Subjects: Liberal Party; role of Australia in East Timor; Australian economy; interest rates; inflation rate; opening of the new Kailis and France Food Pty Ltd factory; industrial relations; Labor Party; government achievements; tax reform; tax cuts; responsibilities of opposition; ALP national conference; Labor policy & ideas?;
E&OE ..............................
Well thank you very much Richard. To David Johnston, the State President, my Federal and State Parliamentary colleagues, Sir Charles Court, other distinguished Liberals, ladies and gentlemen.
It is once again a great pleasure for me to be back as prime minister, to address this State Conference of the Western Australian Division. I do so against the background of remarkable things that we have achieved together since I spoke to you just on a year ago. And if I can take you back to the State Conference last year, you will remember a number of things.
You will remember that we'd just negotiated through the Parliament, after discussions with the Australian Democrats, the implementation of the great bulk of the tax reform programme that we have taken to the Australian people. And we were looking forward, not without a certain degree of trepidation and an understanding of the difficult road ahead, we were looking forward to the implementation stage of our tax reform programme.
And the Labor Party was literally rubbing its hands together with glee. We've withstood twelve months of negative sabotage, of arguing in a carping fashion against the Australian national interest, that vista lay ahead of the Labor Party and they literally salivated. And it's worth reminding ourselves and it's worth reminding them, because we remember what they said, that they set out to devote themselves to a year long campaign to instil within the Australian community a sense of fear and loathing and despair about the introduction of a tax reform plan. And it is a tremendous tribute to the sense of purpose, and the sense of commitment of the Government I lead and of all of my Federal Parliamentary colleagues that we have been able to come through that period, not only successfully with our unity preserved, but we have also presided over the introduction, in a relatively smooth fashion, of the biggest, the biggest single systemic change of the structure of the Australian economy since the end of World War II.
Nobody can doubt the scale of what has been achieved. And none of us, particularly at gatherings such as this, which is a concourse of the broad membership of a political movement, none of us should lose the opportunity to reflect for a moment on what has been achieved. Because politics is about getting elected to office to do things. It's not about enjoying the fruits of office. It's not about congratulating yourself on being a Member of Parliament, or a Minister or a Prime minister. It's about doing good things for the people of your state or the people of your nation.
And this Government from the very beginning, from March of 1996, set about being a reform government. About being a government that was determined to make a difference. About being a government that would try and change those things in Australia that needed to be changed, but equally to be a government that defended the traditional values of this country that has served us through good times and bad in the years gone by.
And that has been very much the keystone of the administration that I have led over the last four and a half years. And although tax reform is not the only great achievement of the Government, it stands as an exemplar of the determination of the current Coalition Government to make a difference for where a difference is [inaudible]. To bring about necessary reform. To change for the better those things that need to be changed.
As I look back over the last year, it is also right to reflect upon some of the Government's non-economic achievements. Nobody knew in July of last year that Australia might as turned out to be the case, be called upon to display a leadership role in defending the liberty of the people of East Timor. Nobody knew what danger might have lay ahead in that very perilous international undertaking. We knew that there was to be a United Nations' supervised ballot in East Timor. We knew the fragility of the domestic political situation in Indonesia. We knew the historic sympathy of so many people of all the generations in Australia towards the people of East Timor, remembering their sacrifices to help defend the safety and security of Australian soldiers during World War II. And as events unfolded, Australia was called upon to display that leadership role. And I am pleased to say to you that in terms of assembling an international diplomatic consensus behind a United Nations' mandate to defend a peace enforcement force into East Timor, that goal was achieved in near record time. And it is now a matter of a proudly recorded history that Australia did play, under the leadership of Major General Cosgrove on the ground in East Timor, did display a magnificent leadership role. And it will forever be to the credit of the men and women of the Australian Defence Force that they did it in a professional, effective and where necessary compassionate fashion and it has brought great credit to this country as a defender of human rights. And there is nothing more basic when you come to human rights than a willingness to defend the political liberty of people in another country who have voted to assert their national independence.
So as I look back over that last year, I can report to you my friends that it has been a year of great achievement. It is a year that has seen the Australian economy continue to grow. I can report to you that since we were elected to government, we've created almost 750,000 new jobs. I can report to you that we have the strongest growth levels since the late 1960's. We have the lowest housing interest rates for probably twenty-five or thirty years. We have a much lower rate of inflation than we had through the 1970s, the 1980s and the early 1990s. We have seen Australia winning despite the vagaries and the perversity of the international trading climate. We see Australian exporters winning new markets around the world.
