CHECK AGAINAT DELIVERY EMRARnOED UTLDLVR
SPEECH BY THE PRIME MINISTER
AUSTRALIAN LABOR PARTY CENTENARY CONFERENCE
HOBART, 26 . JUNE 1991
1 know that you all share with Me a sense of privilege on
this special occasion.
As delegates to this Centenary Conference, we meet as the
representatives of Australia's most important and enduring
force for change and progress an institution uniquely
Australian in its creation and character, uniquely
Australian in its values and in its achievement the
Australian Labor Party.
A proud name and a proud achievement over one hundred years
one hundred years of co-operation with the Australian
union movement which brought it into being; one hundred
years of commitment to the cause of parliamentary democracy;
one hundred years of struggle and service on behalf of the
people of Australia.
We meet as the representatives of Australia's greatest
political Party the engine room of national renewal, the
generators of change, the pioneers of reform.
We are the Party that built Australia's system of social
justice; the Party that created an industrial relations and
wages system in the early years of this century; the Party
that founded great institutions of our public life, not
least the Commonwealth Bank; the Party that first provided
the means by which Australia could defend itself; that led
Australia through its most perilous days; the Party that
after the Second World War rebuilt Australia and laid the
foundations of modern Australian society; the Party that
inaugurated a program of mass immigration that has changed
and enlarged and enriched the very character of our, nation;
the Party that in the 1970s gave new impetus to the quest
for social justice.
Our Party fixed its course by the light on the hill never
wavering in our determination to reach that goal, but never
fearing to modify our means and abandon old methods if that
was necessary to make us more relevant and more effective in
the service of the people of Australia.
And delegates, your Labor Government today stands foursquare
in this, our grand tradition of nation building.
Created by the trade union movement, the Labor Party has
forged with the modern trade union movement an Accord
partnership that is rebuilding the Australian economy. We
have opened a new era in industrial relations, delivering in
exchange unparallelled improvements in the social wage not
least Medicare and the Family Allowance Supplement. We have
secured the future of the steel industry and turned around
our national export performance. We have made taxation fair
and efficient. We have offered new opportunities to young
Australians through expanded education and training. We are
dedicated to justice for Aborigines and Torres Strait
Islanders. We protect the environment from shortsighted
destruction. We have engineered national self reliance in
defence and, at a time of unprecedented change in our region
and the world, we have sought constructive and co-operative
paths in foreign policy.
Ours has been a ministeriLal team of unrivalled quality.
Our partner has been a t:: ade union movement of unrivalled
commitment. And it has been Conferences such as this over the last
decade that have underpinned our success with drive, vision
and unity. It was our last National Conference in September
that accelerated our fourth term with its historic decisions
on telecommunications and aviation.
So we are rightly proud of our past and we rightly celebrate
it.
But I use that past to speak now of the future. We are the
party of Australia's future.
And never in our Party's history has our responsibility for
the future been greater.
It has fallen to Labor, once more, to set the agenda for the
future of Australia to set the goals which will determine
the nature and quality of the Australia we take into the
21st century, and to set the course by which the Australian
people will attain those goals.
That is our task at this Centenary Conference to ensure
Labor's platform expresses that agenda, sets that Course,
and ensures our organisation is in every respect ready for
the next great electoral challenge we must face.
Delegates, The next Federal election is still some two years away.
But in a real sense we begin the campaign now a two-year
campaign not just to win, the election, but to win the future
for Australia.
Over this two year campaign, we will conduct the fight on
two fronts:
First, we will continue the tasks of reforming and
rebuilding Australia:
to maximise for the people of Australia the gains
which will come with sustained low-inflation
economic recovery;
to continue building a more competitive Australia;
to continue building a more compassionate and
sensitive Australia.
And our second task is to expose the real character and
purpose of the Opposition to ensure that the Australian
people have no illusions or misunderstandings about the
fundamental choice they will have to make in 1993.
For this Liberal opposition is unlike any that has preceded
it in the forty-odd years since the foundation of that
Party. Collectively in its leadership, it represents the most
ideological and the most divisive alternative presented : to
the Australian people in the post-War era.
And in its program it is, more than any before it,
obsessively determined to entrench privilege at the expense
of fairness and compassion.
So the choice in 1993 will be very clear indeed.
