Subjects: 2001 Election; tax reform; welfare reform; media laws; Labor Party.
E&OE...........
Thank you very much, Chris; my Federal and State parliamentary colleagues, fellow Liberals. May I thank you very much for that warm welcome and can I say how delighted I am to be back in Australia after one of the more active diplomatic weeks that Australia has had for a very long period of time. And you were right, Madam President, in saying that it was a week in which Australia was able to make a very important contribution on the international stage, and it was a reminder to me of one of the many things that this Government was elected to do only four months ago.
And this morning I want to take a few moments to inject what I might call a reality check into Australian politics in March of 2002. And in the process of injecting that reality check to remind you and to remind the Australian people of why we were elected and what we were elected to do in November of last year and also as a footnote to remind you why the other side of politics was not elected in November of last year.
There are those who falsely assert, and they do it with greater frequency every week, but falsely assert that this Government has no third term agenda. Let me take a few moments this morning to remind you of what we were elected to do in November of last year and what we are doing to implement the agenda that we took to the last election.
First and foremost we were elected in November of last year to keep Australia strong. And that expression of strength is many faceted. We were elected to keep the Australian economy strong and it can barely be said that we have failed in that objective. Our economy is growing faster than that of any industrialised nation in the world. I visited last week the second fastest growing economy in the industrialised world and that's the United Kingdom and the rate of growth in the United Kingdom is less than half what it is in Australia. In fact, Australia's economy is growing at ten times the rate of the OECD average. We've had growth of 4.1% in the last 12 months and we saw a couple of weeks ago some quite remarkable employment figures.
Our economy is the envy of the industrialised world. When I saw the British Chancellor of the Exchequer in No. 11 Downing Street a few days ago he was asking me about our recipe for success and certainly not the other way round. The reality is that this country is held in very high regard and people marvel and wonder at our capacity not only to work our way through the Asian economic downturn of 1997 but also to avoid the impact of the downturn in the United States and the downturn in many other countries over the last year. And it's been no accident. And I look back over the last 12 months and I remember all the things that we were criticised for. We were told last year that we were carelessly spending the surplus. If we had not spent some additional money on roads and reducing petrol excise, on defence, on salinity and a whole host of other things, our economy now would not be performing as well as it is because one of the advantages of that additional spending was that it put a floor under the level of economic activity in Australia at exactly the same time as external events were exerting a weakening pressure on the Australian economy. And we were elected to maintain the strength of the Australian economy and we have done that and we have done that magnificently but we are also elected to maintain the respect and esteem that Australia has around the world.
My great criticism of the foreign policy approach of the Keating Government was that it was over-preoccupied with our own region. I didn't for a moment suggest, and I never would suggest as Prime Minister, that the Asian Pacific region isn't the most important region of the world to Australia. It is where our destiny will always be but our linkages with the Asian Pacific region are not linkages that ought to be to the exclusion of linkages with other parts of the world. And I have constantly, in the last six years, sought to rebalance our foreign policy and I can say now that the alliance between Australia and the United States has never been in better condition at any time since World War II than it is at the present time. And it's a relationship that is built on self-respect. It's a relationship that is a two-way relationship and that was demonstrated very dramatically a couple of weeks ago when in the face of what was an indefensible decision taken by the Bush Administration on steel tariffs, my Government was able to achieve, dare I say it, a rollback. But this is a good rollback. There are bad rollbacks - bad rollbacks are when you change something that's good and good rollbacks are when you change something that's bad.
And, ladies and gentlemen, make no mistake, that was the first occasion in my Federal Parliamentary political memory where the Australian Government was able to persuade an American Administration to change its mind after it had made an adverse trade decision. It was something never achieved by earlier governments and I don't denigrate that, I simply make the point to demonstrate that we were able to achieve an outcome that means that 85% of BHP's exports to the United States will be unaffected by this particular decision. Now that is a decision that's achieved when you have an intimacy of a relationship between two close friends and allies which respect each other and understand each others needs and we remain a firm and, on occasion as necessary, a not uncritical ally of the United States but always a loyal friend in the fight against terrorism, in the fight to defend the common values and the common principles that both our societies hold dear.
And our global respect has been maintained an enhanced over the last six years. When you go from this country and you listen to the views of Australia by others you are reminded of the very high respect in which this country is held. But it's not only the tremendous achievement of the 2000 Olympics that will be forever to the credit of this city and of this nation but it's the role that we played in East Timor. It's the belief that this country is economically strong and economically progressive. It is the respect that we have in many quarters for the fact that we understand that consistent with a generous and open and non-discriminatory immigration policy this country has the right to take the necessary steps to defend the integrity of its borders against illegal immigration.
