I acknowledge the first Australians on whose land we meet and whose cultures we celebrate as the oldest continuing cultures in human history.
It's good to be back home. It's good to be back home on the Southside. It's good to be back home in Brisbane, good to be back home in Queensland. It's good to be back home for Australia Day and the lead up to it.
One of the things that we've done here in our local community over, more than a decade now, these last eleven years is honour our local volunteers and in the last week I have been in Melbourne, I've been in Hobart, in Perth, in Adelaide, last night in Darwin and arriving here. What stuns me, whichever part of Australia I go to, is the sheer magnitude of our national volunteering effort.
As we have had Australia Day receptions at each of the State and Territory capitals, to be able to spend time with those who give of their all, through their local community organisations, through their local churches, through their own charities, through their own sporting organisations, this is an extraordinary reminder of how much our nation is built on the shoulders of those who volunteer.
Had we no volunteers, I shudder to think what our country would be like. Our volunteers are the heart and the soul and the sinew of so much that Australia has become these last couple of hundred years.
You here on the Southside are part and parcel of that tradition.
I'm most familiar with this community more than any other community in Australia, and what I know from your work here in this community is how much people depend on it; how much they depend on whether the meals on wheels is going to deliver tomorrow; how much they depend on the physiotherapy services being delivered at Balmoral Uniting Community Care; how much they depend on whether, in fact, there's going to be a smiling face and a helping hand from their local church, their local parish council and their local parish communities; how much they depend on whether in fact the sporting gear is going to be there on Saturday morning, rolled out ready for those who are going to participate in their community sports; to know that someone is going to be there to set up the Guide's Hut for that morning, to make sure that the young girls who come there and to participate in the wonders of guiding are going to be properly supported and similarly for scouts.
None of this happens by magic. It all happens because you, the women and men of Australia, decide to put your shoulder to the wheel to make it happen and you make the wheels of our community turn around.
There's a huge difference between how we do things here and what I've seen in so many other countries around the world. Where either this level of community life just doesn't happen or there's an expectation that some abstract arm of government is going to try and make it happen. Here we have a remarkable, vibrancy to our community life and you are the heart and soul of that here on Brisbane's Southside.
So the reason I have done this proudly as your local member these last eleven years and as the last two or three years as your Prime Minister is because it is a fantastic thing to do, to be able to come together to honour those who volunteer to make our community work.
The values that are alive in volunteering are the values more broadly which makes Australia the great country that it is.
I was reflecting on this most recently in Perth and in Darwin. There are two things about Australian people - one is that we have this remarkable spirit of, so call it, the 'can do'. Here's a problem, rather than sitting around and moping about it, how do we fix it? How do we make it better? How do we solve the problem. What are the practical thing we can do to change this from here to there, to make a real difference.
The impressive thing about Australian's everywhere is that they don't sit around and mope about it. They say how about we roll our sleeves up. How do we fix this problem? Whether it's cleaning up from the devastation of the Victorian bushfires, more than a century ago dealing with Cyclone Tracey which I spoke of in Darwin yesterday or whether it's the very simple fact of dealing with the challenges which arise day-to-day.
Australians have a 'can do' spirit.
You see it in business; you see it in our universities; you see it in our community organisations; you see it when the challenges are great and we choose to bind together to harness the great individual and entrepreneurial spirit of Australia into a common national purpose.
There's another part of Australia's spirit also.
We have the spirit of the 'can do' but we also have the spirit of the 'fair go'.
The spirit of the 'fair go' is so much who we are, as Australians.
A fair go for all - it doesn't matter where you've come from; it doesn't matter whether you've grown up rich or poor; whether you've grown up in the country or the city; whether you've been to the finest private schools, or the humblest country small schools. Everyone should in this country, be given a fair go.
And the great thing about Australia is that that has been etched into our soul for more than a century - it is who we are.
And it is not just us attending to our own. It is also that sense of a 'fair go' that we have for others abroad.
We've seen it for example in our response to events such as the Boxing Day Tsunami - now more than 5 years ago.
This was an extraordinary tragedy on our doorstep, and Australians, one and all, in partnership with the Australian Government, in partnership with the international community, saw the devastation on our doorstep and decided to extend a helping hand as part of the fair go for our neighbours. Because when natural disasters hit, those folk need a helping hand.
And most recently we've seen it with the Australian response also to the extraordinary devastation in Haiti. This has challenged many Australians as they have seen the devastation on their television sets of an evening.
Already, the Australian Government has provided assistance in the form of funding, comprising $10 million to meet urgent and immediate humanitarian needs like shelter, food, water, sanitation and medical assistance, and $5 million for long-term reconstruction assistance following UN assessments of the requirements.
But we can and we will do more.
Today I can confirm that we have received a request from the Government of the United States to provide a specialist team of air traffic controllers from the Australian Defence Force.