And let me say at the outset that I have one clear message
to this Conference, to this Party, to the people of
Australia, and to our political opponents. It is a simple
message of confidence:
confidence in Labor, that we will successfully perform
these dual tasks over the next two years and that, in
doing so, we will win the Federal election in 1993.
Delegates That confidence is firmly based on a sober assessment of the
facts as, may I say, was my confidence that we would win
in 1987 and 1990.
First, then, let us consider what will happen in the
Australian economy over the next two years.
I begin from the point that the start of economic recovery,
as I have repeatedly predicted, will be evident in the
second half of this year.
No one regrets more deeply than I the pain that has been
suffered by many Australians through the tightening of
monetary policy.
8 : 2 0 _ I
But Australia in beginniing to emerge from the pain and
hardship. We have brought interest rates down over the past
eighteen months by seven and a half percentage points. And
now, the first signs of renewed activity and confidence are
starting to emerge.
Delegates, the important point is that this recovery will be
totally different in quality from any merely cyclical
recovery this country hats seen in the past.
This will be a recovery that unambiguously repays pain with
gain gain not only for workers and their families but for
all Australians.
Remember, in 1963 we inherited an inflation rate of 11% from
the conservatives' rece3Sion. Now, coming out of this
recession, inflation is at 4.9 below the OECD average,
and lower than this country has seen in two decades. And
further falls are in prospect.
Australia has low, competitive, inflation in its grasp.
Under Labor, and only under Labor, Australia can make that a
secure and permanent gain..
Because under Labor, arid only under Labor, can an effective
wages policy be pursued a wages policy based on the
agreement by the trade union movement not to exercise its
power to maximise nominal wage increases, and on the
complementary agreement by the Labor Government to deliver
improvements in the social wage.
That has been the basis of our Accord a direct lineal
descendant of the decision one hundred years ago by the
trade union movement to establish a parliamentary Labor
Party. For more than eight years, both sides of the Accord have
honoured their commitment to the enduring benefit of the
people of Australia.
And for every one of those years, the national aggregate
wages outcome we have agreed with the trade unions has come
in at or under target.
Despite the temporary difficulties following the recent
National Wage decision, the trade unions remain totally
committed to this Accr J principle and through it to the
task of transforming Australia into an internationally
competitive economy.
That is precisely why I can speak with confidence to you
about the character of the next two years as we go into the
period of recovery. Through the Accord, it will be:
a recovery which will see the resumption of secure
employment growth; 832? 1
a recovery in which the competitiveness of Australia's
manufacturing industry will continue to increase so
far this year, the value of manufacturing exports is
23 per cent higher than last year;
a recovery in which Australian workers will gain access
to improved superannuation and, through award
restructuring and union amalgamation, to better jobs,
better-training, better remuneration;
and a recovery in which we will see further
improvements in productivity, through effective mic. roeconomic
reform.
And, delegates, through this recovery your Labor Governent
will continue the broader agenda of economic reform just
as, through the recession, we never lost sight of the longterm
goal of a more competitive Australia.
We will be implementing the reforms that flow from the
decisions we have already taken:
to make housing more affordable through the national
housing strategy;
to ensure cheaper and better services in the
telecommunications and airlines industries;
to cut tariffs while providing significant associated
labour adjustment assistance;
to implement an active and effective competition policy
for the benefit of consumers;
to expand our new network of Cooperative Research
Centres as an important part of creating the clever
country; to develop and implement the policy of ecologically
sustainable development;
and to continue our vigorous engagement in the current
trade round, at this critical time, to win a fair go
for Australia's efficient and competitive farm
producers.
The Special Premiers Conferences next month and in November
will open new avenues to productivity improvements in areas
that require the co-operation of the States: new investment
in rail in return for better practices; better focusing of
roads expenditure on priority routes; sensible pricing of
rail and road so together they serve our industries better;
a coordinated approach to electricity generation in southern
and eastern Australia; and improved efficiency and delivery
of community services, within a framework of agreed and
acceptable national standards.
But, delegates, when I speak of the character of these next
two years, I do not speak only in economic terms.
Under Labor, through the Accord, Australia has become more
competitive. Just as importantly, under Labor, Australia
has become more compassionate.
Understand with me and share my pride in the platform and
process of achievement from which we will further advance
our social goals.
