Thank you very much Mal for those very kind words of welcome, Warwick Parer, my friend the President of the Queensland Division, Geoffrey Green the State Director, my parliamentary colleagues from both the Liberal and National parties, my fellow Australians. It is as always great to be back in Brisbane and great to be back in the great state of Queensland. Mal and I occasionally go together to watch State of Origin Rugby League games and lots of people come along and say I suppose you're barracking for New South Wales and I say certainly not. I said after how generous the people of Queensland were to me at the last federal election I'll never barrack against Queensland again in my life.
I do want to thank all of my Liberal and National Party Colleagues from Queensland and all of the members of the two coalition parties for the wonderful support and loyalty that you have all extended to me and to the members of my government. We do hold an extraordinarily high proportion of the seats here in Queensland and the challenge ahead of us to retain the seats we now hold and hopefully extend even further is very great indeed and we meet at a time when we're about a year approximately from the election and the next 12 months is something that will focus our minds and our energies and our efforts on ensuring that we retain government. I want to thank not only my parliamentary colleagues but also thank the members of the party, the men and women who've worked so hard. Especially do I thank Warwick Parer and Geoffrey Green. It's not easy being a state president or a state director. There are lot of pressures, there are a lot of demands and both of them have displayed superb loyalty and superb professionalism so far as all the contacts that I've had with them and I thank them very, very warmly.
It is as Mal said, a time of great prosperity for the Australian nation and the real question to be asked of the Australian people over the next year is a very simple one and that is which side of politics is better able to consolidate and expand the prosperity that Australia now enjoys. It's been instructive that over the last week in Melbourne there's a conference jointly organised by the Australian Newspaper and the Melbourne Institute of Economic Affairs which is focused on the broad concept of managing the boom, managing the prosperity we now have. Isn't it interesting, 10 years ago the conference would have been about searching for prosperity, about how to gain prosperity, how to have prosperity but now when you have an economic conference of this type anywhere in Australia, the given is that the prosperity is there and the debate is about how you manage and how you prolong that prosperity and over the next year I will be saying a lot about the differences between the capacity of the coalition and the capacity of the Labor Party to manage and expand and develop and consolidate the prosperity we now have and be asking the Australian people do they want to elect as an alternative government to this country a group of people who over the last 10 years have opposed every single change this government has made to create the prosperity we now take for granted because all of the things that we have done of any consequence over the last 12 months have been opposed by the Australian Labor Party.
They opposed getting the budget back into surplus having left it in deficit and I ask a simple question of the farmers here today. This government has been able to respond generously and promptly to the travail of the drought which is gripping so much of our nation. Just imagine how much more argumentative would be the decisions if our budget was billions of dollars in deficit and we weren't able to write out the cheques to help our struggling farmers limp through this dreadful drought and then be in a position to launch themselves when ultimately as it always does eventually, I know it's hard to believe, rain again.
We have so much now which is a product of the efforts and the reforms of the last 10 years, but we should never lose sight of the fact that every single major reform has been opposed by Mr Beazley, and the most recent of course has been his opposition to our workplace relations reforms. Remember when they were introduced in March of this year, chicken- little like he said the sky is going to fall in. He said that there would be mass sackings; instead there've been mass hiring's. We have seen 205,000 more jobs created in Australia over the seven months that have passed since the introduction of Workchoices. He said there would be industrial disputation; in fact the most recent figures on strikes tell us that in the last three months we have recorded the lowest level of industrial disputes since records began to be kept on this in 1913 before the outbreak of World War One.
Finally of course he said that our policy was designed to drive down real wages. He knows a lot about driving down real wages, he spent 13 years doing it when he was a member of the Hawke and Keating government. The reverse has proved to be the case. Real wages have continued to grow in Australia. In the week before last the Fair Pay Commission, so insultingly described as the low pay commission by the Australian Labor Party, produced its first minimum wage adjustment and what that minimum wage adjustment did was drive the final nail in the coffin so far as Labor's attack on this legislation was concerned.
It reflected the capacity of this country to afford a decent increase in the minimum wage for the low paid in the Australian community, and no doubt the decision of the Fair Pay Commission was greeted with gloom and doom in ACTU headquarters and gloom and doom in ALP headquarters because it robbed them of an argument they desperately hoped and prayed they might have in order to attack and assail our legislation.
