E&OE....................................................................................................
Thank you very much, Bob, and to all of my fellow Liberals here in
Queensland I would like to thank you very warmly for that immensely
encouraging and supportive welcome. It's very difficult, on an
occasion like this, to really summon the right words to express the
sense of gratitude, the sense of excitement and the sense of anticipation
of our Liberal achievements yet to be realised. Because what has happened
over the last month and what happened in the election on the 3rd
of October in so many ways was more important, more crucial, more
emphatic and more successful than our victory in March of 1996. What
we have done by winning again and winning again in a convincing fashion
is to give to the Coalition a heaven-sent opportunity to remake the
political map of Australia.
I want to start my remarks this morning by congratulating Bob Carroll
and all the other office bearers of the Queensland Division on their
election to their respective positions. I do express my gratitude
to the Queensland organisation, to your President, to your State Director,
Greg Goebel, and to all the other staff and all the other branch and
conference members who worked so very hard to deliver what is, by
historical standards, a quite extraordinary result. For the Coalition
to hold 19 out of the 26 federal divisions in Queensland and 14 of
those divisions to be held by the Liberal Party is a very remarkable
achievement.
Our sweeping win in 1996 delivered a first-class group of people into
the Parliament. The Labor Party was left here in Queensland with a
bare two seats and one seat, Oxley, in the hands of an Independent.
And I do want to record my regret and my gratitude and my sense of
political commiseration with a number of my colleagues and friends
who were not successful on the 3rd of October.
I do want to thank Andrea West and Elizabeth Grace and Graeme McDougall,
three members who lost their seats through no fault of their own but
through the inevitable swing back, to some degree, of the political
pendulum which was to be expected after the subsidence of the intense
anti-Keating feeling of March of 1996. But all of them worked extremely
hard as members of Parliament and I express my gratitude to them and
my sense of thanks for the work that they did as very dedicated, committed
and hard-working local members. To those people who fought as candidates,
not being members of Parliament and who were unsuccessful and
I don't think anybody will mind me particularly singling out
Rod Henshaw for the campaign that he waged in the seat of Dickson.
To Cameron Thompson, the victor in Blair, and to all others who campaigned
so very hard and who won so convincingly.
It is, as I said, by any stretch of political comparison a great result
here in Queensland and it reflects very favourably on the work of
the Liberal Party here in Queensland, a party that has gone through
difficulties over the years and has faced challenges, particularly
in the nature of Coalition politics here in Queensland which, as I
don't need any reminding, have their own distinctive flavour
and characteristic. But you've done it well and you've done
it convincingly and once again the Liberal Party and the National
Party working together, separate political organisations, separate
and distinctive philosophies on some issues but nonetheless always
united in a determination to politically destroy the Australian Labor
Party.
It is very important in the wake of a victory such as we achieved
on the 3rd of October to understand the nature of what
was achieved and to understand the true meaning and the character
of that victory. It is always a mistake for a political party to misread
an election result. Paul Keating did it in 1993 and he paid very dearly
in 1996. It was always a mistake for us to imagine that the extraordinarily
high swings that were achieved in 1996 could be maintained forever
because there was within that vote, as I said earlier, an intense,
almost unprecedented degree of feeling within the Australian community
that a change of government was needed.
In the years that I've been actively involved in politics I've
experienced, on a number of occasions, in 1972, in 1975, in 1983 and
again in 1996, an intense and obvious and unstoppable desire on the
part of the Australian people for a change of government. But on other
occasions that hasn't been present. And inevitably, therefore,
we faced a fight to retain all of the ground that we had won in 1996.
That we were able to win by a comfortable majority of 12 seats which
by any historical analysis is a reasonable, ordinary, working majority
for any incumbent government.
We face the challenge of ensuring that our victory in 1998 is followed
by subsequent victories in the years ahead but that won't be
achieved by assuming that what operated in 1998 is going to operate
in the year 2001. I've said on a number of occasions since the
election that every election is an island. There is no such thing
as a continuum in the politics of this country. Each election throws
up different issues, different challenges and different circumstances.
And I can see in their reaction to the result of 1998 the seeds of
the Labor Party's grand illusion. I don't think the Labor
Party really does understand that the circumstances of 1998 won't
be present in the year 2001. And just as 1998 was very different from
1996, so the year 2001 will be very different from 1998.
We've learnt a lot of things from the last election but one of
the things that we have learnt from the last election is that when
it comes to marginal seat campaigning the true professionals in Australia
are the members of the Liberal Party. We watched election after election
being taken from us in the 1980s because the Labor Party out campaigned
us in marginal seats. We've now been able to turn that experience
on its head because one of the many lessons to come out of 1998 was
the superb marginal seat campaigning of many of our members. And I
thank them and I congratulate all of them for that.
Something that won't be present, of course, in the year 2001
is the political challenge of introducing a bold tax reform plan.
