Well thank you very much Rene for those very generous remarks, Doug Chipman, the Mayor, President of the Senate, Special Minister of State, my other parliamentary colleagues, both state and federal, my fellow Australians and fellow Liberals.
Again it is my pleasure to share this pre-State Council dinner with the Liberals of Tasmania, and to do it in a very beautiful part of your State, the part of your State that I haven't, well as far as Smithton is concerned, I haven't visited before.
Rene talked about Cape York being 5,000 kilometres from Smithton, it's also about 35 degrees from Smithton too. But being a bloke who's used to travelling, not around Australia but also around the world that's a part of the territory. I'll be saying a number of things about the domestic political scene tomorrow in my address to the State Council gathering. But as I address this gala dinner tonight, I want to first of all to acknowledge very genuinely the wonderful job that I believe Rene and his team have done in extraordinarly difficult circumstances over the last year.
Opposition is awful, I never intend to go back to Opposition, I've made myself that very solemn promise. I had 13 years of it and I know the worst part of it is the first 12 months after the last election that you've lost and that is the 12-month period that the Tasmanian State Liberal Party has passed through. And I sense that in that 12 months the opportunity of consolidation has been taken and that the Liberal Party in Tasmania is building respect by hard work. Politics is about propounding an alternative. Anybody who says to you that you can win an election campaign in the last few weeks with a flash public relations campaign doesn't understand what politics is about. Politics more than anything is about communicating a sense of commitment and a sense of belief in a set of values, a set of principles and a set of policies. And over the last year I believe that Rene and his team have begun that process. It's not easy, he knows that and all the members of his team know that. And we have this extraordinary situation in Australia at the present time where we have a Federal Liberal Government and we have eight Labor administrations at a state and territory level. And contrary to popular belief, and I'm grateful for Rene in drawing attention to it, we don't have a big majority in the Federal Parliament. And there only needs to be a swing of 1.9 per cent nationally for us to lose office. And it is important that we win some seats in the House of Representatives here in Tasmania. We have some great Senators from this State, but we don't have any members of the Lower House and governments are formed in the Lower House. And there is a very special obligation on all of us to find the five people who can win House of Representatives seats in Tasmania, even if some of them haven't been members of the Liberal Party before they decide to nominate, if they are people who share the values and the philosophies of the party they are the people who should be endorsed because we cannot assume that the above-average performance nationally of the Liberal Party in New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia will continue at the next election. And we must aim to win federal seats in those parts of Australia where we haven't performed as well in the past as I believe we can.
So that my friends is the charge that I give to the Tasmanian division, it's an important charge and it could well decide whether we hold federal office. We may be ahead in the polls at the moment but the only guidance I take from opinion polls between elections is the general trend they indicate. And when you're doing well it's a bit discomforting because you only know you can go in one direction and that's backwards. So you've got to be realistic about opinion polls. And winning federal elections for the fourth time is very hard, so we have a very big challenge here in Tasmania.
The other thought, an even more sobering thought, of course that I want to share with you - at the end of an extraordinarily traumatic week for Australia and an extraordinarily traumatic week for the region in which Australia is located. Yesterday we saw the first person implicated, responsible for, directly involved in, the murder of 88 of our fellow Australians in Bali on the 12th of October last year found guilty and appropriately sentenced. I didn't greet that, and I don't believe any Australians greeted that verdict with any sense of vengeance or vindictiveness. Those who lost so much, those who lost loved ones in that terrible tragedy are entitled, and I hope they do, feel some sense of justice having been done. And those who presumed to sit in judgement on the emotional reactions of Australians are required in my view to understand the very natural sense of justice that many of those people who were bereaved by the tragedy of Bali must inevitably feel. And the events of a few days earlier remind us that we live in a very different world from the world in which we lived when I addressed the State Council meeting two years ago before the 11th of September 2001. Because the world has changed, perhaps forever and we are living in a very different environment. It's an environment that requires us as always to find a sense of balance. We must accept the possibility that one day there might be a terrorist attack in Australia. We must work very hard to prevent that occurring and very importantly we must work with our neighbours in the Asian Pacific region and collaborate as much as we can to build barriers against terrorism and to deny terrorism any kind of moral authority.
