E&OE...
Well thank you very much Kerry for those very generous and warm words of welcome, John Cobb, the Member for Parkes and Assistant Minister for the Environment and Water Resources, Alan Cadman the Federal Member for Mitchell, Ian Armstrong, John Matthews, Mr Deputy Mayor, ladies and gentlemen. It's a great privilege and opportunity for me to be here today, not only to visit Bathurst which is an historic part of New South Wales and of Australia but also to commend to all of you Kerry Bartlett. Kerry Bartlett has been one of my colleagues for 11 years. He was a 96'er, he came into Parliament in 1996 when the government won the election and ended 13 years of Labor Government. So has a very special place in my heart, all of those people that were elected in 1996 and the other thing I should share with you is that on the night of the 2nd March 1996 when I was sitting rather nervously in a hotel room in the Intercontinental with a couple of my colleagues and my friends and we had somebody from the electoral office with a computer which was going to pick up the very first result from a polling booth that was posted. I think the first result came from a polling booth in Portland which, it was? And it showed a 16 per cent swing to the Liberal Party and I got very excited and my good friend and then adviser, and still good friend and adviser Grahame Morris said don't get too excited mate, there is only 80 votes at that booth. But, I always sort of associated Kerry a bit with that because it's not too far from here. But ladies and gentlemen, Kerry has been an outstanding Member of Parliament. Bathurst is newly added to his domain, it's still represented of course by the Independent, and I respect the contribution that he has made as a local member, but that will change at the next election, and the people of Bathurst have to decide whether they want Kerry Bartlett or a Labor member. They don't have any option realistically. And when it comes as being credentialed as a good local member in a regional seat, Kerry already has a lot of runs on the board. He's been a wonderful representative of Macquarie, a diverse seat, composed up until now essentially of the Blue Mountains and the Hawkesbury River area, two quite different communities although not that far apart geographically. And I found in the 11 years that he's been a Member of Parliament, he has been assiduous, he worries, he agonises about the interests of the people he represents and he pushes very hard as he did with the dentistry school for the Charles Sturt University, as he has in relation to the $10 million commitment in relation to the Bells Line of road, as he has in relation to many other things which have come the way of his electorate. Now that is the kind of local member people want. He is a genuinely dedicated and committed local citizen and it's very important that we choose people who are prepared to go into bat for their local communities. He's also been, of course, a member of the Government's team and he currently herds them altogether for divisions and other things and make sure that they turn up to keep the Government in power when there are divisions taken. We'll face at the end of this year a very important election and the nation, a very important choice. It is undeniably the case that Australia is living in very prosperous times. We have a 32-year low in unemployment, we have a 32-year high in consumer confidence. We've seen in the last year a reduction of 22