Behind the discipline of our significant reduction in
Commonwealth outlays as .3 proportion of GDP, lies an
achievement of immense siLgnificance for us of the Labor
Party; it has cleared the way for us to deliver Labor's
social priorities in a way that has surpassed the pioneering
social reforms of all previous Labor governments.
How have we done that? We have done it the Labor way. On
the one hand, we have reformed the tax system we have
eliminated the rorts and introduced effective capital gains
and fringe benefit taxation.
On the other hand, we have made sure that those people who
do not need welfare assistance from the community no longer
receive it. Thanks to fair and effective assets tests and
income tests, we focus that community assistance on the
people who really need it.
That's the real equation, that's the Labor equation
historically unprecedented fairness in revenue-raising
matched by equally unprecedented fairness in the targeting
of resources on those who need them most.
Labor's ninth Budget in August will continue to deliver on
the Labor equation.
It will be a budget of necessary fiscal discipline. But
within this discipline, I am determined with my colleagues
to develop initiatives that will further assist families.
Details obviously are a matter for the Budget, but our firm
commitment is that low-and moderate-income families with
kids will be the beneficiaries of such initiatives.
Our budget will also start to. deliver on one of the most
urgent social and economic challenges of the 1990s to make
our cities work better. In co-operation with the States, we
must start to improve people's access to work, services and
education through better transport links, more affordable
and appropriate housing, and a cleaner urban environment.
Further, we are reviewing our system of health care to make
an already great social justice reform, Medicare, even
better. And we will pursue that fundamental goal for Australia
that goal which in the first decade of our nation's third
century is long-overdue the goal of reconciliation between
Aboriginal people and the broader community.
Delegates That is how we will discharge the first of our dual tasks;
we will fight the ' 93 election on the basis of a sustained
economic recovery with low inflation, in a more competitive
economy, and a more equitable and compassionate society.
That will be good news for Australia but grim news indeed
for our opponents.
Which brings me to the second of our tasks, that is to
expose the character and purpose of this Opposition.
Delegates, let me be quite blunt and to the point this;
Opposition is planning the most concerted attack in the
history of this nation on the living standards of the poor,
the underprivileged, the aged and low-and middle-income
families. The centrepiece of this attack is their broad-based
consumption tax, a fifteen per cent tax on all goods and
c: Prv~ ncs it would increase the price not just of every
item on the supermarket shelf, and beyond, but also every
phone and electricity and gas bill, every doctor's bill,
every meal you buy, every ticket for the footy, every repair
bill for every car at every garage.
By these means it would extract, over and above the present
wholesale sales tax, an additional $ 12 billion from the
Australian community.
It would do so in a profoundly regressive way it would
have a relatively greater impact on the poor and on families
with kids because they spend a greater proportion of their
incomes than do those who are better off.
This regressive new tax is designed to replace the
progressive structure of the existing wholesale sales tax
which exempts the basic necessities of life, while taxing
luxuries at a higher rate so the Mercedes would be
cheaper, and bread and milk more expensive.
With this tax, there could be no adequate compensation for
its inflationary consequences and, as the Austral ian
Catholic Social Welfare Commission observes, there appear to
be no serious proposals for compensation of retirees and
others for the loss in the value of their savings.
This savage attack on ordinary Australians is appalling
enough in itself.
But it becomes totally repugnant when it is understood that
part of the purpose of this S12 billion impost is to finance
their intended abolition of the capital gains tax
to restore to the most wealthy members of the community
the right to accumulate capital gains on assets which
will never be taxed
and in doing so to free any capitol gain made but not
realised since 1985 at retrospective windfall to the
rich amounting to billions of dollars.
That is the Liberal -Nat iona: l-Party equation, an equation
stunning in its simplicity, abhorrent in its purpose: pay
the rich by slugging the poor. And not just the poor, but
middle-income families too -to shove billions of dollars
back into the pockets of an already privileged minority.
In smashing the welfare of ordinary Australians, they would
put Australia straight back into the high-inflation league.
And with their commitment to abandon the Accord to abandon
any capacity to determine or even to influence the level of
wages they would keep Australia there.
And the Australian economy would be prejudiced further by
the fact that the absence of a ' capital gains tax would
disastrously distort the allocation of investment resources.
