I acknowledge the First Australians on whose land we meet, and whose cultures we celebrate as among the oldest continuing cultures in human history.
Let me first congratulate Lenore Taylor and David Uren for this book.
This is an important contribution to contemporary political history.
Just as Laura Tingle wrote a defining account of Australia's recession of the early '90s in Chasing The Future - so Lenore and David have written a defining account of Australia's response to the global recession of the late 2000s.
Of course there is a great difference in those two episodes of recent economic history.
In the early '90s, Australia struggled with a recession that was more severe than many other economies.
In the more recent global recession, compared to others Australia has of course done far better.
And this is the story why.
Some elements of the story will be familiar, though already they seem a long time ago.
The weeks of September 2008 when the crisis broke and Lehmann failed.
The sequence of emergency measures, first in the United States and then across the world.
And the emergency responses here in Australia and in other nations.
Lenore and David bring all those events together into a fast-paced narrative.
But their research has also dug up quite a bit that most of us hadn't heard before.
We learn that as the tidal wave of the global recession headed to Australian shores, with Treasurer Wayne Swan in the United States meeting with other Finance Ministers, he took part in the critical cabinet meetings deciding on the stimulus on a phone hookup.
But not a phone hookup in a wood-panelled embassy room in Washington DC - but from a teenage boy's bedroom in Maryland, surrounded by posters of rock legends, because that was the only place the embassy could provide the Treasurer with a secure line.
We also read that one of Australia's leading financial economists, Professor Ian Harper, spent a weekend doing interviews in October 2008 assuring people about the safety of Australia's financial system - and then he promptly raced down the street to the closest ATM to take out as much cash as he could in case of a financial collapse.
We also find that it seems whenever financial markets were collapsing, invariably those events seemed disrupt exotic holidays that bank executives were enjoying in the most remote corners of the world.
These are the discoveries you make with the kind of substantive research that Lenore and David have undertaken.
The early chapters remind us that when the Government was elected in November 2007, we came to office with an ambitious agenda.
We did not imagine that within nine months we would face a full-blown financial crisis.
Lenore and David fully capture the drama and crisis of those weeks in late 2008.
And I can tell you, from someone at the centre of Australia's response to that crisis - the drama was more than anyone could ever wish for - it was a white-knuckle ride.
As world leaders who were speaking to each other every day throughout that period, we contemplated the collapse of the global financial system and the global economy.
As a global economy, we screeched to the edge of the cliff, and we leaned over.
Only narrowly did we pull back from the edge.
Let's remember the scale of the crisis.
- In the first 12 months of this recession, global stock markets fell by more than 40 per cent off their peak - nearly twice their fall during the first 12 months of the Great Depression.
- Global industrial output fell by around 13 per cent from the peak in April 2008 - as bad as in the first 12 months of the Great Depression.
- And global trade fell by 17 per cent this time - almost double the 10 per cent fall in the first 12 months of the Great Depression.
More recently, some have sought to downplay the extent to which this crisis threatened Australian families.
And of course downplaying that threat suits the political interests of some.
But as Lenore and David say, it was:
"arguably the greatest threat the country had faced since World War II...
"it was the worst crisis financial markets had ever seen...The complete collapse of the world financial system appeared a real prospect, with incalculable consequences."
Those incalculable consequences included the risk of a "death spiral" among Australian financial institutions.
Had that happened, it would have wreaked havoc for small businesses, depositors, home owners and the wider Australian economy.
And that's why we were determined to act, and act decisively.
Lenore and David say that the Government's response showed "extraordinarily early planning compared with other governments around the world".
I just call it doing what we had to do.
With everything within our powers, we were determined to leave nothing to chance.
Because we had lived through the recessions of the early '80s and again the early '90s.
- We'd seen the effects on 50-something blokes in factories who one day got a pink slip and never worked another day in their lives.
- We'd seen a generation of kids frozen out of jobs and apprenticeships as unemployment climbed beyond 10 per cent.
- And we'd known families who struggled to stay together through the terrible difficulties of selling up the family home, pulling kids out of schools and seeing a lifetime of dreams turn to dust.
We knew we couldn't insulate Australia completely from the global recession.
But if we acted decisively, we could cushion the impacts on working families.
We could apply the lessons from past downturns.
And that's what we did.
As Lenore and David say repeatedly - if the Government hadn't acted decisively, Australia would have gone into recession.
Just as North America did.
