Thank you very much for those most generous words of introduction Mr Chairman, to Catherine King, my parliamentary colleague Andrew Tink, the Member for Epping, and the Mayor of Ryde Councillor Edna Wilde, ladies and gentlemen.
I am very pleased indeed to be part of this 10th anniversary celebration of the Ryde Business Forum. Ryde has a remarkable history, it's one of the areas of Sydney settled earliest in the history of New South Wales, and over the last decade or two it has become truly an important national business centre for certain categories of information technology, medical research and allied businesses. And the notion of the high tech lifestyle location which has been one of the things that has promoted Ryde to the rest of the business community in Australia is something that the community has done extremely well.
Like most parts of Australia, Ryde depends very heavily on the growth and the strength and the activity of small and medium enterprises. This morning I had the opportunity of opening some new premises for two companies that had decided to co-locate in North Ryde and to join the very large bands of similar companies which have chosen North Ryde as their home. And it's not surprising because the amenity of the area, the support received from the local council, the interest of other businesses and the willingness of the community generally to provide support and welcome is one of the reasons why people choose Ryde as a place in which to do business.
But ladies and gentlemen, all businesses operate in an economic environment and I want to say a few words today about the economic environment in which businesses are operating in Australia at the present time. We are now in the 12th unbroken year of economic growth. Australia is now experiencing what I can without any fear of contradiction describe as the longest, unbroken period of economic growth since the late 1960's. In many ways Australia is now enjoying the best economic period that our country has seen since the end of World War II. The growth of the last 12 years is more soundly based and in many ways more meritorious than the long economic growth of the 1950's and 1960's. Whilst I don't denigrate that period in any way, the truth is at that time the Australian economy was a far more protected species than it is now. We operated behind very high tariff walls, we had a fixed exchange rate, our trading base was essentially that of the farming and mining industries, we saw little future in the export of transport and manufactured goods or in services. But so much of that of course has been transformed over the last 10 or 20 years. We now have an economy which is operating in a competitive global environment. We have a floating exchange rate, we have taken advantage as a nation of the globalised character of the world in which we live, we have a highly competitive internal economy, we have very low to no tariff protection in most sectors of the economy and even in those areas where tariff protection remains, the prospects are that it will over time continue to fall. We've also significantly and importantly diversified our trading base. We have continued to rely quite properly very heavily on our farmers and our miners and I'm very happy to say that coming out of one of the worst droughts we've had this century the prospects for our farmers, particularly in the wheat industry, now look a lot better than many of us would have dared to hope only a few months ago. And our mining industry continues to be a very major export earner. But there's more to it than farming and mining, we now of course have very strong performances in the areas of services. And yesterday I had the opportunity of launching with Joe Hockey a $235 million injection over a period of five years into the tourist industry which is worth something like $17 billion a year in revenue to this country and employ something like 550,000 people. We're also a major exporter of education services and we are a growing exporter of medical services. And we have been able as a nation to build linkages with different parts of the world, those of us who rather foolishly asserted that we were getting too close to the United States for the benefit of our place in the Asian Pacific region have surely been proved wrong by the way in which we have been able to build an ever closer trading relationship and political relationship with the Republic of China. The signing of the natural gas contract last year, the fact that the visit by the Chinese President Hu Jintao a few weeks ago to Australia was the first of his major visits overseas since assuming that job, and carry with it the prospect of even larger export contracts in the areas of natural gas and other exports is a reminder of the fact that what this country has done in building its relationships with the United States and other countries has not been to the detriment of our association with the nations of the Asian Pacific region.
The Australian economy at the present time has that rare double that we've not had since 1968. We have unemployment at below six per cent and we have inflation at below three per cent. We've reduced our government debt, we now have a government debt to GDP ratio of 3.9 per cent, which is astonishingly low by world standards, the average of the industrialised world is 48.7 per cent, Japan's government debt to GDP ratio is over 100 per cent and it's in the order of 45 per cent in the United States. And one of the reasons that we have been able to enjoy historically low interest rates over the last 30 years is that we, historically low interest rates now and they're at the lowest for 30 years, is that we have been able to pay off our debt and that in turn has taken a very significant strain off the propensity for interest rates to rise.