They are committed to cutting Government spending by
$ 3 billion, including $ 1 billion from social welfare
spending. They are committed to abolishing unemployment benefits after
nine months providing $ 750 million of those savings.
They are still ideologically committed to dismantling
Medicare, putting two million Australians back outside the
umbrella of health insurance. And now they float some farfetched
system of health vouchers.
They speak of asking voluntary welfare agencies such as St
Vincent de Paul. and the Brotherhood of St Laurence to take
over the payment of social security payments.
They are set against the spr~ ead of superannuation throughout
the workforce.
And in industrial relations, they promise a return to the
confrontation of the past, even with troops on the
waterfront. That was Tory policy one hundred years ago at
Barcaldine. And it's Tory policy today. They have learned
nothing. Delegates All this is ideology gone ma~ d. It is a deliberate and
systematic assault on the welfare of ordinary Australians.
But it is more and worse than that. It would have the
effect of creating a more divisive, divided,
confrontationist society tha3n any we have experienced
before. To complete the exposure of what this Opposition stands for,
let me, briefly, refer to two other areas privatisation
and the environment. 8 32:
We have had our internal arguments about aspects of
privatisation. We have introduced competition into the
telecommunications industry, but let the Australian people
understand this point with absolute clarity. The Opposition
would totally privatise this industry by selling off
Telecom-OTC and would leave the Australian community without
the protection of any publicly owned utility. We remain
totally committed to retaining that protection by keeping
Telecomi-OTC in full public ownership. -That too will be the
stark choice before the Australian people in 1993.
Consider what Labor has done to protect the environment of
this nation for future generations not least here in this
State. But right from the start, from our immediate decision to
save the Franklin, through our decisions on the rainforests
of North Queensland, on Ozone Protection, on the Tasmanian
forests, on the Greenhouse Effect, on Kakadu, the NSW
Rainforests and Shark Bay, and most recently on the
enormously complex issue of Coronation Hill, through all
these difficult but necessary decisions, the conservatives
have opposed us at every step.
That is their record in the past, and their promise for the
future is no better. That too will be the stark choice
before the Australian people in 1993.
Delegates On the basis of our achievement and on the basis of our
readiness for the challenges ahead, I make this assertion,
not in any boastful spirit, but as an assessment of solid
fact: No Labor Government has applied the spirit of Labor ideals
with greater fidelity. No Labor Government has been more
faithful to Labor's true traditions.
And it has been our special challenge to apply those ideals,
follow those traditions, in this era of the most rapid
change in the whole of recorded history. It is the mark of
our strength that we have had the courage to change.
Of course, we have our differences. How could it be
otherwise, given the rich diversity of our Party?
But the great strength of our Labor Government has been and
remains the constructive contribution made by each of the
groups which compose it.
I also salute again the tremendous contribution of our
colleagues in the trade union movement. You have been
magnificent. Delegates, at this point, you may excuse a brief personal,
and I trust relevant, reflection.
Now in my 45th year of membership of our Party the best
part of half its existence I have been afforded unique
opportunities to feel its history; to understand the
passions and commitment that drive it sometimes in upon
itself; to see its capacity for adaptation; but at all times
to be nourished by the steadfastness of that commitment to
its fundamental goal the welfare of the Australian people.
I have, through leadership of the industrial and then the
political movement, come not just to understand the
relationship between the trade unions and the Labor Party,
but in my own life, for a generation, to live out that
relationship. I have never needed to be reminded that our Party was formed
by organised working men and women. That history is imbued
in me and has become part of me. That same history tells me
how ruthlessly the bastions of privilege in this country
will fight to destroy the challenge they see in a strong,
united and committed labour movement.
As we enter the crucial months and years to 1993, that same
history tells me that we should be guided in all our efforts
and action by what I believe are the two central truths of
Australian political life on the threshold of the 21st
century. First, I deeply believe that never before has the
alternative an anti-Labor government offered a greater
contrast, and a more devastating prospect, for Australia and
its people.
And with equal conviction, I believe that never before in
Australia's history has the existence and continuance of a
strong effective Labor Government been more essential to
securing the future for the people of Australia.
And that is why I am determined, delegates, to work to the
limit of my capacity for a fifth Labor victory in 1993. My
obligation to this Parity and to Australia demands nothing
less.
Together, I am certain that we will achieve that victory
the victory for this great Party, the victory for this great
nation. 8 37