Thank you very much Ian and can I say to Kym that that bat still has a pride of place in the corner of my study at Kirribilli House. Danielle Blain, Julie Bishop, Ian Campbell, Chris Ellison, my other federal parliamentary colleagues. Paul Omodei, the Leader of the Opposition in Western Australia. Two former Premiers of this great State, Sir Charles Court and Richard Court, my fellow Australians.
It is always a great pleasure for me to come to Perth and tonight is a real treat and I want to thank the Liberals of Western Australia and the people of Western Australia for honouring the achievements of the team, and I call it very much a team over the last 10 years.
It is important as Ian says to mark occasions such as this. You need to get the right balance between paying proper regard to the achievement of being in office for 10 years, winning four elections. It takes a lot of elections to chalk up 10 years in Australia. We have only got three-year terms. Tony Blair sort of marvels, I was talking to him the other day when he was in Canberra, and he sort of marvels in an ironic sort of way of the idea that we only have three-year terms.
It is an important occasion to mark. But it is also equally import to remember one simple thing about Australian political life and that is that the Australian public have an unerring capacity to spot humbug and hubris. It has a great capacity to level, it has a great capacity to remind all of us in public office that we are there to serve the Australian people and not to indulge our own egos or to engage in unnecessary triumphalism.
As I look back over the last 10 years there are a lot of things that I can say about what has happened and the Government has done many things in many fields. It has encountered many challenges, it has overcome many problems, it has failed to overcome some and it is obviously like any other Government left a number of things undone that it should have done, or might have done better.
There are I think three things that stand out over that 10-year period. Firstly, of course has been the remarkable economic strength of our country and I won't deluge you with a lot of statistics but to simply make the point that according to every economic indicator this country is stronger, it's more competitive, it's more productive, it's more durable and it is more respected economically around the world than it has been at any time in its history.
We had great economic years in the 50s and in the 60s, but in those days the Australian economy was relatively sheltered and (inaudible). We had a fixed exchange rate, we had rigid foreign exchange controls, we had very high tariff walls, we had a narrow inward-looking economy and it was the circumstance of history, the ruin inflicted by World War II on Europe and the underdevelopment in Asia that gave to the Australian economy a place of strength and relatively competitiveness. That began to unravel in the 1970s and it has taken 15 to 20 years of reform and I am never reluctant to give the former Government some credit in one or two areas where it undertook necessary reforms, which we incidentally supported very strongly from Opposition. But it has taken 15 or 20 years of reform to give the Australian economy the wonderful years that it has now enjoyed. And can I say in no state of Australia is this better illustrated than of course in the State of Western Australia. There is a statistic I am often reminded of when I come to Western Australia, I think it runs something like this. We've only got 11 per cent of the population, but we provide about 32 per cent of the nation's export income. I hope I got those percentages in balance. But it certainly is a wonderful example of the way that this part of Australia has taken advantage in a sensible way of the great endowments that providence has given our country.
The second great thing that stands out over the last 10 years is the way in which this nation is regarded around the world. We've had more people, more world leaders wanting to come to this country over the last few years than I think over the previous 20. And it is from every corner of the world. In the last week we have had the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Tony Blair, a reminder of the country to which we owe so much, measured by our institution our political practises, our civic culture and many of the values that we hold dear. We've had the Premier of China, a nation that is bulking larger and larger in Australia's economic and political experience. And we have had the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, who I will join tomorrow in Fremantle.
Around the world we are seen as a country that has not only achieved and succeeded and been strong and effective, but we have also been a country that has stood up for the things that it holds dear and the values that it believes in and is not afraid to take a stance and even amongst those countries that haven't agreed with everything Australia has done, this country is regarded with great respect and is seen as an achieving nation and a nation that has punched well and truly above her weight. And in earning that respect and in having the regard of so many countries around the world one thing that we have been able to achieve is that we have been able to balance the realities of not only the area of the world in which we live, but we haven't allowed ourselves to do that at the expense of our traditional relationships. When I became Prime Minister I had no desire to reduce our interaction with the nations of Asia and I think it is fair to say that 10 years on, nobody can fairly say that my Government has in anyway ignored the importance of our relationship with Asia. But I held the very deep belief that we never had to chose between our history and our geography as a nation and that building close relations with Indonesia, with China, with India, with Japan, with Korea and all the other nations of the Asian region need not be at the expense of our relationships with our traditional friends and I counted as a great foreign policy achievement of this Government that our relationship with the United States has never been closer and has never been as intimate as it is at the present time. But equally, and at the same time, we have been able to build a remarkably close and effective relationship with China and it is a demonstration that this is a nation that truly is a citizen of the world and is able to interact with different nations and different cultures.