So I describe all of these things ladies and gentlemen to make the point that economic conditions nationally in Australia are very strong. But the process of economic reform is something that is never finished. We have not arrived at this strong economic point as a nation by luck or by accident. It is true as somebody said a moment ago, we do as a nation have to make our own luck, we are incredibly fortunate but we have over the last two decades set out to improve the competitive position of this country and set our in every sense of the word to make our own luck. And the reforms that have been undertaken, some undertaken by the former government and supported by us from Opposition, such as the floating of the exchange rate and reductions in tariff levels, many other reforms carried out by this Government, I must say not with the quite same level of support from our opponents in Opposition, but nonetheless achieved, such as taxation reform, industrial relations reform, a further opening of the internal competitive processes of the Australian economy, all of those things together have combined to create a relatively positive and indeed very benign economic climate. But we must continue the process of reform, we must continue the process of trying to grab for this country more and more opportunities. I said yesterday when I launched the tourism policy that in a competitive world environment nobody was going to give Australia an un-worked for share of the market, we had to go out and grab our share of the market, we had to go out and grab all of the opportunities that were available. And one of the things that we are endeavouring to do in a very uncertain world trading environment as well as pushing ahead to try and achieve multilateral trade agreements which will result in reductions in trading barriers all around the world for everybody, we're also endeavouring to negotiate bilateral trading agreements that are of advantage to Australia. Only a few weeks ago when I was in Thailand I was able to reach agreement with the Prime Minister of that country for a Free Trade Agreement between Australia and Thailand. Thailand is the fastest growing of the ASEAN countries, it has a population of 62 million people, as a result of that Free Trade Agreement we will be able to supply a large number of motor vehicles and significantly greater quantities of Australian wine into the Thai market, as well as winning some important concessions for our dairy products. It's a very valuable addition to the trading opportunities that Australia is going to have and it follows the Free Trade Agreement that we were able to negotiate with Singapore and sign with Singapore only a few months ago.
But the most important Free Trade Agreement that we are endeavouring to negotiate at the moment is a Free Trade Agreement with the United States. The United States is of course the largest and strongest economy in the world. The United States is the biggest economy the history the world has ever seen. The United States economy will grow more important to Australia over the next 50 years rather than less important. 20 years ago or even less people were rather foolishly writing books suggesting that it was the end of the American century and suggesting that in one way or another America was going to be replaced by the European Union or by Japan as the major economic power in the world. And without in any way reflecting upon the contribution and their very important contribution of either of those two groupings, well a grouping in the case of the European Union, an individual country in the case of Japan, and they're both very, very important to Australia. The course of the last 10 years has demonstrated those predictions to be wrong. And it's therefore tremendously important to Australia's long term economic future that if we have the opportunity of enmeshing our economy with the economy of the United States then the benefits of the growth that each can get from the other will be of great significance and will result in a great strengthening of the Australian economy in the years ahead.
Now negotiating that Free Trade Agreement will not be easy, and I repeat here today what I've said on numerous occasions and that is that unless we can get a significant concession from the United States in the area of agriculture then it will not be worth our while to sign that agreement. The negotiations are coming to a head, there is a very strong commitment at the political level in both countries for the agreement to be concluded, if that is at all possible, but as always with agreements of this kind unless there is significant mutual benefit than agreement is not finally reached. I mention that agreement to underline how important it is in a globalised economic environment for this country to be always seeking new opportunities and new chances to further strengthen the base of our economy and further diversify our economic opportunities.
