PRIME MINISTER:
I am delighted to be here with Tim Nicholls, the next premier of Queensland and his shadow cabinet, and also with the Mayor. I have a very keen appreciation, your worship, of the importance of local government. You’re on the front line, to all the mayors, I’m delighted to be here with you. My only achievement in local government I have to say, was to be the first man to be the lady mayoress of Sydney. I’ve learned from Lucy how important it is. You are the front line, that’s why we’re always ready to work with you and support you as the national government.
I’ll just say a little bit about the budget and I look forward to having a discussion with you all.
As you know, we have a determined commitment to regional Australia. We know that Australia does not end at the outskirts of the capital cities, just like Queensland doesn’t end at the outskirts of the south-east corner. This is a big state and a big nation and every part of Australia needs to succeed.
My commitment as your Prime Minister is to ensure that the great opportunities that we are securing for all Australians, particularly young ones like this, our children and grandchildren, will be available right across Australia.
That’s why we’re doing everything we can to invest in the infrastructure of the 21st century – whether it is road, rail, water, energy – setting it up for you young ones to achieve even greater things than your parents and grandparents could do.
Ken talked about the exports from this region. Can I say to you that we are determined to continue to open up export opportunities for our miners, for our farmers, for our professional services people, for all of the creativity and productivity of Australia. We want to open more doors into bigger markets around the world.
We’ve done that during our time in government. We’ve opened up big new trade deals, as you know, with Korea, with Japan, with China – the biggest of them all, and of course with Singapore, expanded that. We will continue to work on new opportunities because we have the best produce in the world. Australians can do anything and everything. We want to have the biggest, broadest field for our great products, our great people, our great ideas to run onto because that is the lifeblood of our economy – more opportunities and that is what we’re securing.
Now, in the budget, we have to do a lot of things in a budget. The first thing we have got to do is live within our means and balance the books. We don’t want you young people to be burdened with a mountain of debt, because your parents and grandparents couldn’t live within their means. So we are bringing the budget back into balance and in a few years’ time by 2020/21 we will have a $7.4 billion surplus.
Now we are having to raise some additional revenue to do that, because we couldn’t get the Senate to agree to all of savings we wanted. But in the end, we have to live with the Senate the people elected, we have to live with the Parliament that the people elected.
So while our senators – Matt Canavan, Senator, who is based in Rockhampton, as you know, and is Minister for Northern Australia and Resources – while Matt and our senate team have done an outstanding job in negotiating a lot through the senate, much more than anyone expected, we haven’t been able to achieve all of the savings.
That’s why we are imposing the levy on the major banks, and that’s why we’re asking Australians to contribute an extra 0.5 per cent on the Medicare levy to fully fund the National Disability Insurance Scheme.
And that’s the other big part of the budget, is security. National security, of course, is our primary duty and no government has put more resources into national security – whether it is the capabilities of the Australian Defence Force or whether it is national security in terms of counter-terrorism, in terms of intelligence, in terms of keeping us safe at home and abroad – no-one has put more money into that and more resources into that in peace-time than my government.
But we also need to secure for Australians those essential services. So we’ve guaranteed Medicare. We are guaranteeing Medicare and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme with the Medicare Guarantee Fund. We’re unfreezing progressively the indexation freeze that the Labor Party first imposed – so we are securing that, those vital health services, now and into the future.
And we’re reforming the way school education is funded. We are putting more resources into school education. So all the schools in this electorate, in this State, in this part of the state and indeed all but one school in all of Queensland will be receiving substantially more money over the next decade, but the funding is going to be needs-based, transparent, consistent, just as David Gonski recommended.
Of course, it’s not enough just to put more money in – while, it is a lot of money, $18 billion over the next decade – but we are also going to ensure that we get the right educational outcomes. And so we are doing a Gonski 2.0 review to ensure that we get support for the best teachers, great teachers. All of us have had great teachers, many of us have had our lives transformed by great teachers. Lucy and are parents of a great teacher. We have got a great commitment to teaching and to school education, so we are going to ensure that we do the best, the right thing by our kids and we look forward to working with Tim’s government after the next election here in Queensland to make it so.
I mentioned the National Disability Insurance Scheme – again, vital priority – that must be fully funded and we are going to do that.
But then, when we look at business and this is Small Business Week in Queensland, we are backing business and enterprise right up to the hilt.
We were just talking today with Jess and Rebecca from the Central Queensland News and we were talking about what we are doing for small business here, right here.
So we have brought down company tax on businesses with turnovers up to $50 million a year.
Again, people said we would never get that through the Senate – we have.
We want those small and medium businesses to be competitive, and to do that we’ve got to give them a competitive tax rate. When they have more left after tax, they have got more to invest, they’ll invest more, employ more, greater opportunities.
And also, of course, small business, when they are investing, buy new plant, we want to be able to give them that incentive to do so, and so we have the instant asset write-off – $20,000 – we are extending for another year. And I think, Ken, this electorate has had one of the highest take-ups of that instant asset write-off. That shows it is a very enterprising community, a lot of small businesses that are investing to get ahead.
So right across the board – whether it’s in the infrastructure, the $75 billion program of infrastructure across the decade, whether it is in business incentives, whether it is securing those vital services – we are ensuring and delivering a budget that is fair, that delivers opportunity and security, and above all, every element of it is focused on the futures of these young men and women sitting here in front of us here today. Because our duty is to ensure that you can realise your dreams and that you have even greater opportunities and greater chances to do what you want to do and realise the better days ahead for you and your ambitions than your parents and grandparents had.
So that’s what we’re doing – working hard to set the stage for you to do great things.
It is wonderful to be here in Emerald. Thank you very much and I look forward to having a chat to as many people as we can today.
Thank you all very much.
[ENDS]