There was a wonderful phrase I recall from a speech, a recording of which I heard of Winston Churchill's during World War II when he spoke of how the citizens of an occupied country in Europe should react to their Nazi conquerors and he used the wonderful expression as follows: "That even in their fleeting hour of brutish triumphs, they should be treated as the moral outcasts of mankind". And people, terrorists who murder and maim indiscriminately without justification and without proper cause are, in the words of that very evocative phrase, they are the moral outcasts of mankind. Nothing can justify, no political grievance, no claim left unaddressed can justify the sort of cruel indiscriminate murder that occurred in Jakarta a few days ago, that occurred in Bali, that occurred in New York and Washington. And it is the responsibility of all of us of goodwill whatever our religion may be, or if we have no religion, to work together and to make common cause. Let me remind you that the great majority of the people who died in Jakarta last Tuesday and who were injured, were not western, they weren't Christian, they weren't Jewish, they were Muslim. And when Jemaah Islamiah and when the spokesman for those fanatics who despoil the honourable name of Islam speak of avenging their Muslim brothers, they neglect to say that last Tuesday they didn't avenge their Muslim brothers, they killed their Muslim brothers. And it's something that we should keep very much in mind. And this is a time for Australia, more than ever before, to redouble our efforts to build an ever-closer relationship with Indonesia and with other countries in the region. My first thought after feeling a natural sense of revulsion last Tuesday was to speak to the President of Indonesia, as I did, to offer her the condolence and sympathy of our country. And we sent quite a number of our Australian Federal Police specialists to help in the investigation. This is a battle that will go on for many years. I wish I could offer you a different alternative, but candour requires me to say what I just have, that this will go on for some years.
But in process we have to keep that sense of balance. We are by any standards an extraordinarily cohesive and stable and safe country. The risks facing Australians are much greater than they were several years ago, but they are not as great as the risks facing some other countries. We must accept some constraints that we might otherwise reject, but by the same token we cannot live our lives in perpetual alarm and fear. We must get on with our lives, we must continue to enjoy the extraordinary economic prosperity of this country. And you Australians who live in Tasmania must take advantage to the full of the reviving economic opportunities of this State.
In the 29 years that I've been in public life and been visiting Tasmania, I have not found such a sense of hope and optimism about this State's economic future than I find at present. Let me say I think it's due a lot to the strong national economic mood. I think it's due a lot to the fact that the policies of the Government I lead have brought record low interest rates, they have brought subsidies which have helped to boost the tourist industry, they've brought security and predictability to the forest industry through the signing of the regional forest agreements with the Government, the former Government some five years ago. But I could go through a long list of things. But whatever the reasons are, the good news is that opportunities abound. The even better news could be that some of the impediments being imposed at a State level could be removed and the economic prosperity could be even greater.
Ladies and gentlemen, can I finish by saying that the gathering here tonight and the enthusiasm that I have found is warming, it's encouraging. Our party nationally is enjoying a very strong period, but all my political experiences taught me that those circumstances can change. There's an unpredictability, there's a volatility, there's an uncertainty about national politics in our country that can always catch the unsuspecting complacent and self-satisfied participant by surprise. I'm working day and night never to qualify for that description and I hope all of you are doing the same. Holding national office at the present time is about the most serious responsibility that the Liberal Party has had since it was founded in 1944. We live in very difficult and challenging times.
Our political opponents at a national level are not, in my view, fit to govern. They don't stand for any identifiable alternatives. When it comes to the conduct of our foreign policy, they behave out of automatic opportunism and opposition. When it comes to domestic economic policy, they oppose for the sake of opposition. When we were in Opposition and they put up a good idea we voted for it in the Senate. Now that the situation is in reverse they vote against everything that we put up which involves any kind of serious reform.
So ladies and gentlemen, we have a lot to preserve and a lot will be lost and there'll be a great cost to our country if there were to be a change of Government at the end of next year. And we have a special responsibility, all of us, to work to prevent that occurring. And here in Tasmania that means winning some seats in the House of Representatives and that is the very special responsibility of all of you.
Thank you for the loyalty and support that you have unstintingly given to me over the last seven and a half years. I could not have succeeded without your loyalty and support. And what I have achieved is through the loyalty and the commitment and the dedication of all of the men and women of the Liberal Party of Australia all around our country and I'm deeply grateful to all of you.
Thank you.
[ends]