Thank you very much Bob, Rob Kerin, John Burston, my Federal and State parliamentary colleagues, fellow Liberals. Again I have the privilege of addressing this annual meeting and I take the opportunity of recording my thanks and I know yours to your retiring State President, Bob Randall, for the tremendous job that he has done in leading the Party organisation here in South Australia over the last two years. I want also to record my very great appreciation to Bruce McDonald who has retired after long service as a Federal Vice President and in case anyone imagines that influence thereby slips from South Australia he has of course been replaced by Corey Bernady and I congratulate Corey on his election as Federal Vice President.
Ladies and Gentlemen I have said on many occasions in the past and I repeat it this morning that one of the strengths of the government has been the extraordinarily high quality of the parliamentary representation from South Australia. Robert Hill, the Leader of the Government in the Senate, Alexander Downer as Foreign Minister, Robert of course as Defence Minister as well, Nick Minchin as Finance Minister, Amanda Vanstone as Minister for Immigration and Indigenous Affairs. Added to that a star-studded cast of parliamentary secretaries and individual members all of whom who have made in their different ways a remarkable contribution. And at the last election eight out of eleven from South Australia, the best strike rate to use a cricketing expression, although perhaps we should avoid cricketing expressions this morning. Can I say a wonderful contingent of Federal members and senators from South Australia.
But as I address this annual meeting and I look back not only on the last year but also on the last nine and half years because our government is now in its tenth year I ask myself and I ask this gathering rhetorically why is it that this government has been successful over that period of time and why is it that the Labor Party federally has been such an abysmal failure and the answer can be found in a very simple comparison of the different attitudes that we in government have taken compared with the Labor Party in Opposition.
On every issue that we have faced in the nine and a half years that we have been in government we have taken a positive stand based on our assessment of the longer term interests of the Australian community. I think back to the days when we were first elected in 1996 we knew that we had an enormous problem with the budget that we had inherited. We inherited a $96 billion national debt. We had to make difficult decisions but we laid in that first budget that Peter Costello brought down, we laid the foundation of much of the future economic strengths of the country because we began with that budget to get the books back into balance and we began the long process of paying off the Labor Party's debt. We faced in our early months the need to achieve national gun control reform. We initiated major reform of the industrial relations system with Peter Reith's legislation and with the help of the then Australian Democrats we were able to secure a large part of that legislation passage through the Senate.
We have over the time we've been in office inaugurated major changes to Australia's health system and I heard yesterday that bulk billing rates in rural areas of Australia have risen from thirty percent to sixty nine percent - thirty percent to sixty nine percent as a result of the changes that we have introduced. In recent years we have introduced fundamental changes to the Medicare system all of which have strengthened it and it has led to Tony Abbott's frequent refrain at question time in the House of Representatives, and that is that the Howard Government is the best friend that Medicare has ever had, and he says it often because it is true and you may notice that in recent months at a Federal level that issue has gone out of the newspapers. The reason it is not so prominent now is that the major reforms enacted over the last three years have begun to have a beneficial effect. The introduction of the Medicare safety net derided by the Labor Party but hugely successful. We have undertaken major education reforms. Brendan Nelson negotiated through the Senate major reforms to higher education and we are now in the process of inaugurating major welfare reform.
Now I haven't mentioned everything that the government has done and no doubt you can think of certain things we did that I haven't mentioned. But I have mentioned enough to give you an idea that on all of these fronts the government has taken a very positive attitude towards its responsibilities. And what has been the contrast. At every turn on all of the issues I have listed with the exception of national gun control laws, the Labor Party, led first by Beazley, then by Crean, then by Latham and now by Beazley again, the Labor Party has opposed every single reform, every single positive stance, every single new idea over the last nine and a half years that this government has generated for the long term benefit of this country. They have been the most negative beliefless Opposition or Party that this country has ever seen and the contrast could not be starker. And it is accelerated in the time almost a year now that has gone by since the election. And over that period of time the government has been responsible for pushing ahead with its reform agenda.
We are now engaged in a major debate about industrial relations reform. I spoke at length on industrial relations reform at the business luncheon yesterday. Let me just say to this audience that economic reform in this country and the challenge of economic reform is like participating in a race towards an ever receding finishing line. You have to keep going although you know in your heart you are never quite going to get there but if you don't keep running towards that ever receding line the other people in the race are going to run past you and our competitive position is going to be eroded.
And for those who say to you we don't need to reform industrial relations because we have low unemployment and high productivity and high real wages, let me say to you that those wonderful conditions are the product of the reforms of the last nine and a half years and in some areas the reforms that took place before that. And unless we undertake further reform in five or ten years time when this council meets you will not be able to look back on another decade or five or ten years of strong economic growth. You will lament the fact that the government at 2005 lost its nerve when it came to further reform. So I remain very committed to reform in that area.