And only yesterday morning here in Perth I opened that marvellous new factory facility of Kailis and France which is a leading example of what we mean when we talk about a supermarket to Asia. Here's a company combining the best of an old family-based work culture and ethic with modern technology to win an export market on the basis of custom made delivery of a manufactured product to the vast markets of Japan. It's a wonderful reminder of what can be achieved if you have Australian commitment, Australian ingenuity and Australian skill.
And it's also a reminder of why you need a deregulated industrial relations system. It's a reminder of why if Labor were ever to win power again in Western Australia or nationally, one of the very first things it would do would be to turn back the clock on the flexible labour market introduced by my government and by the government led by Richard Court. Richard reminded us yesterday at the opening of that facility that there are 250,000 individual workplace agreements here in Western Australia. And one of the first things on the hit list of the union-dominated Labor Government in Perth or in Canberra, would be to restore the union stranglehold on industrial relations in this country. And that is one of the many reasons why Labor represents an unacceptable risk to the modern outward looking economy that we are building in Australia and the modern outward looking economy which is providing rising living standards for the men and women of Australia.
And of the many things that I feel a sense of pride about in the economic achievements of this government, none is more important than my capacity and that of all of my Federal Parliamentary colleagues to look the average wage and salary earner in the eye and say you are better off under this Government than you were under thirteen years of Labor. Because the truth ladies and gentlemen is that the Coalition has been a better friend of the Australian worker than any Labor Government since World War II. It is the Coalition that has delivered via higher real wages underpinned by higher productivity, increases in take home pay. It is the Coalition that has cut the average mortgage bill of Australian homebuyers by hundreds of dollars a month. It is the Coalition that has delivered the largest personal income tax cuts in Australia's history. It is the Coalition that has delivered a tax system whereby 80% of Australian workers are on a top marginal rate of no more than 30 cents in the dollar.
And I have to say to you that of the literally hundreds of anecdotes I have heard about the reaction of Australians to the new taxation system, none has been more common or more repetitive than the simple statement, "I didn't realise how large the tax cuts were going to be". And I have heard that all over Australia. I have heard it from public servants. I have heard it from police officers. I have heard it from school teachers. I have heard it from wage and salary earners in private enterprise. I have heard it all around the country. You see Australian workers are used to being promised tax cuts by another government, only to have them, even they were LAW law, taken back after that government has been re-elected. And they've found in respect of us, that things are somewhat different.
So of all the things I am especially proud of, is our capacity to stare in the face of what used to be the taken for granted constituency of the Australian Labor Party, indeed many members of trade unions around this country and explain to them how they are so much better off under a Coalition Government.
But like all students of politics, particularly Australian politics, and every last person in this room is in one way or another a student of Australian politics, we must try and understand why we are able to look back with so much confidence and strength and pride about what has been achieved over the last year. And there is a very simple explanation for it and it has enduring significance for the future of our party. And that is that in modern politics particularly, governments and political parties and indeed oppositions, are judged as they should be, not only on what they say and how they say it, important though that may be, but they are judged overwhelmingly on what they stand for and what they do.
And the key to the Government's success after four and a half years is that we have been an active government. We have been a government that has not only talked about problems, but we've also been willing to attack those problems. And that gives us a guide into the future. If anyone imagines that the reform process is over, they are wrong. If anyone imagines that the Australian economy can mark time in these early years of the twenty-first century, they are wrong. If anyone imagines that all the hard work has been done and there's no more challenges ahead of us and that there are more difficult decisions to be taken, then they are also wrong. In the modern world you don't mark time. You either keep going forward or you fall back again. And I've made it very clear to all of my colleagues at a Cabinet meeting a few days ago that the reform task is not over. We must now turn our attention to other areas in need of change and reform. We must look at the need to further reform and strengthen the welfare safety net of this country based on the principle that the Australian way, and that is that we provide a decent social security safety net to those in genuine need. And also embracing a very important principle - of mutual obligation and when you provide assistance for people who need assistance that if they are able to do so it is only fair and reasonable that they are asked to provide something back in return.
And there are many areas of change and reform that lie ahead of us, and if we are to maintain the political momentum we have now, the last thing we should do is think complacently we can rest on our laurels and reflect too long over past successes and lose sight of the constant challenge to achieve new successes. But of course ladies and gentlemen that challenge of standing for something, of doing something and achieving something is not only the responsibility of a government but it is also something that is the responsibility of an opposition.
And of course starting on Monday at Wrestpoint Casino in Hobart is the national conference of the ALP. In their smug, indecent complacency, self-described by many leaders of the Labor Party as the principal agent of political change in Australia. Well if it is the principal agent of political change in Australia let's see a few ideas come out of the ALP conference.
