Thank you very much ladies and gentlemen, Doug Chipman the President of the Tasmanian division, Rene Hidding, my Ministerial colleague Brendan Nelson, and fellow Liberals. Again it is my pleasure to address this annual gathering of the Tasmanian State Council and to thank all of you for the unstinting support that you have given to my Government and to the Federal Parliamentary Liberal Party over the last year. And to record my appreciation of the contribution of my Liberal Senate colleagues from this state and of course to express the hope that after the next election they will be joined by some Liberal representatives in the House of Representatives from Tasmania.
Gatherings such as this are an opportunity for a party leader to articulate the goals that he or she might have for Australia';s wellbeing and for Australia';s future. In the time that I have been Prime Minister over the last seven and a half years the Government has endeavoured to implement policies and to construct a vision of Australia';s future based upon three great goals. And they are to provide our nation with the essential ingredient, and the first obligation that any government must provide and that is national security. Secondly, to give our nation economic strength, that not only can it take its place in the world, but also through the generation of wealth care for those in our own midst who through no fault of their own are deserving of a helping hand and an extension of the great Australian tradition of mateship. And finally, to provide our nation with a sense of social stability so that we may relate to one another as fellow Australians in a context of respect, of harmony, of tolerance and of inconclusiveness. And they have been and remain our three great goals, national security, economic strength and a social stability. And I am very happy now and I';m very happy particularly over the time between now and the next election to have the performance of the government, the performance of the Liberal Party in national office, assessed against those three goals. And to invite as I will the Australian people to assess the credentials of our political opponents, a group of people who have squandered seven and a half years in mindless, opportunistic, negative opposition, rather than endeavouring to build an alternative construct that will serve the future welfare of the Australian people.
And I look to the challenge of the next 15 to 18 months as I will argue to the Australian people that against those three criteria our credentials are strong and the offering of the alternative is weak to the extent of virtual non-existence. There is no doubt that the challenge of national security is uppermost in the minds of all Australians. We';ve had over the last year the terrible tragedy of Bali, we';ve had the ongoing war against terrorism and we have been reminded of both the proximity and the brutality of terrorism over the last week. That bomb explosion in Jakarta was not, as the terrorists would claim, an act which avenged their Muslim brothers, rather it was a cruel act that killed their Muslim brothers. And in the process they revealed the ultimate evil of terrorism, they revealed the fact that terrorism has no right to claim the imprimatur of any of the world';s great religions, and what those terrorists did then as they have done in the past that despoils the good name of Islam as it would the good name of any of the world';s great religions if that name were invoked to justify such barbarous behaviour.
It is a reminder my friends of the need for all of us to co-operate as closely as possible with our regional friends and neighbours. And in the time that has gone by since the 11th of September 2001, and particularly since October of last year, we have worked very hard to strengthen the network of co-operation between the Australian Federal Police, the Australian intelligence agencies and their counterparts in Indonesia, in the Philippines, in Singapore and all of the other countries of our region. The war against terrorism will not be ended early, it will not be ended without a combined effort of all nations and peoples of goodwill. And whilst I can give no guarantee that terrorism will not occur on the Australian mainland, it will not occur in Australia, in any part of Australia, what I can promise you is that the Government will do all it can to minimise the possibility of terrorism coming to Australian shores. And that involves not only co-operation with our friends in the region, it also involves as we have done a greater investment in our intelligence services. Intelligence services will be at the very front line of the war against terrorism. Timely, accurate, reliable intelligence is the essential ingredient to provide us with the best protection we can have against the likelihood of terrorist attacks and those in the community who seek to denigrate the efforts of the Government who give not only resources but also the necessarily legal authority to our intelligence agencies misunderstands the scale and the nature of the challenge of modern terrorism.
In recent weeks the Australian Government has taken action to prevent the Solomon Islands becoming a failed state. We';ve taken that action because the people of that country wanted us to help them and we owe it to them as friends and as a powerful neighbour to do so, but we';ve also taken that action because it is in Australia';s interests that we act. We do not want a series of failed states in the Pacific, we do not want a series of failed states on our doorstop, failed states become magnets for terrorists, for money launderers and for international criminal behaviour. That is why we have taken the actions that we have, with the involvement I';m pleased to say and strong support of our other neighbours in the Pacific. And at the Pacific Forum meeting in Auckland next week we will have the opportunity as a group of Pacific Island countries, of Pacific nations to talk about what has occurred in the Solomons and to, for me on behalf of Australia, to make it plain that we accept the leadership role we have in the region and I believe that the decision taken by the Government will continue to enjoy the very strong support of the Australian people. And let us not imagine that because it has gone well that it is an operation free of danger. Any operation involving the dispatch of police and military forces carries an element of danger for those who are on active service, and as we think of the forces deployed in the name of Australia in different parts of the world, let us bear that in mind. So ladies and gentlemen the first of our great goals, and that is of national security, is a goal that ought to be uppermost in the minds of all Australians and it is a goal where the credentials and the performance of the Government can be contrasted very favourably to the miserable offerings of our political opponents.