Finally the thing that comes through to me very strongly and I experience it everywhere I go in Australia, I experienced it in the week or so that we spent in Melbourne at the Commonwealth Games and I experience it in every part of this country, is the remarkable self-confidence and self-belief which possesses Australia in the early years of the 21st Century.
We have always been a fairly cocky, self-confident people and isn't that good thing. We have never bent the knee to anybody and nor will we ever do so in the future, but there is an underlying strong self-belief and self-confidence about Australia in 2006, the like of which I haven't seen and experienced before. It is a combination and a product of what we have achieved, but it is also a realisation that fundamental traditional Australian values have always been there. We went through a rather silly stage in our history 10 or 15 years ago of conducting a perpetual seminar about our identity.
We asked ourselves were we Asian, were we European, were we half-British, were we half-Australian, were we too pro-American, were we too something else and finally I think we have realised what has always been true, that we have always been Australian, there is no doubt as to what an Australian is. He or she is instantly recognisable around the world and those self-appointed cultural dieticians who, a few years ago, told us that we somehow or another fundamentally change our identity in order to get on with the rest of the world and achieve have been proved abysmally wrong and completely ignorant of the nature and history of this country.
They're the three things that stand out to me. There are a couple of other things that we have achieved and a couple of other messages I would like to leave with you as fellow Liberals and supporters of the Liberal Party. Chris Ellison spoke earlier of our (inaudible) and of the contribution that the great philosophers had made to Liberal thought and how that had influenced our Party. But one of the things that we have managed to do over the last 10 years, and I hope all of us continue to do it and we should remind ourselves of it. And that is that the Liberal Party of Australia is a unique animal amongst centre-right parties around the world.
The Liberal Party of Australia is the custodian of two traditions in Australian politics. It is the custodian of the classic liberal tradition, but it is also the custodian of the conservative tradition in Australian politics. You have frequently heard me use the expression 'the broad church.' We are a broad church. We do have within our ranks people who would describe themselves as small 'L' liberals and we have people who would describe themselves as being more conservative. I am a small 'L' liberal on some issues, I am a conservative on others. I have frequently described myself unapologetically as being a social conservative and an economic liberal. Some would describe themselves as both socially conservative and economically conservative, although I think the second rung of that is a more dwindling group, but nonetheless some would regard themselves as both social and economic liberals.
The point I make is that there is room in our party for all of those strands of thought. We should never allow ourselves to lapse into the process of trying to make a choice and the process of trying to define the Liberal Party of Australia according to one or other of those particular descriptions.
You can look at our history; you can look at the abolition of the White Australia Policy in 1967 under the Holt Government as a demonstration of the great liberal tradition of this country. You can look at our determination over the years to stand up for individual rights, to provide full freedom of choice in the education of children, a very important policy commitment for which the Menzies Government was responsible in the 1960s as a demonstration of our classical liberal tradition. You can equally look at our strong defence of the traditional institutions of our society, our defence of the rule of law, the central importance we place on the family as the most caring and strengthening unit within our society as an example of our conservative tradition.
The point I simply make my friends is that we are a party of both traditions and we will continue to survive and prosper if we respect both of those traditions in our party and that no section of the party ever thinks for a moment that there should be a fight to the finish to determine which philosophy and which strand really represents the true liberalism of the Liberal Party of Australia.
Another observation can I make that is very important to all of us and that is the reform process. One of the reasons we are still in office is that we didn't shirk reform. It would have been so easy after the 1996 election to think, well we have a majority of 44, we'll be in power for a long time, we don't have to do very much, we will just dispense a bit of largess at the right time and we'll get re-elected and I can remember having a dinner at The Lodge in 1998 with a group that had been elected in 1996 and many of them are still there, some of them lost their seats, they we miracles victors in a sense in 1996, they lost their seats in 1998. And I said at the time that the approach to the 1998 election had to be utterly different to the 1996 election. That in 1996 the people wanted to get rid of the Keating Government, they were aching for an alternative and we presented a respectable alternative and they voted for us in droves. But in 1998 we would be just another Government and we would have to have a new platform, a new reason, a new validation to seek their support. Well that is the reason why we embraced the GST and taxation reform and it worked in 1998. And again in 2004 there were particular reasons, they were different from 2001 and after the 2004 election there was another moment where we thought to ourselves will we embrace still further reform or will we rest on our laurels, will we assume that a Labor Party that tried Beazley, then tried Crean, then tried Latham, then went back to Beazley, that a Labor Party like that was not going to offer any serious opposition.
