Robert Oakeshott (Lyne, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. Prime Minster, as part of the much anticipated community cabinet to be held in Port Macquarie next week, will you agree to meet with mayors, administrators and general managers from Greater Taree, Port Macquarie-Hastings and Kempsey councils to advance the Nancy Bird Walton Regional Aviation Project, which is the combined No. 1 project for the mid-North Coast of New South Wales under the government’s Jobs Fund program?

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

I thank the member for Lyne for his question. Yes, the government will be attending, through the cabinet, a community cabinet meeting in Port Macquarie next week. From recollection, I think it is either the 13th or 14th community cabinet, which the government has conducted in each state and territory of the Commonwealth. We regard this as an important way of maintaining contact with local communities and responding to local community needs and we look forward very much to the engagement with his community at Port Macquarie.

In response to a question from the honourable member earlier in terms of the Port Macquarie hospital, I indicated that both the health minister and I would be making arrangements to visit that hospital, and I assume that those arrangements are being put in place. If not, I am in real trouble—but I assume all that is underway. Secondly, on the question of the Nancy Bird Walton aviation project, one of the reasons we attend community cabinets is to provide an opportunity for local business proposals and local community infrastructure proposals to be put forward either to me or to other relevant ministers in the individual sessions which are organised between those organisations and the ministers of the cabinet and more broadly, if it is of wider community concern, for public questions to be raised in the public forums which attend those community cabinets. Therefore, I invite the honourable member to organise such a meeting with me and, I am sure, the minister for infrastructure, who also happens to have responsibility for aviation—not wishing to dob you in, Albo—to participate in such meetings.

Can I say more broadly that the vehicle which we have to provide assistance at this time to particular communities which are going through difficult periods of adjustment through high levels of unemployment, coming off the back of the global economic recession, is our $1.5 billion Jobs and Training Compact with the nation. That involves a compact with young Australians based on a principle of ‘earn or learn’ and the provision of sufficient training places to ensure that if our young people cannot enter the workplace, they have provided for them an appropriate training place so that when we come out of this global economic recession an appropriate job can be obtained for them, as they will have been upskilled.

Secondly, of course, we have a compact with Australians who have been retrenched, through no fault of their own, because of the global economic recession, and there are specific provisions which pertain under that as well. But the third, which is of direct relevance to the honourable member’s question, is our local jobs fund—a $650 million fund, a $300 million component of which goes to the consideration of possible community infrastructure projects. I am looking for advice from the minister, but I understand that the first round of applications for projects under that fund has been put out there and that applications have come in. The figure that I can recall is that there are some 3,000 applications for projects submitted by various local authorities around the country. We, therefore, based on departmental advice, will consider those various applications. I understand that there will be further rounds available as well.

Can I say to the honourable member, therefore, that—because of the existence of that local jobs fund, and the community infrastructure fund within it, which I think runs to some $300 million—we will take representations from him and his local community organisations seriously. What we are seeking to do is to not only maintain touch with local communities around the country but do what we can to take the edge off the impact of the global economic recession on local unemployment rates.

Unemployment rates—as was brought home to me again graphically a week or two ago in Far North Queensland when I was there with the member for Leichhardt at the time of the Pacific Islands Forum—in various regions of the country are very high, unacceptably high. Therefore, the reason why there is this other set of initiatives on top of our national stimulus strategy, tailored specifically to local needs where you have, in particular, high levels of unemployment, is to provide us with the basis of engaging the needs which he represents.

So I look forward to engaging the Nancy Bird Waldren—

Opposition Members:

Opposition members—Walton!

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

I apologise for my misrendering of the name; we are all capable of misrendering pronunciations, and I am as well. But I look forward to meeting the representatives of that project when we gather soon at Port Macquarie, and we will see how it stacks up on the merits, and we will see how it stacks up against the evaluation of the relevant government department.