Just as Europe did.
Just as south-east Asian economies did.
And just as New Zealand did.
And just as Australia would have done if the Liberals had been in office.
That is the blunt reality.
The Liberals opposed the stimulus.
They underestimated the risks for Australian families.
They got their analysis of the global financial crisis fundamentally wrong.
And had they been in office, hundreds of thousands more Australians would still be out of work today, and thousands of small business would have gone to the wall.
Lenore and David make the point that perhaps the Government has suffered politically because we acted so quickly that many Australians today aren't even aware of the threat we faced:
"Australia bore the recession very lightly... The reality is that people only factor in what they know. Those whose jobs were saved don't know who they are and, even if they did, would be hard pressed in most cases to draw the link between retaining their employment and the Government's actions."
That's a judgment for others.
But for Wayne and me, and for this Government, working to protect Australian families from threats like the global financial crisis are why we're in public life.
It's why we're Labor.
We belong to a political tradition that grew out of the suffering of working people in the Depression of the 1890s.
That has stood up for working families through the booms and busts of the economic cycle.
And that believes in the power of governments to protect people when markets fail.
As a Labor government, that's in our DNA and it's why we did what we had to do.
So where does this leave us today, nearly two years after the crisis unfolded?
Let's imagine for a moment if the Australian Government had not acted as we did.
Imagine where we would be today.
We'd be just where the governments of many other advanced nations are.
- Facing years of hard, grinding efforts to get hundreds of thousands of people out of long-term unemployment and back into the workforce.
- Experiencing the erosion of our capital base and our skills base when investment dries up and people lose their jobs.
- Dealing with a much larger budget challenge because of the high costs of unemployment, lower tax receipts and a less productive economy.
But that's not where we are today.
Australia has come through the global recession stronger than almost any other advanced economy.
That's why I don't accept the passing remark in the book that "there is depressingly little to show" for our stimulus, in terms of its contribution to productive capacity.
I don't think the facts support that contention.
Of course if we'd had more infrastructure projects sitting on the shelf and ready to go, then we'd have gone ahead with those.
But when we came into office, that work simply hadn't been done - the previous Government had neglected its responsibility for national infrastructure for 12 years.
It's simply not true to say the stimulus investments won't contribute to a more productive economy.
Investments in rail track and new rail lines; in roads; in super-fast broadband; in our schools and universities - these are real investments - essential investments - that will build a more productive economy.
And investments in social housing and community infrastructure deliver lasting benefits to working families across the nation.
Tens of thousands of those homes were in shocking disrepair and we've fixed them - and the whole purpose of building a strong economy is that you can take action and make life better for Australians who are doing it tough.
Because of our stimulus plan, Australia has higher skills base, contributing to higher long term productivity.
More children have grown up in homes with a parent who holds down a job.
The stimulus was never just about savings jobs now.
It was also about saving human capital for a generation, and strengthening our enduring social fabric.
So that we continue to build a stronger economy and deliver fairness for working families into the future.
We acted rapidly to keep the economy going - to stop it going over the cliff.
So mistakes were made along the way.
It's important to learn from those mistakes - and that's what we're doing.
But today, our national debate in Australia is not the debate that's going on in other countries.
It's not a debate about suburbs full of streets of empty homes that have gone through foreclosure.
It's not about how we restore the livelihoods of working Australians who lost their jobs and are still unemployed today.
And it's not about how we deal with hundreds of thousands of kids who have never had a day's work in their lives.
Instead, it's about the big challenges of the future - and how an ambitious government gets on with the job of delivering better health, better hospitals, better schools and a fair share of the proceeds of the mining booms for Australian families.
How we build a national health and hospitals network that can meet the needs of an ageing population in the decades ahead.
How we reform our tax system, so that we have better superannuation and more secure retirement for Australians; competitive company tax rates; and taxation of our resources sector that ensures Australians get their fair shares of the proceeds of the next phase of the mining boom.
These debates aren't easy debates - reform is never easy - but they are crucial to our future.
And we're able to get on with these debates, because we're not facing years of recovery from recession.
So with those initial reflections, let me again congratulate Louise Adler and the team at MUP for another great book.
Across the country, bookshelves are weighed down with the weight of MUP's publishing scoops of the last few years.
Well done again.
And congratulations to Lenore and David.
This is an important contribution to Australian political history and Australian political economy.
I'm delighted to launch Shitstorm.