E&OE…………………………………………………………………………………..
Well thank you very much Mr President for that very very warm welcome. To David Johnston, the President of the Western Australian Division, and my federal and state parliamentary colleagues, ladies and gentlemen. Can I say that I really am very pleased to be at this gathering of Liberal Party supporters and friends in the Stirling Division because I see the next federal election, and it’s not for another 18 months, and I know you’re going to have an intervening state election that’s very important for the future of Western Australia. But I see the next federal election very much in terms of the Liberal Party on the front foot fighting to take back some seats from the Labor Party that it won at the 1998 election. It won’t just be a question of defending the seats that the Liberal and National Parties hold throughout Australia, but it will also present us with an opportunity of taking the fight to the Labor Party in seats such as Stirling, a seat that we do need to win at the next federal election, a seat that we can win at the next federal election, and with your assistance see it again represented in the Federal Parliament by a Liberal.
This weekend will precede the Labor Party’s national conference. And whenever political parties have national conferences it’s an opportunity for the nation to do a little bit of political stocktaking to make a few comparisons. And we are now just over half way through our second term in government. And it is possible to reflect for a few moments as we should on what the government has done, on what people said we couldn’t do and what we have achieved against what seemed on occasions to be impossible odds. And when I think back over the last six months, and when my federal colleagues who are present here tonight think back over the last six months, there were occasions when it looked as though everything was against us. The last six months in particular was as I said the time of our greatest political peril and difficulty in relation to the introduction of the new tax system. It was easy to run a scare a day, it was easy for Kim Beazley and Simon Crean to get on the television and say the pensioners are going to be worse off, the wage and salary earners are going to be worse off, everything’s going up by 10%, the whole nation’s going to be ruined. And that is basically what the Labor Party has done for the last two years. The Labor Party has played the politics of fear and negativism. The Labor Party hoped and prayed the GST would fall over on the 1st of July. They wanted it to hurt Australia. They wanted it to be a disappointment. They wanted it to be a disaster. They didn’t care about the Australian national interest. They only cared about their own political interest.
Now of course you all know that that didn’t turn out to be the case. And we have seen so far, and I’m by nature still a fairly cautious bloke, that we have seen so far the relatively smooth and steady and professional introduction of what is the biggest ever change to Australia’s taxation system. There hasn’t been an institutional change to the Australian economy since World War II that matches the introduction of the new taxation system. We’ve not only taken away an old fashioned indirect tax system and replaced it with a modern one, we’ve not only introduced the largest reductions in personal income tax ever, we’ve not only introduced for the first time since the introduction of uniform taxation as a war time measure in 1942, a method of revenue sharing which will give to the states of Australia access to a growth tax and which will enable them to have access to growing amounts of revenue in the years ahead in order to better fund their responsibilities in areas such as public hospitals, government schools, roads and police, which are the bread and butter responsibilities of state governments.
We’ve not only done all of those things but we have also introduced changes to the tax system that will ensure that more people are required to pay their fair share of the taxation burden. And we’ve also introduced a taxation system that is going to make our exporters more competitive. It’s going to provide cheaper fuel than otherwise would have been the case in the rural areas of Australia. And I could go on. I could talk about the halving of capital gains tax, I could talk about the fact that in two years time we’ll have one of the lowest corporate tax rates in the world falling from 36 cents in the dollar to 30 cents in the dollar. I could remind the self funded retirees and others here tonight who pay provisional tax that we’re abolishing provisional tax. I could talk about the many other changes that are going to make Australia a more attractive country in which to invest.
But if you aggregate it all together it does represent an enormous change. And the good news both economically and politically that I have for you tonight is that it’s now a reality. And we’re no longer dealing in allegation and supposition. We’re no longer having the Labor Party saying it’s a disaster and we replying saying it’s not a disaster and people not knowing the reality. They know now that Labor’s being lying for the last two years. They know now the Australian people that the Labor Party set out to destroy, to instill fear, to encourage despair, and to embark upon a very negative campaign. The Labor Party has been caught red handed trying to talk down Australia’s future, and the Labor Party deserves all the embarrassment that it is now experiencing as a result of that. And there shouldn’t be anybody in Australia who has the national interest at heart that should feel the least bit of sympathy or concern because of their current predicament. They have been caught bereft of any reasonable logical position.
We did take this tax reform to the people in 1998. We didn’t keep it in the drawer, we didn’t conceal it, we didn’t go to the last election saying we weren’t going to do it. We went to the previous one saying we weren’t going to do it and we didn’t during the first term. But having decided that we were going to do it we thought the only decent honest thing to do was to lay it bare with all its detail before the Australian people in 1998 and in the process taking a huge risk. I’m always amused when I read in the paper that the government is poll driven. I remember when I told the Liberal Party’s pollster that we were going to have a GST he nearly had a heart attack. He said you’ve got to be joking, you can’t do that. Now of course we did. We took the risk because in the end you are elected to government to do things for the future of the country.
