Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for her question. If you go to the big challenges facing Australia’s future, such as infrastructure—and we have spoken a lot about those in question time today—either you can as a national government partner with state governments and, I believe, increasingly with local government in rolling out the infrastructure that the nation, including in her community around Nowra, needs or you can simply adhere to the politics of long standing, which is to blame other levels of government. We do not intend to keep up that tired, old game plan, which has been done to death by those opposite, of blaming one state government after another and blaming one level of government after another, until you have had a decent time to work through these things in a cooperative fashion. We believe that is the right way ahead. That is why we have worked with the Council of Australian Governments in the way in which we have done.

Take, for example, the work by the Minister for Small Business, Independent Contractors and the Service Economy. I imagine the honourable member has a lot of small businesses in her electorate. One of the challenges faced by those in small business is how to deal with the avalanche of regulatory overhang in their businesses Those opposite conspicuously did nothing about that. In the period that we have been in office, we have said through the Council of Australian Governments: business—small, medium and large—is having a hard time of dealing with a whole lot of regulations. They are making it very difficult for small businesses to grow into larger businesses and for them to sell into markets across state boundaries. Therefore, one of the practical challenges is how you stop blaming other governments for that and how you start cooperating with them to get rid of some of these impediments to business and trade That is what the minister for small business is currently doing through the COAG working group on business deregulation. We think that is one practical area to work your way through these problems.

Another area is in health and hospitals. I presume that in the area represented by the honourable member she would like to see greater investment by the national government in the particular health and hospital needs of her constituents rather than a formula which says: ‘Ah, we’ve got a problem here; therefore, let’s just blame the state government of New South Wales or wherever for what is going on.’ Why don’t we actually put our shoulder to the wheel and say: ‘If the federal government, under the government which was supported by the honourable member, pulled $1 billion out of the system’—which they did when it came to health and hospitals—‘how do we as a national government put that money back in and partner with state health authorities to improve health infrastructure on the ground?’

Turn to education. Turn, for example, to TAFE. Turn also to the challenges in skills. Either you can say that the digital revolution in schools is just too hard, too difficult and too long term to touch, or you as a national government can say both on computers in schools and on trades training centres that the national government should partner with state and territory governments in order to make sure that schools on the ground are doing better. For example, of the 864 schools which have now received grants for 116,000 computers—and I imagine some of those may have been delivered to the honourable member’s electorate; I am not quite sure—

See this speech in context