This legislation helps to lay the ground work for maintaining our future prosperity. Today's prosperity is a product of yesterday's reforms. Tomorrow's prosperity can only be achieved if we reform today and that is why we set about changing the industrial relations system. Mr Beazley says that if he becomes Prime Minister, he will tear up the legislation; he's going to tear up what might be close to one million Australian Workplace Agreements. Imagine the chaos, particularly in the mining and resource industries which are so important to the wealth and prosperity of Australia if close to a million Australian Workplace Agreements are dismantled by a future Labor government. The chaos, the dislocation, the penalties that will be imposed on Australians who have entered into those agreements will be unimaginable. But this is akin to the rollback of the Goods and Services Tax. In 2000 Mr Beazley told his caucus that he would surf to victory on a wave of discontent against the introduction of the Goods and Services Tax. He always is negative, he's never positive. He never tells us what he believes in, he always tells us what he's opposed to and his record is one of constant opposition to all of the things that have been necessary to deliver the prosperity which is now the starting point for economic debate about Australia's future.
My friends, one of the qualities that has always helped define Australia and one of the great attributes that Australians over the years have brought to the development of good public policy is a sense of balance. We are a nation that does achieve on most important issues a sense of balance and a sense of sensible accommodation. For example, we have achieved probably better than any other country a sense of balance in relation to the roles of the public and the private sectors in both health and education and I know that our health system has it's flaws, not least in the area of public hospitals here in Queensland, but compared with the health systems of many other countries we have achieved a greater sense of balance. We recognise that there's a role for the public sector and there's a role for private sector. We support private hospitals, we support private health insurance as well as recognising the ongoing role of public hospitals in providing high quality services around our country to our citizens. The same thing applies with education. We probably have a better mix of public and private education, both delivering high quality outcomes than any comparable country in the world and we should be proud of that mix,of that balance. We endorse the right of parents to choose where they will be educated, but we also believe and I do very strongly, that it's essential that we maintain a high quality public education system that is available relatively speaking without cost to all Australian children if they so choose.
Once again, there is a sense of balance and the same thing applies in relation to our social security safety net. We have avoided the harshness of the American system where people can be left without any kind of support when they go off unemployment benefits and it's one of the explanations why the prison population in that country is much higher relatively speaking than it is in Australia or other comparable countries, yet on the other hand we have avoided the paternalism of the European welfare system that provides incentives to people to stay endlessly on welfare, is overregulated and cosseted towards employment laws and as a result has a much higher unemployment rates than either the United States or Australia or New Zealand.
Once again we have a sense of balance, we find the mid point and we are as a nation, as a people, we avoid the ideological extremes of debate. The point I want to make to you this morning is that just as we have brought a sense of balance to things like education and social security and health, something must bring a sense of balance to this debate going on in the community about global warming and climate change. We need a sense of balance in relation to this debate. The climate is changing, we do need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we'd be foolish to pretend as a nation or as a people and we haven't done so to date that nothing is going to change in the future but we must avoid the danger of going overboard in the other direction. We must reject panicky, knee jerk reactions that run the risk of hurting our prosperity.
We must always remember and no audience in Australia will remember it better than a Queensland audience, we must remember the great contribution that gas and coal and other fossil fuels are making to the prosperity of this country. One of the reasons Australia is doing so well at the moment is that providence has given us these vast natural resources; they are the envy of so many people around the world. They are fuelling the huge economic, the historic economic expansion of China and of course they have fuelled the economic growth and expansion of both Japan and Korea for many decades. We have the largest reserves of uranium in a single location in the world, we are the largest coal exporter in the world and we have vast reserves of natural gas and we have an enormous natural advantage in these industries.
The point I make is that it would be a colossal act of self injury for this country to be panicked into changes in response to climate variation that unfairly disadvantaged our great resource industries, robbed those industries of investment and trade opportunities and resulted in the unemployment of many thousands of Australians. What we need to do as this debate continues is to preserve that sense of balance. We can't, and haven't put our head in the sand and pretended that the problem isn't there, but we must avoid being mesmerised by individual reports, there will be many of them and as time goes by some of the contents of those reports will be seen as accurate, and some as not so accurate and all the time we have to remember that Australia is different from Europe, it is different from America, it is different from Asia.