You’re not elected to government to warm the leather seats of ministerial office, you’re not elected to government to drive around in white cars, you’re not elected to government just to enjoy the ceremony of it all. You are actually elected to government to do positive things. And I made a promise to myself and to my colleagues in March of 1996 that the government I led and the government of which they were a part was going to be an active reformist government. But it was also going to be a government that was prepared to defend those things of our past and our current institutions that were worth defending. In other words the quality of government is measured by your capacity to change those things that need change and to hang onto those things that continue to work and continue to serve the country well. And that’s been very much a hallmark of this government over the last four-and-a-quarter years. And we set out to reform the Australian taxation system in 1997. We laid the plans in front of the Australian people in 1998. We won the election telling the Australian people in detail what we were going to do. We had to negotiate some changes because we couldn’t get it through the Senate because of the opposition of the Labor Party and others. We didn’t get everything we wanted but what we got was a vast improvement on what it replaced. And we now have a modern more workable, fairer, more incentive driven and I believe overall a much finer taxation system. And it’s a tribute to the determination of the government, it’s a tribute to the determination of the government’s supporters not to weaken and waiver, and be diverted by the negative campaign that was run. And I know that at various stages over the last six months some of you must have thought gee, I wonder if this is really worth while. You must have wondered that the negative campaign might turn out to be right. And I want to thank all of you for the support and the loyalty that you demonstrated to the government particularly over the last six months.
I always believed that once the Australian people saw and experienced the taxation system operating they would realise that it was a change for the better. One of the memories that I will have of that weekend for the rest of my political life was the experience I had of going to small shop keepers in my own electorate in top Ryde in Sydney, and of talking to them and hearing them, all shapes and sizes of business and how they got ready for the GST, they’d got ready for the new taxation system. And how they assured me that they thought it would go okay. And that experience I had that morning, not talking to big operators, talking here to people who were running essentially family businesses, and telling me that it was going to be successful. And having a marvelous experience of an Armenian migrant insisting on paying. I wanted to buy a cappuccino and have it with him. And he said according to the custom of his culture he wasn’t going to allow me to buy the cappuccino and I was denied the opportunity of purchasing the first thing that I could where the GST was applied. But it was a very very interesting experience that. And I remember turning on the television set that night and they had footage of me going through the shopping centre and Peter Costello going through a shopping centre in his electorate in Melbourne. And then they threw the camera to my opponent, the Leader of the Opposition. And where was he? He was in the Labor Party caucus room in Canberra surrounded by photographs of former Labor Party leaders. And I thought to myself there’s got to be some symbolism in this – here we are out talking to the people and here’s the man who’s run an absolutely discredited, negative campaign for a period of 2 years surrounded by the ghosts of the Labor Party past. And I think there was a great deal of symbolism in that and the tax change has been well received and the Australian people in my view will always support reform if you can meet two criteria – you’ve got to persuade them that it’s good for the country – they always want to know whether it’s going to be good for Australia and if it’s good for Australia you’ve got them 50% of the way and if you can persuade them that it’s fair, you’ve got them 100% of the way.
And I always believed that if we produced a fair package, we campaigned on it over a long period of time, we put our energy and our resources into explaining the benefits of it, that they would come on board and support it and so it appears to have been the case.
Now as I say I am naturally a cautious person. But it has gone well. I’m not saying there won’t be some glitches and problems in individual areas as time goes by but fundamentally it’s been well received and the Australian people now know that all of the dire consequences that were predicted by our political opponents were falsely and unsoundly based and they now know that they have got a government that’s got the courage to pursue reforms that are for the good of the country and they have a Cabinet that’s willing to embrace necessary reform and it’s very important having had the success so far we’ve had with tax reform, that we don’t now complacently rest on our laurels and say, well, we’ve done enough, we’ll just sort of muddle along until the next election – that’s a recipe for defeat, you don’t do that.
It’s like running a business. You don’t mark time. You either go backwards or you keep going forward. And the message I have tonight and the message I have for Liberals all over Australia is that the reform process has to go on. You have no alternative in the modern world. The kind of world economic environment in which we now live requires that we keep reforming and changing. Doing it in a sensible way, doing it in a way that looks to the Australian national interest but nonetheless recognising that you don’t have the option of stopping the world spinning for a while and having a rest. It never works like that.
And there are other areas that need reform.
We can consistent with our very strong commitment to a social security safety net, and looking after people who need assistance, there are areas of welfare reform that need to be addressed. We need if possible to achieve further industrial relations reform; we need to persevere with our arguments in favour of the full privatisation of Telstra. It is pointless in my view investing $50 billion to $60 billion of public investment in a communications company – far better that that be invested in further debt retirement and other much needed national infrastructure.
So my message ladies and gentlemen tonight is that yes, we have done extremely well politically and economically in relation to taxation reform and the Labor Party is deservedly, thoroughly deservedly, on the back foot. I mean it continues to be a source of utter amazement to me that the man in the Labor Party who told the truth about taxation reform, John Della Bosca, has lost his job but all of those who continue with this fantasy, this humbug of rollback, continue to enjoy positions of authority within the Australian Labor Party.