We all knew that that added a special dimension of difficulty to the
campaign. We all knew that any plan of that magnitude and boldness
was naturally exposed to an intensely dishonest fear campaign and,
of course, the Labor Party didn't disappointed us on that score.
They ran one of the most dishonest, ferociously simplistic, destructive,
against the national interest, political campaigns that I have seen
in 25 years in politics. Everybody who's had anything to do with
the governance of this country over the last quarter of a century,
whether they're Labor, Liberal or National, knows in their heart
that this country needs fundamental taxation reform everyone
knows that.
And in their own way, in various times holding other positions, three
successive leaders of the Australian Labor Party, Bob Hawke, Paul
Keating and Kim Beazley, have espoused the same cause that I took
to the Australian people on the 3rd of October. They espoused
the cause of taxation reform. And if ever there was a time that something
had to be called for the long-term interest of our country it was
on the 3rd of October and that issue was taxation reform.
And I am immensely proud of the fact that the Liberal Party of Australia
had the courage, the determination, the resilience and the commitment
to the national interest to stick to our guns and to go that election
with a bold plan of taxation reform.
I and many people in this room have wanted taxation reform in this
country for more than 20 years and at long last we have the authority
of the Australian people to do it. And I want to say to our opponents
in the Senate, be they members of the Labor Party or members of the
Australian Democrats, having put our political bodies on the line
on the 3rd of October and having won the support of the Australian
people, we intend to use every legitimate means at our disposal to
see that the will of the Australian people is implemented.
This extraordinary proposition that you should go through what was
effectively a seven-week election campaign, that you should put your
whole political future on the line both individually as a party in
championing the cause of something that everybody in their heart knows
is right and is in the best interests of the country, and then having
won that battle and having survived that challenge and having got
across the line with a comfortable working majority, that you should
somehow or other then sit around and wait until your opponents are
in the best tactical advantage in the Senate before you put your legislation
forward is a piece of political intelligence that completely escapes
me.
I thought politics was about forming a view about what was good for
Australia, arguing your case to the Australian people and if they
voted for you you did it. And that essentially is what I've always
understood politics to be about but obviously, even though I've
been in Parliament for 25 years, I have a lot to learn but we'll
wait and see about that. The other thing that we must remember about
the election, and now that the election is over I rather enjoy the
role of being a commentator for a moment. I spent a lot of time in
the campaign saying I wasn't going to be a commentator because
commentary by Prime Ministers in election campaigns is very dangerous.
After it's over it's a different matter.
The other thing we ought to understand about this election is that
any dillusion by the Labor Party that in some way the result represented
a Labor resurgence is utterly disproved by any analysis of the figures.
What essentially happened nation wide, it varied a bit from State
to State, what essentially happened nation wide in this election was
that the Labor Party's primary vote barely rose. It rose perhaps
1 to 1.5 points nation- wide. The Coalition's primary vote fell
by 8 to 9 % nation wide and almost all of that went to One Nation.
And then via the distribution of preferences by One Nation about half
of that 8% to 9% was passed through to the Labor Party. The Labor
Party profited from One Nation. We lost seats because of One Nation.
The party that did the most self sacrificing thing in placing One
Nation last was the Liberal Party of Australia, not the Australian
Labor Party. But it was the right decision and I want to say that
I never had any doubt that it was the right decision to take because
it would have distracted and beset and befuddled and provided hurdles
throughout the entire campaign if the issue had not been taken off
the political agenda. And I think in the long term Australian politics
is better for the fact that there are no representatives of One Nation
in the House of Representatives. Far, far better.
So we ought to understand why it happened. We ought to understand
the lessons that we should learn from it. We shouldn't be reluctant
to enjoy for a moment, to saviour for a moment, a second federal electoral
victory. We should contemplate the responsibility that we now have
to manage the affairs of our nation at a time of great historical
moment, at a time of intense national excitement. Over the next three
years Australia will experience a number of quite remarkable events.
We will host the Olympic Games of the year 2000 and that is not just
an event for the city of Sydney, it is an event for the entire nation.
We will also of course, and most importantly, we will celebrate the
centenary of the formation of the Australian nation, the centenary
of federation in the year 2001 will represent the greatest opportunity
that anybody in the lifetime of anybody in this room has had to reflect
upon the Australian achievement.
And to me I see the centenary of federation, not as an occasion for
negative, reflective, introspective, defensive, national naval gazing
but rather as an opportunity to celebrate the intense and great achievements
of the Australian people and of the Australian nation.
It is an occasion for celebration. It is an occasion to reflect upon
what this nation has achieved. It is an occasion to remind the world
again that the tolerant liberal credentials of this country are without
parallel anywhere in the world. It is also of course an occasion,
as any nation should do, to reflect upon the mistakes and the blemishes
of the past and no nation is free of them. But few have achieved what
this country has achieved and I would like to see that celebration
as being very much a celebration of the Australian achievement, because
it has been an incredible achievement and it has been an achievement
that has been purchased at a very heavy cost by some of our number
who have given their lives to defend the kind of life that we now
enjoy and the kind of society that we now celebrate.
