Wayne Swan (Lilley, Australian Labor Party, Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Forde for his question. Tomorrow, I will meet with state and territory treasurers here in Canberra to negotiate a historic set of reforms to federal-state financial relations—reforms that are long overdue. On Saturday, the Prime Minister, the premiers and the treasurers will meet to finalise these reforms. These reforms are very important and go to the long-term economic health of the country, our capacity to lift our productivity, and our productive capacity, in the long term—something that was put in the too hard basket for 10 or 11 long years by those opposite.

I am confident that by Saturday afternoon we will sign an agreement which delivers for our communities and also an agreement which recognises appropriately our new fiscal and economic environment that has come through courtesy of the global financial crisis. Our priorities are to stimulate the economy and create jobs in the short term and the long term, to put in place the long-term structures that can make our economy more efficient and the long-term federal-state structures that can lead to better service delivery. Most importantly, we need to put in place a process which can put an end to the blame game.

The Commonwealth is committed to genuine reform across a range of policy fronts but especially in health and education, which those opposite were simply incapable of addressing during their time in government. Like the states, we are determined to fix the health system. We recognise that under previous governments there was an erosion of Commonwealth funding for our nation’s hospitals. It is critical that we deal with that over the long term. That is why we will offer the states a better deal on health funding. On education, we will put forward significant reforms to teacher quality, as the Deputy Prime Minister pointed out earlier this week.

What we are looking for is a new and modern federalism. This will be reflected in the financial arrangements. We will put in place new incentive arrangements with the states through national partnership payments to drive reform and better service delivery, particularly in health and education. In the next two days, the Prime Minister and I will use these new payments to deliver specific economic and social reforms that the Australian people have been waiting for for a long time. We are confident that we can agree on investments to stimulate the economy, to create jobs and to reform the Federation in the interests of all Australians.

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