I mean I ask you to go around to your small businesses, to go around to your friends and you ask them, having gone through what’s been involved, necessary though it was in introducing tax reform and introducing the new tax system, do those people seriously want in the course of the next couple of years to start winding it back, to start changing it again? We’ve just had the biggest change since World War II and Mr Beazley is saying, oh no, I want to change it again. And he can’t have it both ways. He can’t run around saying he’s trying to make it fairer, having previously said you can’t make it fairer, you can’t run around saying I’m going to make it fairer and then pretend, oh no, I’m only going to tinker at the edges. I mean he is stuck big time with rollback. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t pretend you’re going to roll it back and then at the end of the day do absolutely nothing. So when he talks about rollback, he’s talking about major change. He’s talking about tinkering in a big way with a system that’s only just been introduced and has been very well received.
It’s the equivalent, as somebody said to me the other day, you move into a new house, there’s just a bit of painting and a few light switches to be fixed and the week after you’ve moved in a truck load of fellows arrives and says, we’re here to demolish that room, to rebuild that wall, to redesign the garage and for good measure we’ve got the union fellows with us to help.
That’s basically, ladies and gentlemen, what the Labor Party is offering to do and I think it will be seen for the unwanted irrelevance that it really is, because what it illustrates is one very fundamental fact of political life and that is that the Labor Party is against a lot of things but at a federal level the Labor Party stands for absolutely nothing today except the reintroduction of union domination and union control into national politics if it should again be the federal government.
I mean one of the amazing things about Labor is that at a time when private sector trade unionism in this country is at an historically low level of 20%, you now have more trade union officials in the federal parliament than ever before. The union domination of the front bench of the Labor Party is greater and more extensive.
I read an article in The Australian today written by a man called Malcolm MacGregor – he used to be a political adviser for Bob Carr in New South Wales and he absolutely berated the composition of the national conference and he said 90% of it was made up of trade union officials, Labor Party staffers and Labor Party politicians. There was virtually no representation from the great cross section of the Australian community. Where were the small business men and women. Where were the people who had some of life’s experiences outside partisan politics. And it’s very very important that we bear that in mind when we look at the Australian Labor Party.
Mr Beazley has now been the Leader of the Opposition for as long as I have been Prime Minister and he’s been Leader of the Opposition longer than Paul Keating was Prime Minister of Australia but I still don’t know what he stands for. I know what he stands against and that’s us, I know that he criticises everything we do, you announce something you know is – you can sort of plan your day on the basis that he’ll attack it – you know he’s faithfully like clockwork. If I say something he’ll say the opposite. I mean that is the sort of stupid negativity that the Australian people get tired of. No political opponent can be so wrong that he’s wrong all the time. Life is not like that. There were occasions when I was Opposition Leader that I would agree with the Labor Party. In the middle 1980’s I supported the Labor Party’s moves to deregulate the financial system. I supported their moves when, before they abandoned them, for taxation reform and if you look back at that period you’ll see that many of the reforms that the former government introduced were only introduced, only made possible, because we supported them from Opposition.
And it would have been far better for Australia if Mr Beazley had done that after the last election. If after the last election he’d have got up and fronted the Australian people and he’d said ok I was against it, but they laid it out and the Australian people voted for it, I’ll let it go through and we’ll get onto something else, he would have been in a far different situation than he is now.
But ladies and gentlemen, I haven’t come here to give political advice to my opponent. I’ve come here to report to you that your federal government is not resting on its laurels. It’s not going to indulge itself in self congratulation, it’s not going to imagine that having implemented all the reforms that we have over the last four and a half years that the job is anywhere near finished. The job is never finished. We have a lot more ahead of us and we intend to embark enthusiastically on that task in the months ahead and in the lead up to the next election.
That, of course, brings me back to where I started and that is winning seats at the next election. As somebody who’s been in the Liberal Party for a great number of years and has been involved in grassroots campaigning in state and federal elections since the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, I know how important grassroots campaigning is and I know how important all of the people in this room are to our prospects of winning back Stirling. The Liberal Party needs people like you very very much and as Parliamentary Leader and Prime Minister I value very much the contribution that you make. Without the grassroots commitment and enthusiasm of people in the Liberal Party we can’t win back seats and I still believe very strongly in the value of local campaigning and of personal contact at a constituency level. All of those things remain important. They’re even more important now than many of the political experts imagine because there is within the Australian community a greater willingness on the part of a greater number of people than ever before to change their political allegiance. People aren’t as rusted on as they used to be. They shop around, they change. There aren’t as many people I know now who sort of say look I could never vote Labor or I could never vote Liberal – there are more people who are prepared to change their views between elections and that throws an even greater responsibility and an even greater obligation on all of us.
But the Government is in good heart, the Government continues to have enthusiasm for necessary change and reform and the Government will remain committed to pursuing changes and reforms that are valuable and important for Australia’s future.
We’ve come a long way, we have an economy now stronger than it’s been since the late 1960’s, an economy that was able to stare down the Asian economic downturn. We’ve introduced some historic reforms but the job is far from finished and we look forward with great enthusiasm for the opportunity to continue that task for many years into the future.
Thank you very much.
[Ends]