Well thank you very much Chris for those very generous words of introduction, I particularly acknowledge a number of my very valued Cabinet colleagues here, especially the Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, who really has done a remarkable job over ten-and-a-half years in representing the interests of this nation overseas. We've only had three people in the whole time we've been in government that have remained in the positions to which they were appointed after we won the election in March of 1996, myself of course, last time I checked, and Alexander Downer who's done a superb job and Peter Costello, to whom so much is owed for the stewardship and the guardianship of our economic fortunes over that period of time. And to my many other parliamentary colleagues who are here, and Nick Minchin, of course the keeper of the purse, the Finance Minister, the Leader of the Government in the Senate and to all of my other colleagues, and I know a number from interstate are in town for the State Conference, I acknowledge you and I thank you, and I thank the State Division. And can I say what a wonderful start Iain Evans has made as the new Leader of the Opposition here in South Australia. I think...yes let's give him a round of applause, it's not easy being in opposition, not easy being an opposition leader, I remember it well and have no desire to return to it, no intention of returning to it but Ian good luck, and I wish you well in the campaign to bring about a change of government here in South Australia at the time the next election takes place.
In introducing me Chris was kind of enough to talk about the state of the Australian economy. And everything he said was absolutely correct. The Australian economy is very strong. We are now in the 16th year of economic expansion, 16 consecutive years of economic growth. There's not been a period in our history where we've had such continuous and consistent economic expansion. There was a time in the 1960s when conditions were very good, but in a lot of respects the Australian economy then was not as robust and competitive as it is now. It was heavily protected, we had high tariffs, we had a heavily regulated financial system, we had a highly centralised wage fixation system and we were enjoying the opportunity that history had given us of those sort of economic protections. Now, of course, we live in a very globalised economic environment and the fact that the Australian economy is growing strongly in that environment is a matter of very great satisfaction - not only to the Government - but more importantly to the principal beneficiaries of economic prosperity, and that of course is the men and women of Australia.
And the best thing of all is that Australians, as Chris said, who want a job have got a job. And it is a proud boast of ours that we have been a better friend of the Australian worker than the Labor Party ever was. Wages have gone up, unemployment has gone down, interest rates have gone down, taxes have gone down, business investment has boomed, we've got rid of the budget deficit, we've paid off our debt and as the OECD said a couple of months ago when reporting on Australia, that we have the highest living standards on an individual basis in the world, apart from the United States. And of course our society is a more equal society than the United States because we have always wisely in my view had a more generous and a more effective social security safety net than have the Americans.
So having said all of that you might well ask, well what next? What next really, and this is the key question that the Australian people will need to address over the next 12 to 15 months and that key question very simply is, which side of politics in Australia is better able to maintain and prolong the prosperity of the last 15 years? Because the prosperity we now have, today's prosperity is a product of yesterday's reforms and yesterday's changes. And if we are to maintain that prosperity, to build on it, to grow it, make it even stronger, we need to continue to embrace economic change and reform. And the question people must ask is will the Labor Party be better than us at encouraging business investment? Will the Labor Party be better than us at further reducing unemployment? Will the Labor Party be better than us at providing further increases in real wages based on productivity? And will the Labor Party be better than us at keeping interest rates down? And I think that last one would send a chill through many people in this room and many people in the Australian community because at a time when the economy is strong, and there are some inflationary pressures in business, and some inflationary pressures in the Australian economy, it is the last time in the world to go back to the high interest rate specialists of the Australian Labor Party.
