2 December 1996 TRANSCRIPT OF THE PRIME MINISTER
THE HON JOHN HOWARD MP
ADDRESS AT 1996 NATIONAL AWARDS FOR RETAIL EXCELLENCE
THE REGENT HOTEL, SYDNEY
E& OE
Thank you very much Frank Lowy and to your wife Shirley, and to everyone else.
Janette and I are really delighted to be here tonight.
I feel very privileged to share a platform with Kieren Perkins. I guess along with
millions of other Australians, I held my breath that Saturday morning in July. And his
magnificent win that morning, along with Susie O'Neill, seemed to turn the whole
thing around. And it was a magnificent demonstration of the thing that makes all of us
the proudest people imaginable and that is Australian determination and Australian
success and Australian quality and Australian excellence. That's what tonight is all
about. It is about honouring the excellence and the achievements of men and women
in the retail industry.
Can I say at the beginning of my remarks to you Frank Lowy; you are a great
Australian. You're a person who has demonstrated an extraordinary flair and capacity
in business; you're philanthropic; you're a person who gives a lot back to the
community and you are, in many respects, the personification of the story of post
world war to Australia, a nation that receives millions of people from around the
world. Yourself comning originally from Europe, from very sad and unhappy
circumstances, building a new life in this country, pouring so much into it and
becoming so much a part of Sydney and so much a part of Australia. And I'd like to
say what a pleasure it is for Janette and I to be your guests and Shirley's guests here
tonight. Tonight is about remarking on and honouring excellence and achievement. And it is
appropriate that one of the greatest sportsman Australia has produced should be the
first speaker tonight. And excellence is something that ought to run firmly through all
aspects of Australian life. Achievement on the sporting field or in the swimming pool
is something that Australians have always honoured with enormous enthusiasm, they
always will and so they should. But excellence in the school room, excellence at
university, excellence in a profession, excellence in business, excellence on the
shopfloor, excellence at the retail level, is also something that we should unhesitatingly
honour. And particularly those people who commit themselves in the small and
medium size business sector.
Many of you know I do have something of a passion for small business. One of the
reasons, I guess, is that I grew up in a small business environment. My father had a
small garage they used to call them, or service station at Dulwich Hill, an inner
suburb of Sydney. And I was taught as a young bloke that the most important thing
you could do in life was to start with nothing and work your heart out and hopefully
pass on a bit more to your children than you yourself have. It was a pretty good ideal
and it's a very important ideal for Australia in the 1990s.
I know that retailing is about the most competitive thing anybody can be in at the
present time. I know it's tough. I know there's a lot of cut-throat competition. It's
always been an unprotected industry. You've never had any government handouts.
You've never had any protection. You've always been on your own and without much
sympathy if you fell over.
And I know that retailing patterns and consumer habits have changed. I often say to
people that the last recession in Australia left Australia's consumers permanently
hardened in favour of driving tough bargains. And I think we as a community changed
a lot in that last recession. But we've always had amongst our national characteristic a
tremendous capacity to innovate and to change and to adapt to new circumstances.
One of the stunning things about Australians is their willingness to embrace new ideas
and new technology. We are, as many of the people in one section of retailing,. will tell
you, as a society we probably veraciously devour new technology, new gadgets and so
forth, more rapidly than any other country in the world. The way in which Australians
have taken the mobile telephone to their heart, or should I say to their ears, so
enthusiastically is a very good demonstration of that.
And I want to say to all of the retailers of Australia, and particularly those of you who
operate on a small scale, I want to say that my Government will do everything it can to
create good circumstances to make retailing strong and prosperous. We want to have
and preserve the low inflation that we have at the present time. A high dollar is a pain
in the neck for some people, but for other people it's a good thing. Now, we don't
control the dollar, the world market forces control. And I want to say to you that the
days of thinking that any government could control the exchange rate, those days are
gone forever. But a high dollar can bring benefits in lower inflation. It can help,
therefore, to feed into lower interest rates and therefore provide a very, very sound
business base.
And we've acted very quickly to bring in many of the reforms we promised to help
small business. From the I1st of January the ridiculous unfair dismissal law that we
now have will be swept away and replaced by a far more intelligent one.
Our other industrial relations reforms, which have now all gone through Parliament,
will come, most of them, into operation on the 1 st of January and they will make direct
bargaining a lot easier. We've implemented our commitments in relation to the
provisional tax uplift factor and we've legislated to introduce our capital gains tax
rollover relief And I notice that Charlie Bell, the Managing Director of McDonalds, is
here tonight. Charlie has chaired a committee which has given a whole raft of
recommendations to me about how we can reduce the paperwork burden on small
business by 50 per cent in our first three years in Government. And I promise Charlie
and I repeat the promise tonight in front of everybody so you can all hold me to it
that we'll give him a comprehensive and, I think, very positive response to those
recommendations by the middle of February in 1997.
Now we are very, very keen indeed to make conditions as good as we possibly can for
small business in Australia. But, there is of course, so much a government can do.
The rest is up, of course, to the entrepreneurial spirit and the flair and the innovation
and the hard work of men and women in business all around Australia.
I always get a tremendous personal delight out of being at an evening like this because
it's one of those occasions where you can really feel tremendously proud to be Prime
Minister of a country that has produced so many people who've tried and so many
who've succeeded. So many people who've started with nothing, have come to
Australia with nothing and have built great and successful enterprises. They've
employed people, they've generated wealth, they've made a lot of people happy and
they've made a contribution to this society. And business is not, in the eyes of many of
its critics, just a question of a hard edged approach to making profit, it's also about
building a happy and united community. And the shopping centres that Frank Lowy's
Westfield Corporation have produced are now part of the community life in this
country. They've helped change for the better the way in which people shop, our
shopping habits and our whole attitude to shopping and retailing has been transformed
over the last 10 or 20 years. And the Westfield Company and many other people here
tonight have made a massive contribution to that.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for having me as your guest. I want to
congratulate in advance all of those who will receive award tonight. I want to thank
Frank Lowy and his great company for the massive contribution that it has made to
Australia. And I want to thank all of you for the investment that you are making in the
future of our country, the risks that you are taking not only for yourselves, but the risk
that you are taking to build a better, more prosperous and more contented Australian
community. Thank you.