[tape begins] Brian Loughnane National Director, Rosemary Craddock, my Parliamentary colleagues, ladies and gentlemen. As you can see the theme of our conference, of our convention, is protecting, secure and building Australia's future, and I want to address some remarks this morning to the elements, and in particularly one of them, that will together constitute the basis on which we achieve that goal.
The future of Australia is bound up very much with three conditions. It's bound up first and foremost with social stability, a contented, harmonious, united, open, decent Australian society in which the aspiring are allowed to achieve, the ambitious encouraged, and effort rewarded through proper incentives has always been our approach. But our approach has never been a devil take the hind most approach. We have never taken the view that if people fail through no fault of their own and stumble along life's way they should be left behind and ignored. One of the great egalitarian strengths of Australian society is that we have always recognised that as a community there is an immense national and social good in looking after the most vulnerable in our society.
And of all the modern mantras that are repeated in criticism of Australia under this Government none is more inaccurate than the argument that under this Government the rich have got richer and the poor have got poorer. The reality is that through economic strength and progress and growth some people, some of the rich have got richer, more people have become affluent and that of itself is no bad thing, and we should never be a society that discourages that. But step by step, hand in hand with that we have seen the development of programmes which have strengthened and improved the position of people at the lower end of the income spectrum. And indeed as I indicated at the women's conference yesterday the Treasury's analysis of the first year impacts of the new tax system demonstrated that the greatest gains had been achieved for people at the lower end of the income scale. And the analysis of our family tax benefits indicate that the greatest proportionate benefits had gone to sole parent families and very low income families. I digress to talk about that because I do believe that when you are thinking of Australia the first thing we must always claim and we must always been keen to protect is our social stability. We are a stable united society because we're a fair and decent society and if we ever lose our fairness and decency to each other we become a less stable community. And of course part of that stability is that great Australian ideal of home ownership and its been a feature of this convention so far through the release of the Menzies Research Centre documents yesterday to refocus Australia on that great strength of ours of home ownership, not always within the reach of everybody, not necessarily mandated for everybody but certainly something to which every Australian family, as an instrument of family contentment and social stability, they should be able to aspire to.
The second element needed for Australia's future is economic strength, economic strength is the deliverer of so many other things. Economic strength underpins our international respect, economic strength enables us as a medium range power to project influence and to project an Australian view of the world that we would otherwise be unconvincing in doing if we were economically weaker.
Much has been said about Australia's economic strength and rightly so. We are going through a period of remarkable economic growth, we have low inflation, we have budget surpluses, we have eliminated Labor's debt or largely reduced it, we have very low interest rates, we have a far more productive economy, we have made major economic strides in changing our taxation system and reforming our industrial relations system. But above and beyond that we must continue the process of economic reform. The worst thing any of us could do in the Government and the worst thing any of our supporters in the business community would encourage us to do would be to say well you've done enough, you've done a good job, let's now have a quiet life for the next few years. If that ever became the prevailing view inside the Government we would be seeing the beginning of the end of our political success. We now live in a world of a never-ending race of international competitiveness, whether we like it or not we have a globalised world economy, we can't get off it, we shouldn't want to get off it because its brought great benefits for the world and certainly great benefits for Australia. And what we have to do is to find new ways of reforming our economy domestically and new ways of forging international trading links which are going to underwrite Australia's economic future through to the middle of this century. And that is why the Free Trade Agreement with the United States is so enormously important. America will be more important to Australia in 50 years time than America even is to Australia today. The strength and influence of the United States in the world economy will grow, it will not diminish. The rate of population growth in the United States, the superior competitiveness and technology and productivity of the United States economy, particularly compared with the economies of many European countries, will mean that by the middle of this century we will have a situation where the economic output and capacity of the United States will equal, if not exceed, that of the combined output and capacity of the enlarged European Union.
So anybody who suggests that by seeking to forge this great economic partnership with the United States we are locking ourselves into a declining relationship, a relationship of the 20th century rather than a relationship of the 21st century, could not be more fatally misreading the future destiny and the future opportunities of this country. But we can achieve those linkages with the United States without in any way denying ourselves the opportunities that we have already taken advantage of in the Asian region and the opportunities particularly with the growing economic power and strength of China that we have taken advantage of in that region already.
I regard one of the great long term economic achievements of this country since we last met as a Federal Council last year to be the signing of the natural gas agreement with Guangdong province in China by the North-West Shelf Consortium. That agreement achieved after a unique, for Australia's experience, partnership between the Federal Government, the Government of Western Australia, the partners themselves and many others and in the end of course due very much to the commercial determination and acumen of the joint venture. That agreement had great symbolic significance, what that agreement said was that a nation such as Australia seen rightly so as a close friend and ally of the United States was nonetheless regarded as sufficiently stable and valuable and desirable a partner with the Chinese Government that that decision should be made in our favour. And I regard the achievement of that outcome as being not only of enormous benefit economically in a direct sense to the companies involved and to the Australian and especially the Western Australian economy but very much an achievement of symbolic significance. And it gives the lie to those who said, and remember it, it sounds a very weak joke now, that a Howard Government could never deal with Asia. It gave the lie to those who said that it was impossible to have a close relationship with the United States and have a close relationship with the nations of the Asian region. Nothing could be more infantile or absurd. We live in a world of aggregated but different relationships, we live in a world where very naturally Australia, a country of European origins, but in this part of the world, the Asian part of the world, but having very close linkages with North America, must inevitably find its destiny with a series of partners and friends rather than one single relationship. And close though our relationship with the United States is, important though it is, based on the common values that it is, it is not the only relationship that Australia needs or will have for her economic future.