The next three years are of course an opportunity to provide to this
country the economic leadership that has so far protected Australia
against the worst impact of the Asian economic downturn. Last week's
inflation figure was an extraordinarily good result. And it was a
dramatic reminder to the Australian community and to the rest of the
world of just how well this country has been managed economically
over the last two-and-a-half years. Every day goes by we are given
more and more proof of the wisdom of the Government's action
when it came to office in March of 1996 to get the budget back into
balance. There may have been decisions taken that caused pain and
unhappiness and hostility. There may have been people in this room
who disagreed with some of the decisions that we took. There were
people in the community who were affected by those decisions. But
at the end of the day if we had not got our economy in order we would
now be suffering some of the depredation and some of the pain, to
some of the order that is now being suffered by our friends and our
neighbours in the Asian-Pacific region.
If we had not taken action to protect the Australian economy we would
now have higher interest rates, higher inflation, higher unemployment,
lower economic growth, lower economic growth, lower business investment,
a weaker currency and a vulnerability to the world in stark contrast
to the example of strength and resilience that we now represent to
the world. And that is why those decisions, my friends, were so important.
But over the next three years we must not only care for the economic
health of this country but we must do it in a way that respects the
social fabric. We must do it in a way that continues to protect and
nurture the values that provide a decent social security safety net,
that recognise the importance within our community of strong functional
Australian families, and that recognise that good government is not
just about good economics and good bookkeeping. It is also about the
values of our society, it is also about the things that we hold dear.
It is also about confronting some of the non-economic challenges to
the Australian way of life. It's about recognising as a federal
government that we have a role in fighting the drug menace within
our society. It is about recognising the importance of high educational
standards within the Australian community. It is also about recognising
the limited but strategic role that the federal government must play
in the war against crime within the Australian community. It is about
recognising that we are to achieve, what I think all of us want, and
that is a strong and fair and caring Australian society as we move
into the third Christian millennium.
We can't as a government do it alone, nor can the individual
do it on his or her own or nor can it be left to the great community
organisations of our nation. What we need is a partnership between
the government, great community organisations and individuals. A partnership
that recognises that the role of government is not to be intrusive
but rather to be supportive. The government does have a limited role
in our society but nonetheless an important and a strategic role.
There are some things that governments can do that no other part of
society can do. But there are many things that governments over the
past have tried to do and they have been miserable failures. And the
art of good government in the 1990s, as we come towards the close
of this century, the art of good government will be to recognise where
it should intervene in that limited but strategic way. To recognise
that if you want a strong economy you'll only get that through
an essentially unregulated thriving progressive and forward looking
business sector and business community.
But if you really want to provide a proper social security safety
net you not only need the provision of support from the government
through pensions and Medicare and all the other things that make up
the social security safety net, but you also need to supplement that
with the work of the great community organisations such as the Salvation
Army and the St Vincent De Paul, and all the other great organisations
that have a coal face understanding of human misery and human hardship
that most of us don't have. And working in cooperation with those
great welfare organisations we can renew and renew in a very effective
way the compassionate side of our society. But importantly we also
need the partnership of individuals because if the Liberal Party stands
for anything, and it does stand for many things, it stands above all
else for the importance and the sanctity of each individual man and
woman within the Australian community. It has always been the most
important element of the Liberal belief that we should build a society
where every man and woman has the absolute right to pursue to the
maximum that his or her talents will allow their dream and their destiny
and their hopes for their lives and for the lives of their families.
There is no better welfare system of course in any community than
a collection of stable functioning families. United stable supporting
families remains still the best nurturing environment for children,
the best emotional bedrock for young adults and the greatest source
of companionship and emotional support and love throughout life at
whatever age.
So as we contemplate the next three years we are right to feel proud
of what the Liberal Party has achieved. We are right to feel proud
of the political courage the party displayed in going to the electorate
with a bold reform plan. And we are right to anticipate the responsibilities
of the next three years. They will be very different from the last
two-and-a-half. We will need to blend our economic realism with our
social responsibility and our social concern, and getting the balance
right will be very important for the future of our party. There is
no hostility, there is no permanent conflict, there is no enduring
antagonism between an economically efficient society and a socially
compassionate society. The idea that in some way you can't run
the economy well without neglecting the social side of your responsibilities
as a government is a very short sighted view. The two are mutually
reinforcing. The one is not possible without the other. If you don't
have an efficient wealthy society you cannot help the less privileged
within our community. If you don't help the less privileged within
our community what is the point of having a wealthy powerful society
economically. The two are mutually reinforcing. The two matter as
much to me as I know they matter to you. And the successful blending
of those two and the quality that that will bring to the lives of
the Australian community will be our goal and our responsibility over
the next three years. Thank you.
[ends]