Thank you very much Stuart, I think being captain and playing for the West Australian Rugby Union team, playing that game that they play here, and I think it's absolutely fantastic. As I once, in a moment of exuberance, said at a gathering for him in the last election campaign: could have been, should have been a Wallaby and it ended up in one of his campaign brochures. Can I say, Stuart and my old friend Barry McKinnon, my Federal and State Parliamentary colleagues, Danielle Blain, the State President of the Liberal Party, and can I also acknowledge the presence of an old and valued friend of mine, Sir Arvi Parbo, nobody understands and knows more about the mining industry in this country than Arvi Parbo and it's great to have you with us Arvi.
And, you know, let me sort of pay my due tributes right at the beginning, yes, Western Australia does have only 11 per cent of the nation's population, and you do contribute, what about 35 per cent of the nation's export in income. I understand that and I pay tribute to it and the entrepreneurial spirit and flair of this state, which has always been there, is really more in evidence and making a greater contribution to the nation's wellbeing than ever before.
And in a way I felt, as Stuart was introducing me, that I was the preacher and he was the person reading the lesson because he really did give me my text for today when he quoted from something I said yesterday, when I made the remark that today's prosperity is a product of yesterday's reforms, and the prosperity we all want for tomorrow can only be achieved if we are determined to undertake further reform and further changes today. And it's a very important lesson because, the one challenge we have as a country now is not to allow the prosperity we are enjoying to become the instrument of future decline, and future deterioration because there is a big danger that we take our prosperity for granted.
Our prosperity is the product of the huge endowment of natural resources, that's a very big part of it, but it's not the only part of it. It's a product of a lot of reforms that were carried out over the last 20 years. And I have never, incidentally, been reluctant to give the former government some credit for some of the reforms it carried out. In fact some of the reforms carried out in areas like financial deregulation, we supported, and we in fact first proposed when we were in government, and current cuts, they were important reforms. I do of course make the observation that one of the differences between the attitude that we then took in Opposition to those reforms, which was to support them, is in sharp contrast to the attitude being taken by the same Labor Party now that it is in Opposition because all of the reforms that we have tried to carry out, they have tried to frustrate and oppose. They left us with a big budget deficit and then tried to stop us getting it back into surplus. They opposed taxation reform, they've opposed industrial relations reform, they've opposed the privatisation of Telstra, even though they privatised the Commonwealth Bank and Qantas, and so the list goes on.
But the point I make is that the prosperity we now have, sure is a product of our resources and the great endowment of them, it is a product of earlier reform, but it's also very importantly a product of the contribution that individual Australians have made over the last 10 or 20 years. One of the great qualities that Australians have is that they are very adaptable. Perhaps it's because we don't have any class structure in this country. But because we are an egalitarian society we can work with each other and we can cooperate to achieve a common objective, far more readily than many other societies with which we normally make comparison.
But we must understand that the prosperity we now have will slip through our fingers if we give up on reform and give up on change. I know it's hard when you're doing well to say to people well we've got to keep making change. A lot of people say to me, John, you've got a terrific economy, unemployment is down, the country is doing well, particularly Western Australia, why do you keep talking about change and reform? The reason I do is that I know, and I'm sure many of you know and fully realise that if we are to keep it as it is, then we have a special responsibility to undertake the further reforms and the further changes that are needed. And that is why we pressed ahead with workplace relations reform. It would've been easy after the last election to have said, oh well look, we'll just tinker at the edges, we'll make a few little changes and pretend that we've reformed it further. But I knew and my colleagues knew that that would have been intellectually dishonest and it would have been betraying of the country's economic future.
And I have no doubt that those industrial relations changes will over the years ahead lay the further foundations of another round of productivity increases, another round of prosperity. And I know as Stuart rightly said, that if the mining industry in Australia, and particularly here in Western Australia, loses, where something like 43 per cent of the employment arrangements in the mining industry in Western Australia are built on AWAs, if those AWA's are taken away, then that will do enormous damage to the mining industry in this country because, and in this state, because it is those sort of arrangements that allow us to practise the flexibility that we are so capable of delivering. And the whole idea of our industrial relations changes is not to attack unions, it is not to mandate AWAs in every situation, but to give people the right to make the employment arrangements that best suit them and best suit their enterprise.