And the final of the three elements on which Australia's future is built is of course that of national security. Since we last met the focus on national security in our affairs has increased, the tragedy of Bali, the war against Iraq, the continued fight against international terrorism, all of those things have come together to remind us that we do live in a different world, we live in a world where more emphasis on domestic security, more emphasis on defence spending, and more emphasis on the capacity of this country to make a contribution in great international coalition causes will be with us for many years into the future.
The war against Iraq, or rather the war against the former Iraqi regime, the war to liberate the people of Iraq, now seems in the minds of many rather a distant memory, it all came and went rather more quickly than many expected. But it has had a profound effect, particularly on the Middle East and it carries very important lessons for the relationships that we have around the world and the relationships that we have also in our own region. Now I respect the fact that we had differences with some of the nations and friends of ours in the region. Clearly we had a different point of view on the war in Iraq from that of our close friend and neighbour Indonesia. But our differences were understood, they were clearly communicated in a frank way between President Megawati and myself back in February and there was always a determination on our part at a prime minister/president level and through our governments to ensure that those differences did not contaminate the broader elements of the relationship. And that relationship has come through the events in Iraq in a way that is very encouraging to me and I know is very encouraging to the Indonesian Government. And we ought to remind ourselves when we hear this mantra again from our critics, there were many nations in our region that supported the American led coalition in Iraq, Japan did, the Philippines did, Korea did and Singapore did. And to name those countries as examples illustrates the point that its altogether not only glib but completely wrong to say that we were out of step with the region.
But the greatest significance of what has occurred is that the opportunities I believe it presents to perhaps achieve something that has eluded the world for several decades, and that is a lasting settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. I have never subscribed to the theory that the extreme, radical, uncontrolled Islamic fanaticism which must be as distasteful to an ordinary devout Islamic person as it is to me. I have never subscribed to that view, to the view that that attitude has its roots in the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians. But I have always recognised that if we could bring about a settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians that we would alter the climate, we would increase the reluctance of governments and peoples in the Middle East to be tolerant and accommodating towards terrorist behaviour. And I believe that the American led victory over Saddam Hussein has opened up an opportunity to achieve a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians that would never have been there before. The former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak courageously tried to achieve it several years ago, but in the end the Palestinian leader Yassar Arafat was not in my view equal to the task, and history will record the great courage of Barak in taking his country much further than in their hearts they wanted to go at the time.
But as a result of the American led victory in Iraq we now have the opportunity, suddenly opening up, to achieve a settlement. And we saw the remarkable meeting attended by President Bush in Jordan and attended by the new Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Habass and the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, which I heard both of them utter things I thought I would never hear them say, I heard the Palestinian Leader acknowledge the centuries old suffering of the Jewish people, I heard the Israeli Prime Minister say that he believes something had to be done at least about the illegal Jewish settlements. To hear phrases like that and to see them together is to me the most remarkable and immediate dividend of the American led victory in Iraq. I've quoted on a couple of occasions before the phrase of the British author William Shorecross in his Harkness Lecture earlier this year when he said that the road to a Middle East peace settlement could well run through Baghdad. What he was saying was that removal of Saddam Hussein by removing a potential threat to Israel would create the circumstances where appropriate pressure, particularly by the Americans could be applied to all of the parties. And that is occurring, and of the many impressions that I took from my discussions with President Bush in the United States recently, discussions conducted in circumstances that allowed both of us to talk at length over many hours, the strongest single impression I took from those discussions was the absolute determination of President Bush to do everything he could to bring about a Middle East peace settlement. And just as those people who disbelieved his determination and strength of will and purpose over Iraq were wrong, equally anybody who disbelieves his strength of purpose and determination over achieving a settlement in the Middle East will be equally wrong.
Now I mention these things because they are important in a longer term sense to world stability and security. I think a settlement in the Middle East will further strengthen the international front against terrorism, it will further weaken the inclination of any who might be accommodating and more benign to terrorist groups and terrorist cells and terrorist activity. It will remove a raison d'etre for those who seek to recruit people to the terrorist cause, and all of that must be important to Australia. We have been a target of international terrorism for some time, fundamentally because we are a Western nation whose values and attitudes and way of life are unacceptable to the more fanatical within the world who would embrace the terrorist cause. We're not a target because of what we did in Iraq, we were a target long before that. And if you go back over the words of bin Laden, if you take account of some of the information that I released last week concerning the latest intelligence advice it's very clear that this country, because of who we are, and not what we have done, we have been a target for some time.
Ladies and gentlemen, necessarily some of the things I've said are sobering. But as well as being sobering the circumstances in which we now live are also times of great hope and times of great opportunity. We are as a nation socially stable, we are as a nation economically strong and we are as a nation a people who've continued to punch above their weight in world affairs. We've played a decisive and effective and a mightily appreciated role in an international coalition action, which has not only produced the dividend of which I've spoken in some length, but has also liberated an oppressed people. And can I say lest anybody remark upon the absence of my referring to it, that I remain of the view that there will be evidence ultimately emerging of the weapons of mass destruction to which we referred before the war started. There was no doctoring of intelligence advice by the government I lead, the advice was soberly and carefully based on the information that properly flows to the Australiana intelligence agencies by virtue of the very close intelligence links we have, particularly with the United States and the United Kingdom.
So ladies and gentlemen, can I say in conclusion that the theme of this conference, the theme of protecting and securing and building our future is a theme to which this Government remains committed, we remain committed to a socially stable and fair Australian society, we remain committed to maintaining and further strengthening the economic power of this nation and we remain resolutely committed both domestically and internationally to Australia's defence and Australia's overall national security.
Thank you.
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