Prime Minister
PRIME MINISTER: It's great to have the meeting of COAG up in the far north. To the Premier of Queensland who is our host here and all of my colleagues around the table. It's great to be in the north and it's also great to be in regional Australia, coming together in this group. It's a topic that I know all the Premiers, Chief Ministers and of course myself all feel very strongly about - ensuring that what we're doing is reaching rural communities and creating the same opportunities for people in these parts of the country as do in our major metropolitan areas.
Can I thank the Queensland Government and particularly the Premier for their support in the arrangements they have pulled together today.
We will work very collegiately today. I want to thank all Premiers and Chief Ministers for the strong spirit of cooperation that I've been detecting as we’ve arrived and as we had at our last meeting, which I thought was also a very cooperative meeting that we had in South Australia and I think we can continue on that tone today.
When you look across the agenda of issues that we are addressing, they really are very significant issues that our country is facing. Everything from how we manage population, growing our economies by ensuring that regulation and other matters don't get in the way of investment, trade and jobs.
Tackling the big skills challenges of our country and making sure the more than $7 billion that we spend a year together on ensuring that our people are trained for the jobs not just of today, but into the future, and at any age. And that our systems are working hard for those Australians who want jobs and Australians who want to employ Australians into jobs.
Tackling, continuing to tackle reducing violence against women and children. It's been a long-running agenda item of this group and we're making significant progress and we’ll be making further progress today.
Mental health and addressing the challenges of suicide prevention is something that our Government has set with the towards zero goal as a national priority. I thank particularly the Premiers and Chief Ministers on the work that they're doing in that area and we'll have further to say about that over the course of the day.
But it's not just about addressing those serious health and social challenges. It's our environmental challenges as well, which is dear to the hearts of all members of this group. And the discussion we’ve already had around waste management and addressing the issue of non-reusable plastics and how that can be better managed across all of our jurisdictions and how we can work together to achieve that. I know this is, as you all do, is an issue of great concern right across the community and I'm very encouraged by some of the progress we're already making on that front.
Addressing issues of Closing the Gap and how we work better together on that front. At the Closing the Gap address earlier this year we were able to come to a whole new level of agreement in how we work with the peak groups of Indigenous Australia and that agenda is working positively. But there's obviously a lot more work to do.
So a very busy agenda. I want to thank everybody for being here and particularly the Premier of New South Wales, making a late-night run to get here and be able to be with us today. So Gladys, I know it's been a busy week for you and your Parliament. But your commitment to this forum I think is demonstrated by that late-night run up the coast. So thank you very much.
So with that, I think we'll get on with it.