Now in some cases that will involve a union collective agreement, in other cases it will involve a collective agreement that doesn't involve a union, in still further cases it will involve Australian Workplace Agreements. It has been estimated that by the next election there will be more than $1 million Australians employed on Australian Workplace Agreements. And the thought of saying to those people, well your employment arrangements, if there is a change of Government, are thrown into doubt and thrown into conjecture, will be to create particularly, but not only in the resource industry, an enormous amount of chaos and an enormous amount of confusion.
Now today's gathering I know is something, a gathering that has been convened under the auspices of Stuart's campaign committee. It is unashamedly, therefore, a luncheon in support of the Liberal member and the Liberal candidate for Hasluck. And I want to say that you have in Stuart a very special member. You have somebody who has brought to the parliament an understanding of small business, he has brought to the parliament understanding of an industry, we need people like that. It is very important that the party that identifies with the cause of small business has within its ranks a reasonable number of people who have actually had hands on experience in small business. But Hasluck of course is not an easy seat for us to hold, it is the seventh most marginal seat in the country and we have to work very, very, hard to make sure that Stuart is returned at the election.
And the next election, can I promise you, is not going to be an easy one for us to win. I know there is a bit of a feeling, oh it is a pushover, it is not, please believe me. It is going to be very difficult. We will be asking the Australian people to return the Government for a fifth term and in anybody's language that is a significant challenge. And although the economy is strong and I expect it will be strong at the time of the election, I would expect unemployment still to be quite low, I won't hang my hat on a particular figure, but I think we will still have very strong economic conditions. But once again as years go by people start taking it for-granted. I spoke to somebody a moment ago who said he had three children and they've never known any Government, or any Prime Minister other than my Government or the time that I have been Prime Minister. Now, I mean they must be, you know, I guess, quite young and obviously taking a very early interest in politics as well, which is very encouraging.
I guess the point of all of that piece of frivolity is that after a while you, people do take things for-granted and it is very easy therefore an Opposition to say, well look, you know it wouldn't be very different under us, we'll keep the prosperity going, we'll keep the unions in check and all of that sort of thing.
The reality of course is that the longer you are in office, the greater becomes the challenge. And that is why your support at gatherings like this in marginal seats like Hasluck are so overwhelmingly important.
The last thing that I want to say is that in all that we say and do about our governance of Australia, we should always put it in the context of our optimism about, and our hope about, the future of this country. If I could, in a phrase, describe the change that has come over Australia in the last 10 years, I would best do it by saying that this is a country that is filled with hope and positive thoughts about itself. It is something I find, as I move around the country, people are enthusiastic, people are no longer faulting and apologetic about what this country stands for. Sure, there are a lot of people who hate everything that my party and our party represent, and there are plenty of people who would love to see the back of me, I understand that. I have no illusions that there are people barracking for the other side. But even many of those who are barracking for the other side, they do recognise the fundamental strength of this economy.
I noticed the other day, I suppose a stream of consciousness from Wayne Swan the Shadow Treasurer when somebody was reported in last weekend's Australian, with some observations about the impact of minimum wage increases on levels of unemployment in Australia. Wayne Swan was debunking what this fellow was saying and he said, what he has got to understand is that we have a boom economy, we're doing extremely well, our economy is very strong and our unemployment is at a 30 year low. I thought gee, he's the Labor Party's Shadow Treasurer. Now I can assure Wayne Swan that that particular remark will end up in an election pamphlet. It certainly will. It might even end up in one of Stuart Henry's election pamphlets here in Hasluck.
But the point I want to make is that people do have a sense of well-being about our country and I can certainly say, as somebody who's had the privilege of representing Australia abroad on lots of occasions over the last few years that the regard in which this country is held, and the belief that we are a strong country, we do punch above our weight, we do have a very virile economy and we're also a nation that's prepared to take a stand on difficult issues even though they may not be popular all of the time. It is something that has marked us out as a nation very much of the early years of the 21st Century.
So ladies and gentlemen, I want to thank all of you for coming along to support this great bloke. He's a terrific Member and he's made a great contribution, but it's not going to be easy, it's a pretty tough seat and he needs all of your help and I hope there's lot of it over the next 15 or 16 months.
Thank you.
[ends]