And let me tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that when I spoke to senior members and I spoke to all of the senior members of the British Labour Government, I did not encounter any criticism of our illegal immigration policy. I encountered a great deal of interest, a great deal of understanding amongst all of the people to whom I spoke. And I wondered what, you know, I just wondered about the difference in the media reporting of alleged attitudes and the reality that I encountered. And part of the reality check we ought to face concerning Australian politics at the present time is that around the world amongst ordinary people there is a great deal of understanding and sympathy about the position that Australia's taken.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are also elected to maintain the momentum of economic reform. We are elected to maintain the momentum of labour market reform. I understand that last night you offered a dinner in appreciation of the work that Peter Reith did as a senior Minister in my Government over the last six years. And by far Peter Reith's greatest achievement was that he led the Government's campaign to modernise the Australian waterfront and to break the debilitating grip of the trade union movement on the maritime position in Australia. And it was his achievement and the achievement of the Government in that area that has contributed so much to the competitiveness of the export sector of the Australian economy. But we have more to do on the labour market front.
We need further reform, we need to further loosen the shackles on small business in the area of the unfair dismissal laws. One of the reasons why the Australian economy is so competitive now is that it's more productive and it's more productive because we have reformed our labour markets. But it could be even more productive if we could have more reform in the area of labour markets.
We are also elected to implement, as we will begin to do this year, major reform and restructuring of Australia's welfare system. Isn't it interesting, it's been left to a Coalition Government to begin the serious renovation of Australia's welfare system. It's a Coalition Government that has maintained the social security safety net while building into the Australian compact the notion of mutual obligation, the idea that we owe to the unfortunate in our community the dignity of safety net economic support. We are not a society that allows people to fall between the cracks and we should never be a society that takes the view that if you don't make it, well bad luck whatever the circumstances. It has always been the Australian way to look after people who, through no fault of their own, don't make it or temporarily find it hard to make it. But it's equally fair that if society gives people help then they ask those people, if they are able to do so, to give something in return. That is really the Australian way. It's the modern Australian way and it's a modern Australian that endures widespread support and respect within the Australian community.
We are also elected to bring about major reforms in the area of savings and superannuation. And when those reforms are implemented we'll not only provide more choice for women and more opportunities for women in relation to superannuation, it will also open up a major new opportunity for people from the time of birth to access superannuation benefits. And I believe that that particular reform, when it is implemented, will open up a completely new dimension in the area of savings and in the area of superannuation.
We've also been elected to achieve, if we can, a reform in the area of Australia's media laws. There's been a lot of debate about that in recent days, in recent weeks. The aim is recognise the modern reality and that is that artificial divisions between print media and electronic media are increasingly anachronistic and increasingly irrelevant. And we ought also to remember that the laws that now govern media in this country were put in place by the Keating and Hawke governments. I use those words advisedly in that order, or those names in that order, not as an act of visionary policy but as an act of retribution and punishment against media organisations in the mid 1980s that were not regarded as being sufficiently pro-Labor. I mean, I know that sounds almost an oxymoron in the light of some of the media that has emanated from Canberra over the past few months.
Ladies and gentlemen, I've taken a few moments to talk about these things because we have this curious notion put around by our opponents in the Labor Party and elsewhere that in some way this Government was elected by accident, that this Government was elected without an agenda, that this Government was elected off the back of negative prejudice and not because of a positive embrace of a government that have done good things for this country over the last six years and offered the prospects of doing even better things over the next three years.
But the other reason that we were elected, my friends, is that the Australian public had a bit of a look at the other side and they didn't like what they saw, or perhaps more importantly, they couldn't see anything at all. Because the true message out of the last election is that he who stands and waits and hopes that his or her opponent is going to self destruct and he or she will get the benefit of that self destruction without even trying, is doomed to political disappointment. Now, this is a political message that ought to resonate all around this country that in this age of detribalised political allegiances, in this age where you have far more swing voters than ever before, in this age where people's political allegiances are more transient, particularly those under the age of 30 and they will chop and change from one election to the next between State and Federal, between candidate to candidate, you always need to offer a positive reason why people should vote for you. You can never believe that you can exploit a negative perception towards your opponents and particularly so when you completely fail to understand that that negative perception is nowhere near as strong as you imagine it might be.
And everyone knows that last year the Labor Party's strategy was to surf to victory off the back of the believed and perceived unpopularity of the GST. Four months have now gone by since the last election, do you hear the Labor Party talking about the GST now, do you hear the Labor Party talking about rollback, do you hear the Labor Party saying what a monstrous thing it is? The only statement I've heard about the GST since the last election from a Labor Party politician came from the Premier of Queensland during the CHOGM meeting when he announced the biggest ever shake-up of Queensland education, he announced the expenditure of untold millions of additional dollars in the years ahead. And when he was asked how he was going to pay for it he said, I'm going to pay for it out of the additional revenue we get from the GST. And yet in the middle of the election campaign, some of you may remember during the debate, I had the temerity to say that the best thing that we have ever done in this country for health and education expenditure was the introduce the GST because it would give a growing source of revenue to the Australian States, the worm turned against me - it seems as though the worm has now turned against them. They ran ads, they rubbed their hands together. Bob McMullan was down there at Saatchi and Saatchi putting the ads together and he said, oh we've got him now, this is Howard's great campaign blunder, such a blunder that now it's become sort of received doctrine in the ranks of the Labor Party. My friends, it was always the case that the GST was going to enrich the States as the years go by. It was always the case that Queensland was the first cab off the rank. It was always the case that if you really believe in giving the States more resources for education and health and for public schools and for roads and for police you had to have a growth tax. And if you're an ageing population you've got to have a growth tax that's not built on an ever increasing share of the tax take from income tax otherwise your marginal rates of income tax so far from coming down will have to go up. And that was one of the fundamental, intellectual reasons why I always believed that it was necessary at some stage for this country to have a look at the issue of taxation reform.