So the big challenge is a very fundamental and a very simple one. That is which side of politics is better able to maintain the prosperity and to stretch that 15 or 16 years out to 20 or 25 years? And there's no reason why we can't do that if we are willing to undertake continuous reform. And it's that belief that drove us to bring in the WorkChoices legislation, the biggest single reform of this term in office. WorkChoices came in on the 27th of March and there were two predictions made by our opponents. And the field evidence to date is not going too well for them. The first prediction they made was that it would be a charter for mass sackings - that's what Bill Shorten, the great hope, new hope of the Australian Labor Party, the national secretary of the Australian Workers Union. Bill Shorten said this was a charter for mass sackings. Since WorkChoices came in we've seen 159,000 new jobs created in Australia. It's probably been the best three-month period for new job creation in the last 10 years. The other prediction that was made was that wages were going to be driven down, now of course all the statistics indicate that, certainly in the early months, that has not occurred. And as your President said in his opening remarks, the real wage performance of this Government far outstrips that of the former government. And the reason is that we now have a less regulated industrial relations system. And if you have a less regulated industrial relations system you build employment arrangements that suit the circumstances of individual firms, and that makes sense. Mr Beazley says that he will get rid of Australian Workplace Agreements. There are hundreds of thousands of those agreements. And here in South Australia, the Roxby Downs uranium mine, most people there are employed on AWAs. In the resource industry in Western Australia, close to 50 per cent of people in the resource industries are on AWAs. And if AWAs are abolished that will do enormous damage to the resource industry in Australia.
And why would you want to cripple, why would you want to put a dead weight on the back of the most successful industry sector that this country has at the present time? Now that's a simple question that I pose to the Leader of the Opposition, who has his ideological objection to Australian Workplace Agreements. I don't have an ideological objection to collective agreements, I don't have an ideological objection to people belonging to unions and if they want their union to negotiate for them, I have no problem with that. Well why should Mr Beazley have a problem with people negotiating directly with their employers, without the intervention of a union? Because fewer than 20 per cent of Australian workers in the private sector now belong to unions, that's their choice, they've voted with their feet. Who's the ideologue, who's the fanatic, who's the extremist? It's not me, I'm in favour of choice, he's against choice, I don't mind if people belong to a union, they can get a union bloke to negotiate for them, terrific, that's fine. Why therefore should the boot not be on the other foot? Why shouldn't Mr Beazley acknowledge that if somebody doesn't want to negotiate through a union, he or she should not have to, because the bottom line is the unions want to get back in control of the country, and Greg Combet said that in an unguarded moment, I think he may even had been here in South Australia, he made that observation in an unguarded moment. He said, you know, wouldn't it be good if we were running the country again. The truth is that if Labor wins the unions will be injecting themselves back into every workplace agreement they can get their hands on, even if they're not wanted and in fact they're repudiated by the workers in those individual industries.
So we do as a country have every reason to be proud of what we have achieved over the last 10 or 15 years. And the prosperity we now have is the product of reforms, and I've always given them credit for it, the former Labor government enacted a number of very sensible economic reforms, and they had our support. When they deregulated the financial system, we didn't oppose it, we supported it, because it had come out of the Campbell Inquiry which I'd established as Treasurer. When they reduced tariffs we didn't run a fear campaign amongst Australian workers because we knew it was in the long term interests of the country that that happen. But every economic reform we have tried to implement they've opposed. We inherited a huge budget deficit, not only did they give us a deficit, but than they tried to block every move we took to get rid of it. And when we brought in tax reform, they opposed that. And they opposed our industrial relations reform. They've opposed the privatisation of Telstra. They have opposed root and branch every single, sensible economic reform that this Government has endeavoured to bring about, and of course we only ever bring about sensible economic reforms.
So let me say that not only did they neglect other reforms when they were in government, but I think to their very great discredit, they have opposed sensible reforms in opposition. So these are choices that the community has. In a democracy there's always a choice. And people can vote a government in, they can vote it out, and I will be telling the Australian people a lot over the next 15 to 18 months of that choice, of asking that rhetorical question. Who do you think will better maintain the prosperity we now have? Do you really think the high interest rate specialists that gave us 17 per cent and 21 per cent can do a better job of maintaining the prosperity we now have? Or do you think we'll do a better job? Now that is something that ultimately the Australian people will resolve.