Let, after four and a half years as Labor leader, Mr Beazley, tell us at long last what he stands for and what he believes in. I mean he has long enough. He has been leader of the Labor Party as long as I have been Prime Minister and he has been leader of the Labor Party longer than was Paul Keating Prime Minister of this country. And yet nobody has a clear idea of what he stands for. And the other night on the 7.30 Report he even tried to tell the Australian people that after all he said about the GST, after everything he said about the GST, about everything he said about our attempts to bring in tax reform, he didn't really regard the GST as the most important element of the Labor Party's attack on the government. You could have fooled me.
I mean let me give you a just few, a few of the many quotes -
"as they face it on the first of July it will be an absolute nightmare, as an example of economic management you could not imagine a more disastrous policy, both in its strategy and execution"
And he went on :
"in the horror picture it's a complete mess, this is hell, this is hell in a small place and I think there will be an awful lot of people experiencing terrible truths with that as the year unfolds".
And, of course, to cap it all off was the interview with Howard Sattler, who you all know well on the 30th May of this year and he had this to say :
"Look, I mean, this has been something out of the Soviet Union, circa about 1955. You have got Joe Stalin's successors up there telling everybody in the Soviet Union how good it is, you know. You've never been better off, you've never had more freedom in the workplace, you've never had more money and everybody is being marched off to the gulag and the same thing is happening here".
Now, ladies and gentlemen, he did actually say that. He did actually liken Australia in the year 2001 to the gulag. I mean that is a measure of the desperation of the language. The reality is they banked their all on the GST being a failure. Their fondest prayer and hope was that come the first of July that dark cloud of which they spoke would burst and the deluge would come and it would sweep all of us away. And to use his words to the Labor Party caucus in December of last year he would then "surf to victory" on the back of the public's discontent with the goods and services tax.
Now, that was the grand design, that was the measure of the positive contribution that the member for Brand is making to Australian politics. And ladies and gentlemen I think he owes it to the Australian people at the national conference over the next few days to finally admit that not only did the Australian people vote for tax reform in October of 1998, they have now accepted tax reform. And that tax reform has become ...[applause]..
He should listen to the leader of the truth squad in the ALP, John Della Bosca. He should listen to John Button. I mean, John Button had that nagging habit when he was a Minister in the Hawke and Keating governments of always telling the truth about how government policy wasn't working and he was frequently talking and he said it again at an ALP gathering in Melbourne a few days ago and he said he didn't understand what rollback meant and that he really thought that the Labor Party should have done something about tax reform a long time ago.
And I think the best thing that Mr Beazley can do for Australia is to admit that the Australian people have not only voted for tax reform but that they have accept tax reform, and abandon this ridiculously confusing commitment to a rollback which can only undermine the quality of the reform that we have introduced. And instead of persisting with that, try and develop some kind of alternative strategy and some kind of alternative agenda because in the end it is what you stand for what you do both in government and in opposition that can judge the quality of the contribution that you can make to Australian public life. And this idea that oppositions are only there to oppose is wrong. When we were in opposition, and we were in opposition for quite a long time, I remember. I have no desire or intention of going back to it. And, no, neither have any of my federal parliamentary colleagues. But when we were in opposition we played a major constructive role in bringing about a change in public attitudes on a lot of major issues. We drove industrial relations reform from opposition and when the former government proposed a policy that we thought was good for Australia, such as the privatisation of the Commonwealth Bank, the privatisation of Qantas, we supported them.
By contrast, every single measure virtually of any significance that this government has introduced has been opposed by the Australian Labor Party. They not only left us with a ten and a half billion dollar deficit but they fought tooth and nail, root and branch, every attempt by the coalition government to get rid of that deficit and to replace it with a surplus but of course without shame they will only be too happy if they were to win government to help themselves to the expenditure of that surplus.
But ladies and gentlemen I doubt very much that the national conference of the ALP will do what I am advising it to do. It doesn't seem to work that way. I don't know why, but it doesn't. But perhaps another reason why they won't do what I am suggesting is they might do is that when you look at the national conference of the ALP you see one thing coming through very clearly and that it is a very narrowly based group of men and women. 90% of them are trade union officials, Labor members of parliament or Labor Party or political staffers.
And when I look around this great gathering I see farmers, I see lawyers, I see doctors, I see school teachers, I see public servants, I see small businessmen and women, I see people with a mining background, I see people with a lifelong political background. In other words, I see a cross-section of modern Australia. I see people whose principal commitment has been most of their adult life to what remains the most important responsibility in our society and that is the raising of children. I see all of those people gathered in this conference centre this morning.