Since the last election of course we have recommitted ourselves as we said we would do in the election. We have recommitted ourselves to the sale of the government's remaining share in Telstra. We are not doing that for the money, we are not doing it out of a sense of ideology, we're doing it because we believe in the long run governments are bad at owning companies and in the long if we are to have a very good telecommunications system in this country we must allow Telstra to operate freely and openly as any company of its size has the right to operate. And the other reason we are doing it is that it is fundamentally absurd for the government to be both the regulator and the regulated which essentially is the situation we have at the present time with the government owning a majority of shares in Telstra.
Since the last election we have also seen some of the largest personal income tax cuts in Australia's history. The last budget provided major income tax relief and when all of the reforms in the last budget had been implemented only three percent of Australian taxpayers will be paying the top marginal tax rate of forty seven cents in the dollar and that represents a remarkable piece of taxation change and taxation reform and it a space of three years the point, the level of income at which the top rate of income tax cuts in, will have been lifted from $60,000 to $125,000 a year. Now those two changes alone represent major and generous income tax relief.
We have also seen on the foreign policy front and I pay tribute to Alexander Downer and Robert Hill in particular, both of them, for the work that they have undertaken on the nation's behalf in this area. We have seen major achievements. We have seen the signing of a climate change partnership between Asian and Pacific nations which validates the opposition this Government has always had to an unconditional endorsement of the Kyoto protocols. We have also seen a historic break through whereby Australia will be invited to attend the first meeting of the East Asia Summit in Kula Lumpar in December of this year. And that has happened side by side with a further deepening of our relations with the United States, the maintenance of very close relations with Japan our great traditional export friend and destination and also of course the remarkable burgeoning economic relationship with China.
Once again as I look back over the last year I contrast that positive agenda of the Government with the negative responses of the Australian Labor Party. At every point again we have been opposed. They had said no to the sale of Telstra. They had said no to our position on climate change. They voted against tax relief in the budget. They have opposed our industrial relations reforms. And once again as I look to the new resurrected Kim Beazley the third as Leader of the Labor Party, I ask myself, how is he different? I find that he's not. He was negative between 1996 and 1998. He was even more negative between 1998 and 2001 and he has continued to be negative between 2004 and 2005. People will say well it's the job of an Opposition to be negative. Yes it is to a point. But it is not the job of an Opposition to be negative when it's against the national interest to be negative.
When we were in Opposition we didn't oppose everything the Labor Party put forward. We very strongly supported deregulation of the financial system. We had pioneered the idea when we'd been in government and when the Keating Government embraced it we supported it. We supported tariff reform. We supported the introduction of the Higher Education Charge. We supported the privatisation of the Commonwealth Bank. I even remember Mr Beazley ringing me on the night the budget was introduced containing a recommitment to the privatisation of the bank to make certain that we were still willing to support it because without our support in the Senate it would never have got through.
Now I mention those four things to make the point that just because you are in Opposition you can't escape responsibility for acting in the national interests. You can't claim to be the alternative Prime Minister of Australia but behave as though you have no responsibility to look to Australia's national interest. And that is essentially the two bob each way, walk both sides of the street approach that the Australian Labor Party has taken. Now that may have been clever politics, it may have been something that served them well until the last election. But in the last election the Australian people, I believe in their wisdom, gave the Government a very slim majority in the Senate. And that is a majority that we are going to use very wisely. We're not going to use it wantonly or capriciously. And you may have noticed that one of the early decisions that was taken, and I thank the National Party for it's very constructive approach on this, was to maintain the Deputy Presidency of the Senate in the hands of the Labor Party in having been the convention that has grown up since 1983 that the major opposition party should retain that position. Now we could have used our numbers to achieve a different result but we didn't because we thought it was more conducive to the proper and fair and reasonable conduct of things in the Senate that we did otherwise.
My friends, I've taken a few moments this morning to run through some of the achievements of the Government but more particularly to highlight the fact that the success of this Government has been rooted as much as anything in the fact that it has been a Government willing to take positive forward looking decisions. In contrast to the sheer negativity of our opponents. And I can't think of one single new idea that the Labor Party has embraced in nine and a half years of opposition which has survived more than six months or beyond defeat at the election after the idea was embraced.