But ladies and gentlemen, if I could return to an observation I made at the very beginning and that is that important though those gestures are and important though they are in laying the base, it is the underlying strength derived from the economic environment in which they operate of the hundreds of thousands of small and medium enterprises around Australia that really provide the real strength of the Australian economy. We have a healthy economy now because we have a healthy small business sector. The grouping here today, the strength of the Ryde Business Forum, the strength of the various chambers of commerce that contribute to it, they all emphasise that small business in Australia in 2003 is very much alive and well. It has enjoyed very, very good economic conditions. But it has also contributed very much to its own success, but in the time that I've been Prime Minister, if I could single out of one group of people who I think have contributed as much if not more than any other group of people to the growth and the strength of the Australian economy, I would single out the men and women who comprise the small business community of Australia. We pride ourselves and we think quite a bit about national pride right at the moment. We pride ourselves on many characteristics as Australians and one of the greatest characteristics we have as Australians is that we are very adaptable. We are people who see an opportunity, we adapt our performance, we adapt our response, we adapt our business, we adapt our organisation in order to take advantage of it. And in what I have witnessed as Prime Minister over now almost eight years is the way in which the small enterprises in particular of Australia have transformed themselves and have grabbed hold along with their employees of opportunities that have been presented. And the environment in which many of them operate is unrecognisable from what it was even ten years ago.
They've been able to diversify and to adapt, and to change according to circumstances in a quite spectacular way. And because we are a relatively classless, a very egalitarian country, a country that does not behave according to rigid patterns of predictability that ethos has transmitted into a business community and one of the real, unreported reasons why we have been so successful economically over the past eight or ten years has been the way in which the men and women of the small business communities of Australia have been able to adapt. And as a result of that they have grabbed hold of the remarkable opportunities that this country has had. Opportunities that at various stages I think everybody wonders if we would continue to preserve, but opportunities we have nonetheless been able to take advantage of.
I just want to say one other thing, ladies and gentlemen, and you will understand my making a reference to it, today. And that is that we do in unfortunately, despite the remarkable economic conditions that this country has, we do live in a word environment now that in many respects is more frightening and more disturbing than we might have hoped it would be eight or ten years ago. All of us will have been distressed by the unprovoked and unforgivable terrorist attacks in Turkey overnight. A lot will be said about them, there will be a lot of debate about the causes and the bases of terrorism.
I can only make two observations and the first of those is that the idea that the civilised world retreats and cringes at the face of that kind of threat is totally unacceptable to me and I believe totally unacceptable to the overwhelming majority of the Australian people.
And can I simply say, that I've observed in the news bulletins this morning that there are, what 100-200,000 people demonstrating in the streets of London against the President of the United States. Now, like any other political figures he's used to criticism and he can take it and he can handle it - it goes with the territory. And I don't seek a particular intercession on his behalf in relation to criticism. But I find it bizarre, even obscene that you could have 200,000 people demonstrating against the democratically elected leader of the largest country in the world, instead of demonstrating against the atrocites that continue to claim the lives of innocent people.
Can I also remind people who may see this issue in simplistic terms that any life lost in a terrorist attack is a tragedy and a blot on civilisation. But over the last nine months those who have carried out these attacks in the name of some perverted version of their religious belief have in fact claimed lives of people belonging to that religious believe in which they claim to have carried out these attacks, than they have the lives of people of other religions. To put it bluntly, more Muslims have died at the hands of terrorists over recent months than Christians or Jews, or Atheists, or Hindus, or Buddhists. And that is the ultimate obscenity, the ultimately unforgivably inexcusable character of what is done in the name of this modern terrorism.
It should be carried out in the name of some perverted view of the faith which does great violence to the principles of that faith, but process should kill more of the adherence of that religion than it does the adherence of other religions and it just reminds all of us if anybody thinks there is some kind of pattern, or rhyme or reason to this and that you will buy yourself immunity by feeding the crocodile in the pathetic hope that it might eat you last, you're wrong.
This is very much an assault on the civilisation that we belong to. Terrorism attacks us for who we are, not for what we have done. As Tony Blair said last night, the Americans didn't attack al Qaeda, al Qaeda attacked the United States in September of 2001. And none of the 88 Australians who lost their lives in Bali had done anything to deserve that terrible fate any more than the innocent victims of these latest attacks. It is not a happy note to end on, but it is unavoidable on occasion like this that that issue should be addressed.
Can I finally say, again, congratulations to the forum for everything that it's achieved and everything that it's done. And very finally, on a very up beat note, I think Edwin expressed all of our sentiments as he lifted his magnificent gold Wallabies scarf and I can only say to the whether man or who ever controls the weather up there - let us all pray for a warm, dry, evening tomorrow night.
Thank you.