But when I look at that ALP national conference I see a narrowly-based group of men and women and if you don't represent the broad cross-section of the Australian community you can't hope to govern in the best interests of the broad cross-section of the Australian community. And it remains one of the great perversities of modern political life that at a time when fewer and fewer Australians are embracing trade unionism more and more of the Labor Party is dominated by trade union officials.
Isn't there something supremely ironic about a political leader embracing the notion of knowledge nation replacing as national president of his party the man who invented the term with somebody who is straight out of the central casting of the trade union movement of Australia. It seems to me a very strange and bizarre approach and it symbolises in a very effective way the contradiction which is modern Labor.
Ladies and Gentlemen, as we reflect on the last year, we not only reflect upon our capacity as a political movement to achieve great things together in the public policy area, but we also reflect upon our capacity to manage within the forums of our own party challenges that might, if handled differently, have created problems and division. And I think of our decision to allow a free vote in relation to the referendum of constitutional change in November last year, an issue which people said was going to divide the Liberal Party. It didn't divide the Liberal Party, because in a mature fashion we acknowledged that this was an issue where good Liberals of good will to one another and to the future of their party and their country could legitimately have different points of view and so far from that issue dividing us the way in which we handled it in fact, I believe, provided a greater sense of cohesion to our party. It's a mark of maturity to be able to say to the Australian people that independently minded men and women with strong wills and strong minds can legitimately disagree on certain issues without in any way sacrificing the broad philosophy that they hold in common. And that has always been one of our defining characteristics. We have always been able to do that better than our political opponents. And it's a lesson we should never lose sight of. We are, as I have frequently said, a broad church. We are trustees of both the classical liberal and the conservative traditions of Australian politics. We should never lose sight of that. One point of view should never try to chase the other point of view out of the councils of the party. We should always remember that we prosper best politically when we represent that broad church to the Australian community.
Modern politics is very different from politics of thirty or four years ago. It is less tribal. There are fewer people in the community who will look you in the face and say I don't care how bad the Liberal government is I could never bring myself to vote Labor or vice versa. People do judge governments more on their day-to-day capacity to solve their problems rather than on ideological prejudice sanctioned by generations of affiliation with one or other side of politics. And that presents a very dynamic and different challenge for all of us who are members of the Liberal Party in the 21st century.
Our party has been the most successful party on the Australian political horizon, certainly since World War II. It's a party with a very great tradition. It has a great tradition of tolerance and it also has an unerring instinct for what it is in the best interest of the great mainstream of the Australian community.
I remember that very exciting night in March of 1996 when we were able to claim a 44 seat victory over the former Labor government and of the many commitments I made to the Australian people on that night none was more important than my commitment to govern for the mainstream of the Australian community. Certainly to listen to the range of views that is produced in a pluralistic society but never to lose sight of the fact that the mission of a government is to govern for the broad interests of the community, for the great mainstream and that is what the Liberal Party has been able to do and that is what the Liberal Party continues to do.
I want to say to all of you that I am very much in your debt. I want to thank my federal parliamentary colleagues from Western Australia. I want to thank my federal parliamentary colleagues from all around Australia. I want to thank Peter Costello particularly, as deputy leader of the party, for the burdens he carried in relation to the detailed implementation of the taxation reform program. I want to thank all of my other Ministers for the work that they have done. It is a team effort. People are kind enough to publicly invest me with their gratitude for what the government has achieved but I could not have achieved it without the support of the rank and file of the Liberal Party all around our country and without the support of my parliamentary colleagues.
And can I finally say that I am aware that this is a very important year for the Liberal Party in Western Australia. Sometime between now and when we next meet at the State Conference there will be a state election. I want to say to you, Richard, that the people of Western Australia have been well served by you. You have been a Premier who has defended, as you should, the interests of your state and we will do what we can to help you in your election campaign whenever it may take place over the next 12 months.
It is an incredible privilege to be leader of the federal parliamentary Liberal Party and it is an even greater privilege to be Prime Minister of this country. And I have never forgotten what I owe to the Liberal Party. I have never forgotten the things that it has done for me and I remain, as I have in the past, deeply grateful for all the loyalty and support that I have received from all of you. We have had a good year. We have reason to feel a quiet sense of pride about great things done. But we never lose sight of the fact that in the months ahead there are new and different challenges. Politics never remains the same. It is a constantly moving experience and together I know that we can deal with those challenges, achieve further reforms and reflect again, not in hubris, but in quiet satisfaction in a year's time, about what has been achieved over the previous twelve months.
Thank you indeed.