Overcoming logistical obstacles is one of the keys to making sure the assistance that is being provided actually gets to the people of Haiti.
And making sure that their airports are operatively effectively is key to that again.
Making Haiti's airspace and airports effective, safe and useable is crucial to the overall humanitarian effort. And we, as Australia, will help make a difference through this part of our relief effort.
The US Government has made this request for our assistance in Haiti, and the Australian Government today, agreed to that request for assistance to help the people that have been affected by this appalling natural disaster.
The Australian Defence Force is now in the process of preparing a team that will be deployed of specialist air traffic controllers and they will be deployed to Haiti within the next week.
As ever, Australia stands ready to provide whatever further logistical and other humanitarian assistance is necessary for the reconstruction of that country that has seen such enormous devastation.
It is part and parcel of the 'fair go'.
A fair go for people who cop it from an event of nature, for which they are not responsible, who cop it and therefore need help. And Australians stand ready, as ever, to assist.
Over the past week I have been speaking also about the challenges which face our nation in the year ahead, and in the decade ahead.
If I reflect back on where we were a year ago - the nation and the world was staring down the barrel of the worst economic crisis the world has faced since the Great Depression.
I don't know if you've followed your newspapers over the last 12 months but what we've seen in countries and economies around the world is one falling over after the other like nine pins, unemployment reaching double digits in the United States and in countries in Europe, in Spain something like 15 to 20 per cent unemployment, as the entire global economy has been affected by the global financial crisis. What we have seen is economic growth collapse, what we've seen is unemployment rise, and what we've seen therefore is families and communities devastated around the world.
Here in Australia we decided to make a difference, we decided to make a difference together. We've drawn together those great spirits of the 'can do' and the 'fair go' to make a difference here in Australia.
So what we did in harnessing this tradition of the 'can do' and 'fair go' was how can we as government at all levels together with the business community, together with the trade union movement, together with the church and charitable sector make a difference as this economic tsunami was making its way across the world. It had no respect for national borders, no respect for countries, no respect for political ideologies, one country after another falling victim to its horrific effects.
What we did as the Australian Government was say the private sector is about to come under massive pressure, it's time for Government to step up to the plate. That's why we decided to invest through our national economic stimulus strategy. It's part and parcel of conservative economic management that when the private sector retreats, government should step up and fill the space, otherwise employment just falls through the floor. That's what we did.
And that's why we're in the process of building for example the largest school modernisation program this country has ever seen. Every primary school here on the Southside you will see buildings rising from the dust, and you see it not just across Southside, but right across Brisbane, right across Queensland, right across every state of Australia. Every suburb I visit, every town I see, we are seeing new classrooms being built, we are seeing new language centres being constructed, new science centres being built as well, and on top of that 21st century libraries, multi-purpose halls often for use by the wider community as well where halls may not be available.
The sum total of our effort has been this - a year on the report card for Australia is as follows - We have uniquely among the major advanced economies not fallen into recession.
Australia is the only economy of the major advanced economies not to go into recession. Australia in 2008-2009 is the only one of the 33 advanced economies in the world to generate positive economic growth. Australia only second in terms of the lowest level of unemployment across the major advanced economies, and doing all those things with the lowest debt and the lowest deficit.
But none of this could have been possible had the Australian Government not been able to work in partnership, together, in the Australian spirit with State Governments, Labor and Liberal right across the country, local governments, all 565 of them right across the country, to make a difference on the ground. And to make a difference on the ground also with local chambers of commerce, with local businesses, with local trade unions, with local church and charitable organisations, and what we've seen is the Australian spirit at work, recognising that we are all in this together and therefore making a difference together.
So the report card that we have generated for the nation a year on, with the rest of the economies around the world still in such diabolical trouble, has been a good one, but it's been a good one because the nation has pulled together in the face of the worst economic crisis the world has ever seen since the Great Depression.
We as Australians should draw great encouragement from that and great encouragement for the future.
Our challenges for the future cause us also not to be complacent about the future. What we have done in the year past, that is solid, but the year ahead will present its own challenges, the decade ahead presents its own challenges, the century ahead presents its own challenges. I am confident however that as Australians pulling together, as Australians acting as an Australian family, as an Australian national family, putting our differences to one side when it comes to the great challenges we face, we can make a difference.
Our history is full of examples of us making a difference, deploying the spirit of the 'can do', the spirit of the 'fair go', applying it to the practical challenges of the moment and making a difference at home and abroad, making a difference for our nation, and making a difference here in our local community.
None of that would be possible were it not for you, the volunteers of Australia. None of that would be possible were it not for each and every one of you as part of our Australian volunteering community here in Brisbane Southside.
So as Prime Minister of Australia I say thank you; as your member of Parliament I say thank you; and as a fellow Australian I say thank you as well.