to introduce our own Member for Ballarat who is certainly a supporter of education in Ballarat, Catherine King.
Catherine King: This is the 21st Community Cabinet to be held by the Rudd Labor Government and I am absolutely delighted that they have chosen Ballarat for the 21st one. The Prime Minister and his senior Cabinet colleagues in a school hall with 500 people engaged in a community, a completely open agenda, it is just absolutely fantastic to see democracy at work.
Prime Minister: In the street this afternoon in Sturt St with Catherine King talking to local people and getting a sense of what people are talking about in this community and some of the things they think we are getting right and some of the things we might be getting wrong. Which brings me to why we are here tonight for a Community Cabinet such as this.
Community Cabinets are about one thing, and that is to ensure that the Government that you have elected in Canberra remains in touch with you as members of the community here at the local level.
Question: Thank you Prime Minister, I am John Fitzgibbon, General Manager of 3BA a local radio station. For the last 20 years we have worked with four local charities to run a Christmas appeal that provides food and food hampers and toys to local families. The last three years we have seen about a 250% increase in families seeking assistance at Christmas. I guess with increasing household costs, increasing utilities costs, food costs and so forth - what is this government planning to do to, to reduce the divide between the haves and the have-nots?
Minister Macklin: Right across the board we have got organisations contributing to making sure that those people who are doing it very very hard in our community have some support. When we saw the Global Financial Crisis really coming down the barrel at us as a country we doubled the amount of money we made available for emergency relief and of course have been getting that out through organisations like St Vincent de Paul, the Salvation Army and so on.
Question: You spoke before about best educational opportunities and that is what I want to ask you a question about. There is a large body of research on early brain development that shows very clearly that 80% of language development occurs between the ages of zero and three.
Prime Minister: So we are quite passionate about this because we have seen it. That is why we talk about building the education revolution. We say early childhood education, we say primary school education, we say secondary schools, we say trades training centres, we talk about universities, we talk about rocket science, research, innovation, R&D. It's the whole spectrum.
But unless you get those first building blocks right, it is really hard.
Prime Minister: Thank you also to those of you who are community leaders here, many from local government who I have had the privilege of meeting with earlier today and to many other community organisations and for your leadership here to make a difference, things don't happen in communities by magic, someone makes them happen - that's what a community leader is.
So whether you are the folks from the Salvos up the back or the folks from local government over here, or the wonderful woman over here who is doing the work with Aboriginal kids at the breakfast group, homework group, I'm sorry. Frankly it all makes a difference and all of these are the product of leadership.
Comment 1: It is a great opportunity to engage with people and to actually hear the systemic issues as Joanne said and to actually hear that broader community perspective.
Comment 2: Well we are from the Woady Yaloak Landcare Catchment Group - one of the best in the country.
We are hoping to be able to have some influence in government attitudes towards environmental issues and landscape change in right across the board.
Comment 3: My reason for coming is because I am committed to Indigenous education. I work in the area at the University Of Ballarat and I was interested to see what the Prime Minister had to say.
They seemed to be right across their portfolios without having advisers there to tell them what to do which I thought was interesting.
I think it is a really good idea. I don't think the public get to meet their federal politicians enough.
Comment 4: I think it is a good idea.
(The video related to this transcript is available from the Multimedia section of this website.)