Michelle Rowland (Greenway, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. How is the government getting on with the job of building a stronger, smarter and fairer Australia?

Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Greenway for her question, and I thank her and all government members for their focused interest in our nation's future. We share in common great Labor values. What those values mean is that we always focus on creating opportunity and fairly sharing opportunity and that we always focus on protecting people from the risks they can encounter during the course of a lifetime. For this Labor government, that means the work of 2013 is focused on creating opportunities, sharing opportunities and protecting people from risk.

We enter this year with real and clear plans to make sure that we keep our focus on jobs and growth—jobs in our economy overall, economic management to ensure jobs are created—and on industries, like manufacturing, that are bearing the brunt of the high Australian dollar. We are proud of the fact that, even during the worst of global economic times, by keeping a focus on jobs and growth we have created more than 800,000 jobs while around the world far more than 20 million jobs have been shed.

To ensure that in the future we can also offer Australians the benefit of jobs and growth, we need in this world to be continuously modernising our economy. That is why we are delivering the very detailed policies and plans that will seize us a clean energy future, that will improve our infrastructure—including the rolling out of the National Broadband Network—that will improve the opportunity of Australians for new skills so that they can get the jobs of the future and that will ensure the nation is appropriately regulated and people are not caught up in red tape. That will mean we will tap into growth: the growth in our region of the world in this time of change as Asia rises.

At the same time we are also focused on protecting people from the risks they run in an ordinary life, including the risk that someone in their family or, indeed, an individual will confront a profound disability during the course of their life. What is important is that government works with them to ensure they get fair help and a fair deal. That is why I am very proud that, on 1 July this year, we will launch the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

This is the work of 2013 and this is the work for this government beyond 2013—making sure that there are real plans to give people opportunity and real plans to support modern families as they encounter the risks of life, including the risk of disability.