As I move to the second to the our great goals, and that is to build the economic strength of Australia, the performance of this country in this area is self-evident and it is all around us. No country calling itself a western industrialised nation has performed better than Australia over the past six or seven years. No country is held in higher regard than our own by virtue of its economic performance over that period. Our growth rates have been greater than countries with which we normally make comparisons. Our unemployment levels have fallen, our inflation rates are down, our interest rates are at 30 year lows, our levels of business investment are high, we have eliminated large amounts of government debt and we are seen around the world as a strong and growing economy which is an attractive place for foreign investment. Now none of those things have been achieved by accident, they didn';t fall out of the sky, they are the product of a series of economic reforms, and over the past six or seven years they';ve been the product of economic reforms that have been carried out in the teeth of unrelenting obstruction and opposition from the Labor Party, the Australian Democrats in the main and the Australian Greens. Every single important measure that we have endeavoured to implement to strength the Australian economy over recent years has been opposed by the Labor Party. The Labor Party left us with a deficit of $10.5 billion in our first year of office, yet they tried to stop us implementing the measures that were needed in order to wipe out that deficit. They opposed virtually all of the budget repair measures in Peter Costello';s first Budget in 1996. Despite the mandate they had, we had rather, they opposed our sale of one-third of Telstra. Despite the mandate we had, they opposed our reform to Australia';s industrial relations system. Despite the mandate we obtained in 1998 when we went to the Australian people and said we';re telling you before the election that we';re going to change the taxation system, unlike 1993 when Paul Keating opposed Fightback yet didn';t tell the Australian people that if he were re-elected he would increase sales tax on just about every imaginable item, we laid it all out in painful detail and perhaps paid a political price to some degree in the process. But I wanted in 1998 to be certain that I had the authority of the Australian people to implement tax reform, and we laid it out, we won that election, we lost some seats but we won the election and therefore we had a mandate, yet what happened? The Australian Labor Party opposed the implementation of the GST, they opposed root and branch the fundamentals of taxation reform. And so the process has gone on, they';re obstructing efforts to maintain the affordability of the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, one of the great pieces of social welfare unpinning that this country has. A scheme that will increasingly harvest at an affordable cost the benefits of progress in medical science for all Australians. But the wonder drugs of the future can only be made available as they come on stream, they can only be made available if we keep the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme within affordable bounds, and we are determined that that will happen because I believe that that scheme is one of the great pieces of social welfare egalitarianism that this country has devised.
Ladies and gentlemen, the economic comparison that you will hear about over the next 15 to 18 months is once again an economic comparison as with the national security comparison that illustrates the credentials of this Government and illustrates by comparison the miserable offerings of our political opponents. You will hear much over the next 15 months of the fact that in August of 2003 the average monthly repayment on a housing loan throughout Australia is $450 lower than it was in March in 1996. You will hear that since 1996 real wages in this country, that is wages after adjusting for inflation, have risen by 10.2 per cent in that seven year period, yet they rose by only 2.3 per cent in the entire 13 years of the Hawke/Keating Governments. Now when you add those two things together no two statistics could better demonstrate the extent to which the Labor Party has been disqualified from claiming to be the friend of the average working man or woman in Australia because it is under the Liberals that the working people of Australia have done well, it was under Labor that they faced 17 per cent interest rates and heard their Prime Minister and Treasurer boast about how they had suppressed the growth in real wages. And I say to my Labor opponents you';ll hear a lot about those two comparisons, you';ll hear a lot from me and my colleagues over the next 15 months about how when you were in Government you failed the very people you claim to be the protectors of. You failed the average working man and woman in Australia, you let their mortgage interest rates go through the roof and you suppressed their real wages because you ran an industrial relations policy that denied this country the productivity gains of a modern economy. We have been able to preside over a non-inflationary increase in wages because we have implemented an industrial relations system which has led to a boost in productivity. Any nation can afford higher wages, any nation can afford wage rises that run ahead of inflation provided those wage rises are underpinned by productivity improvements, and that is what we have been able to do because if you don';t have productivity improvements wage rises are purchased at the cost of higher unemployment. And to quote the words of a former Labor Treasurer, the father of my current opponent, Frank Crean, when he was Treasurer in the Whitlam Government he said one man';s wage rise is another man';s job, given certain circumstances. And that is right, and the lesson of the last seven years is that if you can have real wage gains, providing productivity is up, because not only have we had real wage gains based on higher productivity over the last seven years, but we';ve also had lower unemployment. Unemployment in March of 1996 was 8.2 per cent, now it is 6.2 per cent. We have seen the creation of 1.1 million new jobs in Australia over the last seven and a half years. But if you dig beneath the surface the story';s even better, in December of 1995 apprenticeships in Australia stood at 141,000. I am now very proud to say, and I';m very happy to say in it on a platform with Brendan Nelson, the Minister for Education, that now apprenticeships and traineeships in Australia stand at 390,000. Once again an illustration of the extent of which Labor Governments failed at what they have always claimed to be their historic constituents.