When they first went into opposition they distanced themselves from the Hawke/Keating economic agenda. When we said we were going have tax reform they embraced a thing called rollback. We all remember rollback. Rollback you don't hear of anymore. When Mr Crean became the Leader they seemed to go in a somewhat different direction on a number of issues. It is best to skip over the Latham period. I will leave it to the Labor Party to talk about the Latham period of Opposition leadership. And now with Mr Beazley restored to the leadership of the Australian Labor Party he tells us that he's going to strangle Australian Workplace Agreements one month. The next month he says that he is going to keep Australian Workplace Agreements but make them work better. The only way you can make Australian Workplace Agreements work better is to make it easier for people to enter into them and that is exactly what our industrial relations reforms are. But I challenge you, I challenge the Labor Party to nominate one cause that it has consistently believed in for nine and a half years. You don't need to have to have the public agreeing with you on everything you do to win their support and win their respect. Some of the decisions the government has taken, some of the stances I have taken, I have known have not had majority support. But after thinking carefully I believe they were the right decisions and in the long run the public respects a government that stands up for what it believes in and goes out and argues the case even though it may be a majority opinion. But the contrast couldn't have been more stark and I have searched my recollection to try and think of one single idea or belief or principal apart from wanting to win office, that has survived the nine and a half years of Labor in opposition. And contrast that with our thirteen years in opposition when we in fact led the debate on industrial relations reform, where we were prepared to support the then Labor government when it put forward intelligent ideas.
So my friends, the contrast could not be starker and finally in one absolutely crucial area, the contrast between the consistency and the positive start to the government versus the inconsistency and the incoherence of the Labor party. The contrast could not be starker in the fundamental area of national security. When Mr Crean led the Opposition, it's position on our decision to join the Coalition in Iraq was to say the least totally contradictory verging on the incoherent and in the time that Mr Beazley has been back in the leadership, his stance has been equally opportunistic. Iraq is a difficult challenge and whatever views people may have taken about our involvement in 2003, it is undeniably the case that the worse possible thing would be for the Coalition to prematurely pull out, that would condemn that country to chaos and it would condemn that country to control by terrorism and forces inimical to our interests, not only in the Middle East, but around the world. Yet that in essence is what the Labor party is talking about. Every time they open their mouths on Iraq, they demand a deadline for withdrawal, they don't think of the processes or of the consequences. The Iraqis are struggling to establish a democracy, it took more than a decade for Australia to write her Constitution. It took a revolution for the Untied States to write her Constitution, it took hundreds of years for the British to evolve their unique and wonderful constitutional system, yet the rest of the world has got the nerve to sneer at the fact that the Iraqis can't meet a deadline of a few weeks or a few months. I think it is remarkable what has been achieved in that country in the face of the terrible intimidation of terrorism and the terrible attacks to which they are subjected and I admire their courage and I wish them well and I believe they will write a constitution. And they will over time, if they have support and they're given time, they will be able to build a nation that will bring democratic values and democratic practices to the Middle East. And that is the cause that we're committed to and we'll retain our presence there for so long as it is necessary to help the Iraqis bring that about. And you won't build a credible Iraqi army or a credible Iraqi security force by prematurely withdrawing our training forces and those that are making the emergence of those defence and security forces possible. And that precisely is the attitude of the Australian Labor Party on that issue.
My friends, can I conclude by doing as I did last night - to thank each and every one of you for the wonderful support and loyalty that you've given to my Government and to all of my colleagues over the last nine and a half years. It's been very much a Liberal partnership. I thank Rob Kerin and his team for their support and I commit myself and my colleagues to doing all we can to help Rob achieve success at the state election here in South Australia. He does face a challenge, he knows that, we all know that. But we also know that politics can be unpredictable. Last week in Queensland there was a huge swing against the Beattie Government in Queensland - two by-elections, both won by the Liberal Party. South Australia is enjoying good economic conditions, it does have a low unemployment rate, and it will, I believe, be able to because of that strength absorb the great bulk of the job losses that will result at General Motors Holden at Elizabeth, following yesterday's announcement by that company. But those strong economic conditions are overwhelmingly due to the performance of the national government. I work with elected governments at a state level, Labor or Liberal. But let me make it clear when it comes to national economic management the overwhelming impact is from the Federal Government. When things go poorly I can assure you we get all of the blame. We things go well you get a slightly different tune, but the circumstances are the same. If we're to blame for the bad things, we're entitled to some of the credit for the good things. And let me say to all of the State Premiers of Australia - I will work with you cooperatively in the national interest because that is what the Australian public wants us to do. But let us understand that the strength of the Australian economy is a direct result of the leadership of the Federal Government, it's a direct result of the economic and budget changes, all implemented in the face of ferocious opposition from the Australian Labor Party at a federal level. Not one major economic reform that my Government has brought down, that's produced the prosperity of 2005, had any support from the Labor Opposition. They opposed tax reform, they opposed getting the budget back into balance and in surplus, they have opposed IR reform, they've opposed a whole raft of reforms. So it is therefore proper of me to say to the Australian public yes we believe the economy is strong and we believe that the contribution of this Government has been enormous to that outcome.
My friends, thank you very much for your support. I wish you all well. I congratulate in advance whoever made the elected positions of authority in the South Australian division. I love everybody and I do hope that the South Australian division has a very successful year, one that is just as successful as the 12 months that we are completing.
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