COMPERE: Well the Prime Minister returned from holiday as of yesterday and he was immediately addressing one of the weightiest issues facing the nation - the need to boost productivity to meet the needs of a growing and ageing Australian population. To look at just how the Government aims to boost prosperity in the future, where a much larger proportion of the national population will be retired, Marius Benson is joined now by the Finance Minister, Lindsay Tanner.
MARIUS BENSON: Lindsay Tanner, good morning.
LINDSAY TANNER: Good morning Marius.
MARIUS BENSON: You can set out the problem for yourself and the Government at large fairly easily in numbers, you can say the productivity growth is now running at 1.4 per cent, boost that to two per cent and you get the economy growing at three per cent, get that right and the Prime Minister says; we'll all be $16,000 a year better off by 2050. Now what are the top priorities in terms of reforms to achieve that in?
LINDSAY TANNER: Well there's several fronts that we're working very hard on Marius, the broadband network of course is probably the most central and that will transform our economic performance gradually as it comes into place. It will transform work places, it will transform education so that is central to our productivity. If it's - but just as important is improving our performance in education, all the way from early childhood through to universities and beyond so there's a lot of additional money going through there and also a lot of specific reforms that are being pursued like publication of school results, we're improving university quality monitoring. Then you've got - there's been an infrastructure that a lot of major projects that are being financed through our nation building strategy and of course finally the area that I'm responsible for which is the microeconomic reforms and regulation, the uniform regulatory system across the country so we don't have different rules and different states on crucial economic regulation and also tidying up some of the things in our own backyard.
MARIUS BENSON: Federal state relations getting things uniform across the country, broadly the issue of federal state relations is pointed to as a major reform that's needed. Tony Abbott has been a very keen advocate of Canberra running the show in a number of areas, do you think that could be an area where you reach agreement readily with an opposition lead by Tony Abbott?
LINDSAY TANNER: There have been some specific areas in our reform agenda that do involve direct control by Canberra. For example there were a number of areas in financial services like mortgage broking and margin lending that were supposedly regulated by individual states and in some cases not even regulated at all. One of the agreements that we've reached with the states is for all of those things to be wrapped up into a single federal, national system of regulation. So in some cases that's been appropriate or will be appropriate but in others the states remain in charge, there are some capacities for particular decisions by states but you've got a harmonise system where it doesn't impact adversely on businesses that straddle more than one more state.
MARIUS BENSON: Basically is it fair to say that when you look at the productivity objective and gross objectives you're talking about, you're trying to do what John Howard and Peter Costello did do in the 1990s?
LINDSAY TANNER: Look obviously Peter Costello and John Howard did some things that we agreed with and some things that we didn't agree with but I think it's fair to say that in most of the areas that we're dealing with, what we're really tackling is things that they fail to address. We all know their appalling record on broadband, we had 17 different schemes that were all flim-flam, that were all designed to look like they were doing something, we all know about their failure to do anything serious about education, the fact that Australia became the only country in the developed world where investment in higher education from government was actually going backwards. Of course we all know about their inability to invest in infrastructure and they did very little in reforming regulation across state boundaries so these things are really things that the Howard Government spent 10 or 12 years not doing very much about.
MARIUS BENSON: In planning for 2050 you have to take decisions for the long-term but there is one overriding priority for the Government right now which is to get itself re-elected in about eight months and according to the first newspoll of the year, that objective is becoming a bit harder?
LINDSAY TANNER: These polls go up and down as you know Marius and we're not really specifically focused on them. Obviously all politicians take a look at polls but we're focused on building a stronger economy and we've got a lot of big challenges because we're trying to do the long-term things just as the world is coming out of the biggest economic crisis in 75 years and Australia has clearly suffered an impact as a result of that, so that's really where our focus lies and I believe you know, I've got a very strong belief in this that if we get those things right and people see us trying to do the right thing and achieving improvement, achieving progress that that will work politically so I think the key thing is you've got to focus on the substance of the job and that's what Australians will recognise and that will influence their votes more than the kind of political tricks that some people get addicted to.
MARIUS BENSON: Lindsay Tanner, thank you very much.
LINDSAY TANNER: Thank you very much Marius.
COMPERE: The Federal Finance Minister, Lindsay Tanner with Marius Benson.
-ends-
| Media Contact: | Website: |
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| Nardia Dazkiw - 0418 144 690 | www.financeminister.gov.au |