But instead of being complacent on the policy front we decided to embrace further reform and so in 2004, 2005 rather, we embarked upon the process of industrial relations reform. And it is true, as Ian Campbell alluded to, that economic reform is like competing in a race towards an ever receding finishing line. You never get there but if you don't keep running for that ever receding finishing line the bloke who is running in the race with you is going to go past you and you are going to fall behind and your nation's competitiveness is going to be affected. So one of the other messages I have for the future is that this Party must always be the party of reform. We must always be willing to embrace further change, we must always have a capacity to embrace new propositions and to advocate new causes and new reasons to modernise and change this country for the better. Once we lose the enthusiasm and the stomach for the reform cause, we begin to enter the terminal phases of our time in office.
Can I on a more personal note say to all of you how fortunate I have been to have been the beneficiary of such sustained loyalty and cohesion within the parliamentary party over the past 10 years. It has been an incredibly united Government. It has been a wonderful Coalition. I am a strong coalitionist. I know that relations between our two parties vary a bit around the nation and I know that there are some different views held in different parts about it. But at a Federal level, the Coalition has been a remarkable success and I do pay tribute to the three National Party leaders who have served with me as Deputy Prime Ministers over the last 10 years, in Tim Fischer, John Anderson and Mark Vaile. But can I, I have been the leader of a team, it is called the Howard Government but it has been very much a Government of men and women who have worked together as a team and it is always invidious on occasions like this to try and single people out, but I must pay a special tribute to two men who have served with me in the same portfolios over the last 10 years. And that is Peter Costello and Alexander Downer.
Peter has been a wonderful Treasurer and the principal architect of the economic policies of the Government. Alexander has been an extraordinarily successful and capable Foreign Minister. Somebody who did a great thing for the Party early in 1995 when he facilitated a change of leadership in a way that brought the Party together and laid the foundation for our victory just over a year later.
Can I turn to all of you in the Liberal Party in Western Australia. The last election, measured by the two-party preferred vote, Western Australia was our second best state after Queensland. We won two seats from the Labor Party and we can win some more at the next election if we continue to chose the calibre of candidates that we chose at the last election and were successful in winning seats from Labor. The party organisation here performed magnificently and I do pay tribute to you, Danielle, for the wonderful leadership you gave as President and the then State Director Paul Everingham and the general support that I received from the organisation. It was always a delight to come to Western Australia in 2004. Everything was organised, people were enthusiastic, there was a sense that things were going to happen and that things were going to turn very, very well for the Liberal Party and that is precisely how it turned out. And to my cabinet colleagues from Western Australia, in Julie Bishop who has done a wonderful job already in the short time that she has been Education Minister, to Ian Campbell who is a wonderfully articulate spokesman on the environment and he gave you a few statistics.
Let me give you a statistic that he used in a cabinet discussion we had last week with Tony Blair and it drives home the reason why you won't solve the problem of global warming until you get the largest polluters in the world, namely China and the United States within the embrace of the global solution. He said that if all greenhouse gas emissions in Australia were to stop tomorrow, it would only take 10 months of additional greenhouse gas emissions from China following the cessation of them in Australia to cancel out completely the value of there being no more greenhouse gas emissions in this country. And it is a measure of the dimension of the problem that we face in tackling that issue.
But to all of you my friends can I say that the journey of the last 10 years has been a wonderful experience. It has been a privilege every single day of my life to be Prime Minister of this country. It is the greatest privilege any man or woman can have to be the Prime Minister of this wonderful country and all of you have helped in different ways, to our donors, and so many of them are here tonight, you have been generous, very generous, very, very supportive. I encourage you, of course, not to lose the habit. And I express my very great gratitude. To the branch members, to my parliamentary colleagues and to everybody who believes in and passionately fights for and advocates the Liberal cause. You have shared the journey of the last 10 years. And in conclusion can I express my gratitude to somebody who has helped me more than anybody else in my political life and that is my wife Janette, whose support and that of my three great, wonderful children have made it all possible.
It has been a good 10 years. We have achieved a lot for our country. We are privileged to have had the opportunity, but we have a lot left to be done and I want to go on working with you and giving my all and I know all of my colleagues want to give their all in continued service of all of the Australian people. Thank you.
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