I think that it is about 10 years, almost to the minute, that we were officially able to claim victory in the Wentworth Hotel in Sydney on the 2nd of March 1996. Peter, I thank you very warmly for your introduction, I thank you very warmly for your kind words and can I say of all the people to whom I owe so much in the parliamentary party and in the political community in Australia, there is nobody I owe more to than you for the great contribution you have made to the success of the last 10 years, I thank you very much.
As you rightly said it has been a team effort. This is not just a night of celebrations - there I said the word - this is not just a night for celebration for John Howard; it is also a night for all of us to reflect with some pride, with humility always, but with a sense of real justification and satisfaction. And as I think of the contribution that you have made Peter, as the principal architect of the successful economic policies, of the contribution that has been made by so many of my colleagues over the last 10 years, I think of the importance, the centrality of the strong Coalition between the Liberal and National Parties to our success. This is a Liberal Party dinner, but the last 10 years have belonged very much to that coalition between the Liberal and National Party.
There is no other way for the parties to relate to each other than to be in coalition. Any who entertain the idea that we would be better off running on our own should forget it because they haven't read Australian political history. Apart from a brief period between 1996 and 1998 the Liberal Party could never have governed in its own right and I have got to tell you that the concept of leading a minority government has never been something that I have particularly warmed to. So can I say how very important it is on a night like this to reaffirm the importance of the Coalition, for me to thank Mark Vaile and John Anderson and Tim Fischer and all of my other National Party colleagues over the years for the work that they have done.
Tonight is also a night for me to say a special word of thanks to the New South Wales division. It is the division of which I have been a member since 1958. It is a division where I first meet representatives of a remarkable generation of Australians. They were, in the main, people who had returned from active service in World War II and had joined a new, still fledgling party led by the then Robert Gordon Menzies, or RG Menzies, they used initials a lot more in those days. You were RG Menzies, JB Chifley, AA Calwell and so forth. And that party contained a group of people whose values had been forged during some of the difficult years of the Great Depression and they had risked their lives, and all too many had lost them defending our freedom in World War II. It was a party of people who were determined to build a greater and better Australia after World War II. I meet a number of people there who influenced me and shaped my political views and many of them are here tonight but one I want to mention in particular, I owe more to him in terms of being a political mentor than anybody else I have known in my political life and I am talking of that great treasure of the New South Wales division of the Liberal Party, John Leslie Carrick.
Some people have accused me of perpetual campaigning, that as soon as one election has finished I start on the next one and it is true, I do. It is a lesson that John Carrick taught me and that immortal phrase whenever he addressed a campaign gathering that 'you can't fatten the pig on market day' and it is a reminder to all of us that if you leave the campaigning to the day before the election it is pretty hard to win and you have got be on the job from the close of polling on one election and never cease until the polling booths close the following time, and then start all over again, that is essentially why it is perpetual. But to John and to all the other people of which he is emblematic I owe so much. They taught me a lot about politics, they taught me to understand the importance of carrying on a conversation with the Australian public. They taught me to understand the importance of perpetual contact with the Australian public, to understand that the commonsense of the Australian people is immense. The Australian people rarely get their political decisions wrong. We look back over the years, let's face it, even when we haven't liked it, the Australian people have been right in the decisions that they have taken. So as we gather tonight, I want to express my deep thanks to Liberals all around Australia. Because we are here in Sydney, I want to congratulate the New South Wales division on the extraordinary contribution that it has made to our federal position over the last 10 years. In terms of the number of seats we hold as a percentage of the number of seats in New South Wales, the Liberal Party is stronger now in the Federal Parliament than it has been at any time since it was created in 1944.
You think of all of the new people that have come into the Parliament, not only for New South Wales but from around Australia over the last 10 years. It encourages us to be optimistic because we have been able to renew, and we have been able to renew with people who represent all the talents of the Australian community. We don't draw most of our new members from the trade union movement, or from political staff, much in all as we have benefited from drawing quite a number of our people from political staff and they have an important contribution to make. But if we are to remain relevant as a political party, it is essential that we continue to attract people who have done something outside politics with their lives before they seek to run for parliament. It is important that we have people, who understand small business, it is important that we have people who have a professional background and it is important who've been in some of the great teaching professions. In other words, we need a broad cross-section of the Australian community. One of our great federal strengths has been that we have been able to do that over the last 10 years. Can I say, as I did last night a special word of thanks to all, of course, of our Federal parliamentary members, but a special word of thanks to our marginal seat holders. Those of you who have been deeply involved in the organisation here in New South Wales for a long time will remember the depths of despair to which we fell after the 1993 election when the Liberal representation from New South Wales was to say the least, pathetic - the Liberal representation in the Federal Parliament. And as a result of the energy of the organisation, the energy of people like Bill Heffernan as the State President, we set about attracting candidates who have now become household names in Australian politics. People like Bob Baldwin, Kerry Bartlett, and Jo Gash and Jackie Kelly, and so the list goes on. People who were in 1996 to be the spearhead of our victory and to lay the foundation, not only for that victory but also by reason of their campaign skills in 1998, which let's face it, was a very difficult election for the Coalition. To use that famous phrase of Sir Humphrey's, 'we were courageous.' We went to an election promising a new tax, that was very courageous. And the tremendous campaigning skills of those people, not only in New South Wales, but all around Australia meant that we were able to hold on, so I pay a special tribute to the marginal seat holders of the Federal Coalition. In the end, they are the people that have sustained us and kept us in office and a great many of them are here tonight.
