Welcome to this discussion, to this meeting today which includes leading members of the economic team from the Government including the Deputy Prime Minister and the Treasurer and my other colleagues and of course from the national reform summit, representatives of organised Labor, the ACTU, business, large and small civil society, a very broad group.
Can I just say at the outset how grateful we all are for the national reform summit having being held. I think it was Nick Cator’s original idea or he claims it but we’ll give him credit for it. I want to give due credit to the Australian Financial Review and The Australian for taking it up and sponsoring it, KPMG of course were sponsors as well and that was good leadership on their part.
There are some other apart from the representative bodies that are here, of course there are some great research done. John Daley is here from the Grattan but Henry Ergas and Craig Emerson can’t be here they are both overseas, but it is most of the leading figures from the national reform summit that are here so I want thank you for coming here.
From our part, we are here to listen, it’s what politicians don’t possibly do enough of and we are very committed to listening to you and then the discussion that follows to tease out some of the proposals that you have and the discussions you have.
Can I say that I was impressed with the degree of consensus on the challenges that we face. I recognise that there is a difference of opinion on the measures that can be used to address it but we all understand that our future prosperity depends on us being more productive and more competitive, more technologically sophisticated perhaps above all more innovative in the years ahead, that is clear. We’ve seen the inevitable decline in the mining boom, iron ore and coal and not going out of fashion but clearly all of these booms have a cycle, this one went up and then it came back as it was always going to.
The global economy is bigger than ever before. There has never been a more exciting time, there’s never been a time of greater opportunity, of more rapid change than the one in which we live today and I believe our shared objective is to ensure that we are as competitive and productive in the future as we possibly can be because that’s how we ensure our prosperity.
Can I also say that speaking as the Prime Minister and Leader of the Government, we embrace the future with enormous optimism, of course there are big challenges we recognise that but there are gigantic opportunities and as a nation we are very well positioned to take advantage of them but what we need is a good frank and open discussion, we need good ideas and we need to engage with these challenges and the ways to take advantage of them with an open mind and that’s what we’re, that’s what today is all about.
So thank you very much for the work you’ve done for the national reform summit thank you for being here today and now we can get down to a very frank and forthright discussion in which I’m afraid to say you will have to do most of the talking.