So what did Labor deliver to the working men and women of Australia? Horrendously high interest rates, a suppression of their real wage increases and a stagnation in the apprenticeships system of this country. Not a bad trifecta for a party that is meant to represent the interests of the working people of Australia. Little wonder that many of Labor';s historic constituency now sees the Liberals as being their real friends, and they are right to do so because we have elevated the position of those people to a very prominent place in our social and economic policies.
But ladies and gentlemen those figures relate of course to the impact of our policies on individuals. But taking a slightly broader canvas our deficit reduction policies means that compared with 1996 this nation is paying $5 a year less in interest on the money that it has had to borrow to cover the Labor deficits of the past, $5 billion less than in 1996. And what that means of course, is that we';ve got $5 billion more to spend on health, on education, on roads to recovery, on personal income tax cuts, on defence, and on investment in our intelligence services. All of which have enjoyed significant treatment and beneficial treatment under this Government. So when you hear me talking about the value of reducing the deficit and running surpluses, when you hear Peter Costello talking about that, we';re not engaging in some mind numbing treasury jargon, we';re talking about real money, your money, and as a result of getting rid of the debts of the past we have $5 billion a year more to spend on things that you want us to spend money on, and that is on tax cuts and on productive investment in the nation';s infrastructure.
And I mentioned health a moment ago, let me say just two things on the issue of health policy. We made an offer to fund the public hospital system of this country about two months ago. Public hospitals in Australia are owned and operated and run and directed by State Governments.We don';t control them but we make an enormous financial contribution to their operation and indeed over the last five years of the Australian Health Care Agreement the Federal Government has actually contributed more to the operation of State public hospitals than has State Governments, we don';t mind that, but what we do mind is when we do that and when we make an offer for the next five years that involves a $10 billion increase, a 17 per cent in real terms, the State Premiers say oh that';s not enough, well I say to the State Premiers we are prepared to carry our share of the burden with public hospitals, but we want you to do the same. We want you to match the increase that we are prepared to make, we';ve put our money on the table, it';s generous, it';s 17 per cent more than was the figure under the last agreement, $10 billion more in money terms and it represents a very appropriate and very generous commitment by the Federal Government to the operation of the hospital system which is a fundamental element of Medicare.
The other thing I would say about health is this. Have a look at what Labor Party spokesmen say on the private health insurance rebate. Remember that when this was put before the Parliament in 1998 the Labor Party voted against it. The Labor Party opposed 45 per cent of the Australian population who now belong to private health insurance funds from having a 30 per cent tax rebate, they voted against it in the Parliament, I don';t know whether the story is true but I read in the newspaper, so I guess it must be, that while, back in 1998 while the Labor Party in Federal Parliament was voting against the 30 per cent tax rebate certain members of the Labor Party from New South Wales were furiously lobbying independent Senators in the Senate to vote in favour of it so that they could have the cynical double. You could say we';re against it but it got through and gee you won';t be blamed for rejecting it. I mean that is the ultimate pinnacle double. Now I don';t know whether that story is true, but as I say I read about it, I read about it in the newspapers, so it may well be the case that occurred. But that was 1998, fast forward to 2003 asked about the 30 per cent tax rebate the new Labor health spokesman says oh we';ve got to under review. Asked to give a guarantee that it will continue the Opposition Leader says it';s under review. When the Labor Party says something that they voted against in 1998 is under review if they get elected you can be pretty certain it';s a dead duck if they form government after the next election. And the strength of Australia';s health system at the present time rests on a partnership, a partnership between public investment and private investment, and the secret of the fact that our health system, with all of its imperfections and it';s not perfect, it is an infinitely better and fairer and more affordable and more accessible health system than that offered by any comparable country. If you';re a battler in Australia you';ve got a better opportunity of getting decent health care and treatment than in the United States, the United Kingdom or any nation in Europe or Asia. And for all the weaknesses of our system we ought to be bear that very very much in mind.