In many respects the whole debate surrounding the Kyoto protocol has been driven out of Europe rather than out of countries whose economic circumstances are similar to our own and we have to be very careful to keep those things in mind as we go forward and we must make sure that the adjustment that inevitably will have to be undertaken does not occur in a way that puts us at a competitive disadvantage to the rest of the world. We must be certain that any additional costs borne by our resource industries are also borne by competitor resource industries in other countries, otherwise we're going to lose the competitive advantage that we now have and that is the reason why we never ratified the existing Kyoto protocol, although unlike most other countries in the developed world, we are going to meet or nearly meet the target set under the Kyoto protocol for Australia's greenhouse gas emissions.
The other point that I want to make to you this morning in relation to climate change is that any balanced approach has got to look at all of the options. We've got to look as we have been doing now for a number of years, and the week before last Ian Macfarlane announced major projects which have been some months in development in relation to the clean coal technologies and the week before Peter Costello and Ian Macfarlane announced the largest solar energy project yet in the world and we announced those projects in fulfilment of commitments we made some two and a half to three years ago. But in looking at responses to climate change and recognising the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as the years go by we need to have all of the options on the table and one of the options that's got to be on the table is nuclear power. I believe that the world's attitude towards nuclear power is changing. I believe that Australian attitudes towards nuclear power are changing. Nuclear power is potentially the cleanest and the greenest of them all and we would be foolish from a national interest point of view with our vast reserves of uranium to say that we are not going to consider nuclear power, not even going to look at it, we're going to say no to it before the debate even starts, and yet that is that is the attitude of the Australian Labor Party with one notable exception, Martin Ferguson, a man who does understand the needs and the aspirations of what used to be the working class supporters of his party.
So my friends we need to have clean coal technology on the table, we need to have renewables, we also need to have nuclear power. But most importantly we need a response to this challenge that cares for Australia's national interests and preserves the great competitive advantage we have. Wouldn't it be an extraordinary national paradox if this country having achieved great prosperity in no small measure due to the resources that providence has given us were then to be knee jerked into a response to global warming that crippled the very industries that gave us that prosperity. That would be an extraordinary national paradox and I can promise you that while ever I am Prime Minister of this country I am not going to allow that to occur.
So my friends as I said at the beginning of my remarks, we have an enormous struggle ahead of us. I don't want anybody in this room to imagine that the next election will be easy. I ask all of you to utterly disbelieve those polls that say 70 per cent of the people to predict that the Government is going to be returned. It's going to be very tough. The Labor party is always competitive federally. We'll be shooting for our fifth election victory and we will face in the lead up to the election campaign at least six, perhaps eight, I don't know depending on the outcome of state elections in New South Wales and Victoria, we'll face six incumbent state and territory Labor governments with all the extra man power that that means, with all the resources available to state governments to attack the national government. We will need a great effort, we will need an extraordinary amount of enthusiasm from our rank and file and I know that will happen. We will also need may I say and I say it very bluntly and I say it very unapologetically, we will need total co-operation between the Liberal and National parties. I am a coalitionist. I am a Liberal first, second and third but I am a great believer in the coalition. The coalition has brought stability and prosperity to Australia, the coalition I now lead is the most united stable coalition that this country has had and we've had three great coalitions federally since the end of World War Two and together our two parties have achieved so much.
I know we have our historic differences and I understand the variations that occur around Australia from one state to another, but for me at a federal level the unity of the coalition, the cohesion the collation brings is fundamental to our victory and in the end we have only one enemy in politics and that's the Australian Labor Party. We have achieved so much over the last ten years and we have not in the process betrayed the interests of the more vulnerable in the Australian community. Despite all of the predications that were made when they said the income gap would broaden, would widen while we were in government the truth is that yes the rich have got richer and that does happen in a prosperous society, but they haven't got richer at the expense of the poor getting poorer, indeed at that very conference I mentioned a moment ago there was analysis demonstrating that people in the middle had benefited most from taxation and family benefit policies of this government. We have so much to be proud of but that is in the past. Politics is always about the future, the next election will in part be determined by the public's assessment of what we have done over the last 10 years, but it will be even more determined by the public's assessment of which side of politics is better able to preserve the security and the stability and the prosperity that we now enjoy. I have no doubt that is the coalition and that together our two parties can win and win again for the benefit of the future of the Australian people. Thank you.
[Ends]