Could I just say something before I conclude about a non-economic matter, because the world and life is not just about economics, although it is moderately important to the existence and being of us all. But I want to say about history, not political history but history generally. I believe very passionately that Australians increasingly know less and less about the history of this country that they should and I think that is sad. And it's my very strong view that the parents of Australia think that's sad. And the reason that we have embarked upon an exercise in bringing back a proper disciplined teaching of Australian history, and all the things that contributed to the modern Australia in our schools, is not throughout because of some ideology. I don't want some authorised version of Australian history. There'll always be debate about the meaning of particular events, there'll always be debate about the influence of movements, the influence of different philosophies and different political and religious beliefs on the development of nations, but a country that doesn't understand fully where it came from and what it experienced is a country that can't properly understand the present and respond effectively to the future. And I looked through some of the notes that were prepared for the 'history summit', and some of the commentary on the teaching of Australian history in South Australian schools, and I found that there was no detailed curriculum requirement, and no particular timetable allocation for Australian history. I found that history in South Australia is taught primarily through 'Society and Environment', this means there is no set approach for the teaching of history topics. I learnt that in senior years, listen to this, 'students critically analyse continuities and discontinuities over time and reflect upon the power relationships which shape and are shaped by these' - a very interesting version, sort of, of teaching history.
All I want to say is that we want a change. We believe very strongly that there is no structured narrative to the teaching of history in most Australian schools around Australia. There are exceptions, I have to say that the curriculum in New South Wales is more rigorous and a lot more effective and comprehensive than it is in many other states. I don't mean to give offence to anybody, but I really feel very strongly about it. I think we have taught history as some kind of fragmented stew of moods and events, rather than some kind of proper narrative. I don't believe that history is simply taught by the rote learning of dates, but you can't have an understanding of events and movements unless you have some sense of the order and sequence in which things occurred and the cause and effect over a period of time of developments in our own nation.
And in talking about teaching Australian history I don't just mean teaching the history of Australia since European settlement. Of course we must have an understanding of indigenous history, we must also have an understanding of the history of those societies that shaped Australia, more than any other; we must of course have an understanding of British history because the institutions we inherited from Britain have been very important to our society; we must have an understanding of the history of the countries in our own region; we should have an understanding of the history of the United States, which is so very important to Australia because of its size and influence. In other words we've got to have some understanding of the history of countries and movements that have influenced our nation. But most importantly of all we have to have an understanding and a pride in what this country has achieved. I mean how many Australians now know that this country was in the forefront of giving women the vote around the world. This country was years ahead of countries in Europe in giving women the vote. That our Federation is, given that it was in 1901 and for all of the mistakes that we have made as a nation, and we've made many, and for all of the difficulties of the federal system in this country, it is an infinitely more useable and effective federal model than the models that operate in many other federations.
And if you go back and trawl back through the history of this country there are many great Australian democratic firsts of which we can be enormously proud. And the sad thing is that I don't think many people know it. And in a sense that the metaphor for my frustration I heard on the PM program a couple of months ago, and a young women who on all other criteria was highly successful and highly intelligent, and she was asked by the interviewer what the date of Federation was, and she didn't know it, what year did the ANZAC legend arise and the Gallipoli landing take place, and she didn't know that. And she was asked who the first Prime Minister of Australia was, and she didn't know that. Now I'm not saying that if you just know all of those things that's enough, you've got to be willing to embrace it, understand the impact of the depression on this country, the importance of post-war migration, the influence of other movements divisive and uniting in the history of Australia. But I think we have failed our young and our not so young because the muddled thinking about history in our education system has been around for a very long time, and it'll be like trying to turn around an ocean liner. But it's an enterprise that we ought to undertake and I hope that the State Governments will join us. And I was delighted that Bob Carr, a former Labor premier of New South Wales, and a person who believes passionately, as I do, in the proper teaching of history in our schools. I was delighted that he was part of the 'history summit'. And I can't for the life of me understand why Kim Beazley regards what we are trying to do as an elite preoccupation, that's how he described it. Well it might be alright for him to regard it as an elite preoccupation, but the parents of Australia regard it as part of the bread and butter of their children having a decent education, just as they regard literacy and numeracy as part of that.
My friends, thank you very much to the support that you're giving to the South Australian Division. I'm delighted to be back again and the occasion being presided over by Michael Pratt and to all of you, thank you, very, very much and as our thoughts wander to football at the weekend, I know you'll all join me as a lover of the game they play in heaven, in wishing the Wallabies the very best in their match in New Zealand.
Thank you very much.
[ends]