To the organisation and everybody who has worked and to all of you here tonight who have over the years helped us financially; I have been asked a few questions about the nature of these gatherings and I said we want to mark the occasion and if, along the way, we can raise a few bob then I don't mind that happening either, I don't mind how many bobs there are that we raise along the way, but I do very sincerely thank people who support the Liberal Party financially. It is not always easy to do so. It is not easy to do so. We have had a few spectacular examples in the last few months, in the last few years, of people who have vilified under parliamentary privilege by our political opponents. Why? Because they have had the temerity to support the Liberal Party, and for that to be publicly known.
It is easy if you belong to a trade union, because you dissolve into the anonymity of a group donation and there is no individual opprobrium in any way that attaches to you. So I want to take this opportunity and there are many people here tonight who have stuck by our party through thick and thin, I know them well and I am deeply grateful for the support that they have given us. It is bit easier now, we are doing well, it wasn't so easy 10 years ago, or 15 years ago, it was awful and you risked often discrimination and persecution. I remember what happened to the Housing Industry Association after the 1993 election because they strongly supported our industrial relations policy the Labor Government of Mr Keating refused to talk to them for a couple of years simply because they had publicly supported us. So let me take this opportunity of thanking all of those people who have stuck to us for their generosity and their commitment to our political cause.
My friends, tonight is a night to reflect on the past, but it is also a night to look forward to the future. I want to spend a few moments to talk about some of the challenges that face our nation in the years ahead. There are five of them in my view.
The first of course is our national security and global engagement because all Australians have a right to live and work and raise their families in a secure nation. Australia faces large strategic challenges over coming decades, from global terrorism to the threat of weapons proliferation to the gradual rebalancing of global power that is likely to accompany the rise of China and India. At the same time, we live in a world where the most serious threats to Australia come from state weakness rather than from state strength because the problem of weak and failing states lies at the core of our global engagement.
More optimistically, in my Australia Day address a few weeks ago I made the point that one of the most important global developments in the 21st Century is the emergence for the first time of a truly global middle-class, one that increasingly will be concentrated in the developing world. Next week, I will make my second visit to India as Prime Minister, a recognition of that country's emergence not only as a major Asian power and global power but at the degree to which a rising Indian middle class now numbered at between 250 and 300 million is part of a larger trend. As a country we in Australia need to explore and take advantage of the policy interface between Australia and a rising global middle class.
The second challenge is to maintain the process of economic modernisation and reform in this country. Australia's spent a great deal of the 20th Century in gradual, relative economic decline. The experience of the last decade stands in stark contrast to the point that Australia is now seen as an exemplar of the benefits of sustained economic growth. Since the mid-1980s a number of Australian industries have made productivity gains relative to the world's best practice. The number of industries with productivity levels above that of their United States counterparts, for example, has improved greatly over this period. We know, for example, that Australia's mining sector is amongst the most productive in the world and more productive than that of the United States. Developments in China, India and elsewhere appear to be generating a further shift in Australia's comparative advantage in favour of resources. Australia's financial services sector has been another of the great success stories of the last 20 years because Australia has gone from being a regulated, cosseted financial system to now having world-class financial arrangements and world-leading finance houses.
The third challenge is to ensure that government services meet the needs of a changing society and an ageing population. Australia is well-placed to respond to intergenerational pressures because the strength of our fiscal position is so obvious and we have a targeted, and properly so, social security safety net. The great challenge is to get the best out of Australia's social infrastructure, health, aged care and other community services, which account for a sizeable and growing share of our national wealth and are keys to our future living standards. This inevitably will test the mettle and maturity of our federal system. We need to be able to work across the federation to identify national solutions to national problems. The most recent COAG meeting showed that with determination and goodwill on all sides, this can be done. The Australian people rightly expect their political leaders at all levels of government to cooperate in the best interests of the nation. And can I say on that point that over the years as I have interacted with the Australian people in so many ways one of many strong messages have come through to me and one of them is that they are tired, they are sick and tired of buck-passing and blame-shifting between the Federal Government and State Governments. Whenever I say to them 'something is a state issue, or a this or that issue' their response to me is Prime Minister, or John, or sometimes something else, their response to me is very simple. You're the Prime Minister, you fix it. In other words they want outcomes, they want solutions. They don't want buck passing between different levels of Government.