The reality, my friends, is that the Labor Party always has an excuse when they lose an election. And when I hear them talking about how we had a tainted victory, when I hear them talking about how they was robbed and how, in reality, if somebody had said this on a different day, in a different tone of voice, with a different coloured tie and shirt they might have been successful. But I'm reminded, you know, in my very young days of following Australian politics and I give my age away in saying it, I can remember the 1954 election - it wasn't the first one I remember, incidentally - but I can remember the 1954 election. And that was the one when Dr Evatt thought he'd one but then he'd lost and he went, so he said, he went to bed on the Saturday night thinking he'd won, I mean, I can't believe how if you were that close how any Opposition Leader could think about going to bed. I mean…I tell you what, if I'd have been an Opposition Leader in that situation I wouldn't have been able to sleep. And he said he went to bed on the Saturday night and he woke up on the Sunday morning and he found he'd lost and he had to develop a theory, he had to develop an explanation. He had to find a conspiracy and, of course, as many of you know he lighted on the Petrov Inquiry called by the Menzies Government a couple of months before the 1954 election.
And when I've sat in Parliament, and I'm sure my colleagues have had the same experience, sat in Parliament over the last few weeks and listened to the Labor Party say how terrible it was about the boat and the children and everything and how shocking it is and so on, and I was reminded of that. I mean, the only thing missing now is a Soviet Foreign Minister for Leader of the Opposition to write to! They lost because they weren't good enough. And it came to the issue of border protection the Australian people voted for us because they genuinely believed that we were serious about protecting this country's borders whereas they disbelieved the commitment of the Labor Party to that obligation.
Ladies and gentlemen, there is much on the third term agenda of the Coalition Government. We have great responsibilities to maintain our economic and our diplomatic and our international strengths and our respect. We face a Labor Party that should have begun the process of renewal they now claim they are embracing six years ago. We are the great reformers in the areas of health and education and social welfare. And this morning before I came here I saw Brendan Nelson outlining magnificently on the Sunday programme some of the initiatives and some of the approaches that we have in the area of education. Education is crucial to the future wellbeing of this country and it will ever be to the credit of these Coalition parties that we are the ones that upheld the great principle of freedom of choice of parents in the education of their children. We are the parties that offer them the great hope of choice in the future education of their children and of themselves.
So, my friends, can I say again as I did when I addressed you a few months ago, I am ever grateful for the tremendous support and loyalty that you have demonstrated to me and to all of my colleagues. Can I say how proud I am of the Federal Parliamentary contingent from the State of New South Wales in the Federal Parliament. No State did better for our national cause in the last election than did the State of New South Wales and it will forever be one of my, how can I put it, most warming comparisons to think that the seat of Gilmore, which we won from Labor in 1996 via that magnificent representative, Joanna Gash. There was a bigger two-party preferred majority than Bennelong or North Sydney.
The last thing that I do want to say to you this morning is that over the next year, although what happens in Canberra on the national political scene will always be of overwhelming importance and significant, we have a great fight here in New South Wales that has to be won for the good of the future of our State. We have before us a year to turn around attitudes in New South Wales. No political contest is either unwinnable or unlosable in modern politics. There is no reason why we cannot win the next State election if we have the right policies, we steadily release them, we remain united, we focus on the weaknesses of a now ageing and a tiring Carr Government but also propound the alternative that we present to the people of New South Wales. There is a willingness, I believe, in this State to positively look at an alternative government. And can I say, Kerry, that in your quest for the premiership of New South Wales you will have my total support and the total support of all of my Federal Parliamentary colleagues. I don't like the idea of going to a Premiers' conference with no Liberal mates there because when I had a few Liberal mates there we always agreed. But I'd rather disagree with some Liberal mates at a Premiers' conference than be faced by - I don't know what you'd call it - a clutch of Labor Premiers and Chief Ministers, a gaggle, a mob…. well, I must be careful.
So Kerry, good luck and I think you've had a great launch for the campaign year here this weekend and I know how committed your friends and supporters in the rank and file of the New South Wales Liberal Party are and all of us are going to do everything we can to install a Liberal government in New South Wales in March of next year.
Thank you.