Prime Minister Cameron, it’s fantastic to be here with you, it’s great to be here with Premier, Mike Baird and it’s good to be talking about infrastructure as we overlook what is perhaps the world’s biggest single construction, certainly building construction, project right now – the great Barangaroo development.
It was great to hear you talk, David, about what’s happening in Britain in terms of better roads, faster trains and so on. I can remember some years ago when I was a student at Oxford, sitting on the Oxford Railway Station and looking at a British Rail poster and the British Rail poster said boldly, “The last train is later than you think”, and some wag had scored underneath, “Why is this particular train being singled out for attention?”
I can remember being given some British Rail matches back in the days when you were still allowed to smoke on trains and they didn’t work, and I thought, “God, the only thing in Britain that doesn’t strike is the matches!” A long, long time ago, at the beginning of the Thatcher era which did so much for Britain and of course over the last 30 years, with a few hiccups, Britain certainly has roared back as one of the great countries of the world. That’s good for Britain, obviously, it good for Europe, it’s good for the wider world and, in particular, it’s good for Australia because of the extraordinary partnership that our two countries have had ever since the First Fleet sailed into this magnificent harbour just over 200 years ago.
As we look around this glorious city, as we see the extraordinary development, it’s hard to think that back in 1788 it was nothing but bush and that the marines and the convicts and the sailors that straggled off those 12 ships just a few hundred yards from where we are now must have thought they’d come almost to the moon. Everything would have been so strange. Everything would have seemed so extraordinarily basic and raw and now a city which is one of the most spectacular cities on our globe and in a country which is as free, as fair and as prosperous as any. A country which is in so many ways the envy of the earth.
So, it’s great to be here with you, David, and I hope as you pay your first visit to Sydney and you think of what your countrymen did 200-odd years back, you do feel a measure of pride and satisfaction at what has been achieved here in that time.
It’s terrific to be talking about infrastructure. Mike, I’m the infrastructure Prime Minister, you’re the infrastructure Premier; together we are building a better Sydney, a better New South Wales and a better Australia, and didn’t we need to get cracking? Didn’t we need to get cracking, because for too long there had been too much money invested in short-term consumption and not enough money invested in long-term economic infrastructure and that’s exactly what’s happening right around our country now, in part because of good, strong state governments and in part because of a good, strong national government that wants to work with the state governments to give our country the 21st-century infrastructure that we must have if we are to remain at the forefront of the first world economies.
Here, in Sydney, we’re building WestConnex, the largest road project in our country; work is beginning, preparatory work is underway, work on the ground will begin early next year. There’s NorthConnex, there’s the work that we’re doing together on the Pacific Highway, there’s the work we’re doing on what some people call Sydney’s second airport, but which I like to think is Western Sydney’s first airport. We will give this country the muscle and the sinew that it needs to advance into the future and we will do it in partnership with investors from Britain and elsewhere.
There’s a long history of British investment in Australia. After the United States, Britain is by far the biggest investor in this country. It’s been a very steady consistent flow of British investment into this country ever since the very beginning of settlement here in 1788.
David and I were lucky enough to stroll down Macquarie Street towards the Opera House, and of course you swing down the end of Macquarie Street, you’re looking out onto the Opera House and of course you turn to your left and there is the Sydney Harbour Bridge – one of the great Wonders of the World when it was built and it was built as a collaborative effort between the state of New South Wales and that great British engineering firm, Dorman Long. I’m not sure that building the bridge was great for Dorman long, but certainly, it was great for Sydney and great for the world!
In those days, it was more of a one-way-street, the expertise and the capital coming from the United Kingdom to Australia. Today, it’s very much a two-way-street. It was Multiplex that built Wembley Stadium; Westfield is currently building some of the really extraordinary shopping complexes in the United Kingdom and elsewhere.
It is a two-way-street, because while Britain remains economically larger than Australia, the disparity is by no means as great as it was and that’s one of the gaps that we hope to close in the years and decades ahead. But it is a two-way-street, it’s a relationship between, if not quite equals, certainly peers and it is as warm, as intimate and as important as any relationship on this earth.
So, David, lovely to be with you today and lovely to be with so many people who want to make two great countries even greater in the years and decades ahead.