The fourth of our great national challenges is to ensure that our use of natural resources is placed on a sustainable basis for future generations. We do live, as the saying goes, in a very fragile continent. We have a responsibility to use our natural assets and resources wisely to achieve prosperity and security and sustainability in energy. And to surmount what I regard as our greatest conservation challenge, and that is our nation's water use.
And the fifth challenge is in some ways our greatest. And that is to maintain our great national unity, our social cohesion and above all our egalitarian spirit. I am proud of what this Government has done to modernise our social welfare system and to support the weak and vulnerable in our society. And we run the risk of not talking about this enough because our great economic strength has given us the capacity to do this. We need to find innovative ways to break the vicious cycles of poor parenting, low levels of education, unemployment and health problems that can afflict some individuals and communities. And we need to reinforce the virtuous cycles of caring families, strong learning environments, good jobs and healthy lifestyles that allow others to succeed in a competitive world. We need to find ways of restoring order to zones of chaos in some homes and communities, zones of chaos that can wreck young Australian lives.
The whole point of this Government's idea of a social coalition in welfare policy is that Government will play its role, but individuals and families and businesses also have responsibilities to fulfil if Australia is to truly tackle disadvantage in our community. This is an acute challenge which many indigenous communities face. But it is in no way confined to indigenous communities. The indigenous leader Noel Pearson has made the point powerfully that people living in welfare dependent communities are poor and alienated regardless of their colour or their location. The major economic reforms of the last two decades and the immense economic strength that has resulted have in some ways opened up these deeper social policy questions to become the new frontier of policy development and innovation.
I've taken a moment to talk about those great national challenges because if gatherings such as this are to have meaning, they should not just be a justifiable reflection on past success and past achievement. They should be an opportunity for us to focus again on what is our great responsibility and that is, to serve the interests of all of the Australian people. And tonight, as was last night, is an opportunity to rededicate ourselves to the service of all of the Australian people. And can I, on that note, say that I am delighted that Peter Debnam is here tonight as the Leader of the New South Wales Opposition because he has a task ahead of him. It's a big task, he has a big mountain to climb, but he's made a very, very good start. And can I say that the people of New South Wales Peter, they want a change of government. I think they're aching for a change of government.
And there's a great responsibility on you and a great responsibility on the party organisation here in New South Wales to get the best candidates, even if some of them aren't now members of the Liberal Party. You need men and women capable of winning seats from the Labor Party. You ought to choose them on the basis of the contribution they can make and their capacity to win the seats, not on the basis of their past affiliations with any section or group of the Liberal Party at the present. It's a great opportunity and I hope the message I convey by that is understood by all of those who should understand it.
Let me finish on a personal note and that is that everything that I have achieved in public life has been due overwhelmingly to the support that I have received from my family. From my wonderful wife Janette, whose advice I unerringly accept. On many occasions I have been invited in a very polite way to do things that sort of run the risk of me making a fool of myself, and there's always an injunction saying 'don't you dare do that' and like any other Australian man I take that advice and I don't do it. But to Janette, you've been a wonderful source of counsel and comfort and advice and I can't express too fully the affection I feel for you and the gratitude I owe to you for everything you've done.
I've got two of my three children here tonight, Melanie and her wonderful husband Rowan, and Tim, and I spoke to my younger son Richard in the United States this morning and we reminisced a bit about that night ten years ago. But to have your family with you, and one of my brothers Stan and his wife are here with a lot of my close friends, some from school and some from university and some from more recent years. It's a nice feeling on an occasion like this to have people around you. But tonight is a night for all of us. It's a night for me to say again to all of my colleagues, to Mark and Peter especially and all the other colleagues who are here tonight, and to thank again Alexander Downer who is not here tonight for the wonderful contribution he made 11 years ago in putting the interests of the party ahead of his own. And to everyone else, to the party organisation, to you Geoff, who has taken over as State President, I thank you very warmly. The strength of this organisation here in New South Wales is clear and evident. But I want to say in that context what a great job Paul Nicolau does in relation to the Millennium Forum. Paul has, in my opinion, a long career ahead of him in the cause of the Liberal Party if that is his decision. I wish him well. He's a great Liberal and he's done wonderful things for this organisation and I appreciate the friendship and support that he's extended to me.
But to all of you, thank you, enjoy yourselves. It's been a wonderful ten years, but it was Disraeli who said that finality is not a word known to politics. There is more work to be done tomorrow. We return to it. We rededicate ourselves to one thing, not our own self-aggrandisement but we rededicate ourselves to the service of all of the Australian people.
Thank you.