So ladies and gentlemen they are some of the issues that I know will be in the minds of the Australian people as they look at the credentials of this government, not only in relation to national security but importantly in relation to economic management and in relation to matters of social stability. And as we move towards the next election we will seek very happily and very readily to be assessed against our performance in relation to those three very important national goals.
I want in the remaining moments to says something about the Government policies in relation Tasmania. I said last night that I find as I come to Tasmania that the sense of hope and optimism about the economy in this state is greater than it has been for a very long time, perhaps greater than at any time in the 29 years that I have been in Parliament. However you measure it I don';t think there';s much doubt that there has been an improvement, and that is something that I very warmly welcome and I know that all Tasmanians very warmly welcome. This state has been by (inaudible) its separation from the mainland and other factors has suffered some special economic disadvantage and that has been the subject of inquiries and it';s been the target of policies carried out by this Government over many years. And I';m very proud of these special policies that we have introduced to try and address some of the disadvantage suffered by the Tasmanian economy. And as I look at the growth in the tourist industry I think not only of the freight equalisation scheme but I think of the subsidy schemes that have been introduced to eliminate that disadvantage, and I think of the contribution that has been made by those schemes. As I learn of the confidence and the sense of stability and security in the forestry industry, I think of the value of the regional forest agreement that was signed five years ago by myself and the former Premier Tony Rundle. I want to pay tribute to the co-operation that I received from that government and from that Premier because that agreement has been the basis of the resource security that has been delivered and has been the basis of the fair balance that has been struck by our very strong conservation and environmental concerns, and equally the desire of this state and this nation to have a sustainable forest industry. And we have achieved the double there. We';ve achieved a virtuous double of having cared for the environment and for the old growth forests but by the same token we have maintained a steady stream of investment into an industry that has generated jobs as well as attracting investment. I';m also very conscious as I think of Tasmania';s needs of the fair and proper, some from other states might even say generous treatment, of Tasmania out of the proceeds of the first sale of Telstra, and the natural heritage trust and the policies that were put in place. But all of them totally justified in my view because of the particular problems that Tasmania has faced and the particular challenges that your state has faced.
I want to say that whilst this is not an occasion for the announcement of specific policies that time will come, but it remains the concern of the Government to make sure that particular disadvantages that Tasmania suffers continue to be recognised in Federal Government policies because the essence of national government and national economic leadership is to provide the engine room of national economic growth and that is good strong national economic policies and when you hear State Premiers strutting the national stage and saying gee the economy in my state is doing well, aren';t I good? Just remember one verity of national political life, it';s the Federal Government that in the end pulls the economic levers and puts on and off the economic switches and quite properly when things don';t go so well the Federal Government gets the blame, and equally when things go well it';s a bit rich for some State Premiers to claim sectoral confined local guidance and influence. But they do it from time to time and I understand why, but they will not understand my gently and politely reminding them that it';s been the policies of the Federal Government, the cuts in interest rates, the low inflation, the reduction in the budget deficit, the creation of surpluses, the modernisation of our industrial relations system, the competitiveness of our economy, the strong industry policy, they are the things that have generated the growth and the wealth throughout the length and breadth of this country over the last seven and a half years.
So friends can I again say how much I appreciate the support and the loyalty that you';ve shown towards me and to my colleagues. We';ve come a long way over the last seven and a half years, Australia is a stronger more open more confident more respected more powerful country than it was seven and a half years ago. That';s been accomplished by a Government that';s been determined despite the unpopularity of many of the measures we';ve had to introduce, determination to stick to our guns, and to bring in policies for the long term benefit of the country. But that could not have been achieved without your support, people are kind enough to compliment the government from time to time, let me say on behalf of all of my colleagues that it';s very much a team effort, without your loyalty and support at the grass roots we wouldn';t be there in the first place, we wouldn';t have been re-elected in 1998 and 2001 and we won';t have a hope of being re-elected next year. The election next year will be very hard, people at the moment think we';re a mile in front, we';re not. We only have a small majority, a loss of seven or eight seats will put us out of government, we';re overperforming as I said last night in a number of states and we need to make sure that we do a little better on other states such as Tasmania. So the next election is going to be a big challenge, Labor can win, don';t think otherwise, they may not deserve to win, they may not properly in the eyes of many be seen as fit to govern, thaty doesn';t mean to say they can';t win. And we';re going to have to work very very hard to ensure that we hold the treasury benches. And I know that in our effort that we';ll have the enthusiastic support of Liberals in Tasmania.
Thank you.
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