ADDRESS BY THE PRIME MINISTER, THE HON P J KEATING HP,
QUEENSLAND STATE ALP FUNDRAISING DINNER, GREEK COMMUNITY
CENTRE, 30 JULY 1992
E& OE PROOF COPY
Ian McClean, the Lord Mayor, and of course the Premier,
Ladles and Gentlemen.
Well thank you very Much for those kind words, Wayne, and
for so many of you coming along tonight. I don't know
about the Canberra Raiders, I'll be gone by then, but I
hope at the Grand Final when it really matters I can do a
Lazarus too, and be there when it matters.
But as Wayne and I came tonight into the building with
the demonstrators outside, I thought of that remark
passed by a predecessor of mine also in Queensland, I
thought if I knew Wayne was that unpopular I mightn't
have come with him. But jokes aside it's great to share
a platform with him, the most popular Premier in
Australia, a clean cut guy in every way. Clean cut
personally, clean cut politically, given hope and heart
to the Queensland Labor Party and restored it to its
position in Government as the oldest Labor Party in the
world, a real achievement.
For some reason there's a great empathy between the New
_.. ZuhWales Labor Party and the QueenslandLabor 95i-ty.
When you go __ to a___ 07eensland1 Labor Party' ConTerne-yralways
feel at home, there's always working people there.
it has not been middle-classed, and it's always great to
be amongst the Labor Party in Queensland, it feels like
there just isn't a boarder between us.
But ladies and gentlemen, I've had a wonderful week in
Queensland and I must say that in the six odd months I've
been Prime Minister no better reception and nicer time
have I had than Townsville, Innisvale, Rockhampton,
Glandstone and now in Brisbane. And the thought occurred
to me today and yesterday as we talked to those
communities, and also recently when I was in Newcastle in
New South Wales, not long after recovering from an
earthquake, and in Geelong in Victoria which of course
has had more than its share of economic woes. But the
one thing I found in all of these places is a great sense
of purpose as communities, cohesion, common sense, social
partnerships and of course spirit, and I found that
yesterday in Townsville, I found it at lunch at the Civic
Reception given for us in Innisvale, in Rockhampton last
evening, and in Glandstone, when a few years ago and I
use to go there as a Shadow Minister for Minerals it was
a small community of a few thousand, now grown to over
23,000 and an international port city of Australia.
And it just makes the point that these communities
understand better, than perhaps Some in the major cities,
about how to make Australia work, how to work together,
how to achieve things, how to have pride and have that
spirit and go out and grasp the future. Because that's
what I found around Queensland, that great spirit of
optimism, that spirit that says we're not going to let
anything defeat us and we're going to get out there and
grasp the future.
We're pretty lucky in this country, we're the only nation
in the world that has a content to itself. We've got
what a lot of countries don't have and that is clean air,
clean water, a lot of space and a great future. You know
what they always say about real-estate ' position,
position, position', well we've got the best real estate
in the world. And that is, a continent in the South
Pacific and the Asia Pacific area, which is the fastest
growing part of the world, where we can carve out for
ourselves a lifestyle and an existence which is unique
amongst nations. That is a multicultural country,
inheriting a continent, coming to terms with it, coming
to terms with the resonances of Australia, the old
continent of Australia, coming to terms with the first
Australians, making a life for ourselves in this country,
locking ourselves in with the Asia Pacific, and giving
ourselves a style of living and an income which I think
can be the envy of the world. Very few countries have
those possibilities now, Australia still has it, and that
great spirit I found in Queensland today is the thing
that will capture it for us.
Now ladies and gentlemen, It's a case of working
together, of partnerships. And if you look at that
tremendous community spirit in those towns and cities
I've mentioned, it's all about partnerships, the
community comes to you as a whole. They don't come to
you as factions or with divisions, they approach you as a
whole. And that's the great strength, and must be
strength in pulling Australia together.
Now we've had good times and we've had some tough times,
we've been in a recession we're now into recovery, we've
got unemployment as a result. But we've still come a
long way. Our labour market today is 7 1/ 2 million. it
was 6 million in 1983, even with the unemployment it's
per cent bigger. In 1983 the size of the economy was
worth $ 200 billion, GDP was $ 200 billion, today it's $ 400
billion. And sure, the economy has not grown in the last
18 months very much, ityVgr-owng again now. But as a
result we've not had enough employment to take people up
into the labour market and _ 4npeiR_; oYment has risen. But
we'e arglyettTe jobs of the 1980s and we-had three
times the employment growth of the western world then, we
had very high work force growth coming from our natural
population and migration, and we succeeded in taking
those people up and bringing unemployment down and
doubling the nominal size of our gross domestic product,
not a bad achievement in that period.
But now that we're in a position where we've been in a
recession, again we've got to make it clear there's a
role for government in directing Australia to the future.
It's not simply a case of relying upon the old question
of private initiative and private reward, as important as
they are, it is not a matter of relying on those alone
but having government create markets, making markets work
and governments doing the things in infrastructure, the
building which we know has made Australia great.
Now I was at the South Johnstone sug9Ar mill yesterday and
interestingly it wai W fff by-Fthe-6ueeniii Government.
It's no longer owned by the Queensland Government, it's
very competently managed now by the people who produce in
the region. But it's another example of how Government
can kick a community along when those resources don't
exist. That's the attitude we've taken in the One Nation
program, which Wayne mentioned, and where today Bob Brown
and I announced a $ 2 billion road program for Australia
and one of the biggest infrastructure spending programs
ever 45 per cent increase in Queensland this year over
last year, $ 600 million extra dollars from the One Nation
package in roads.
It's just another example of Government playing its
proper role, in roads, in rail, in airlines, in all of
the things we know a private company can't provide. A
private company can't build a highway. A private company
is not going to build a ring road around the capital
cities. A private company is not going to build a
railway line down to Robina. A private company is not
going to restore the National Rail Highway of Australia.
These things can only be done by Government. And there
is a role for Government in providing that public
infrastructure and kicking the economy along at a time
when private spending is down, so when private spending
picks up it can play its role as we know it has to.
there is a real role there for Government, and part of
that, of course, is even beyond those great building
programs for which the Labor Party has always been proud
and had a great history, but as well as that in the areas
of social policy.
Now Wayne mentioned earlier the fact that we're now an
externally oriented country. This is true. We've thrown
off the Menzold, Menzian era of believing that we were a
lucky country, and that we needed to nothing more clever
than dig up another mount of minerals, grow another
paddock full of wheat, grow a bit more wool and Bobs
you're Uncle. Well Bob wasn't you're uncle. And we
found by 1980 that we could no longer pay for our
imports. And that the so called ' lucky~ county. was not
really a very clever country, that the post war trade in
goods and services had passed us by, that we were still
buying things from the shelves of the world, computers,
colour televisions, video tap recorders all the rest, we
expected to have those things but couldn't pay for them,
and then started to borrow to be able to maintain our
standard of living.
Now this Government said we can't go on like this, we'll
end up like some of the South American economies, and how
could you tolerate a position where you claim to be a
smart society but only three children in ten completed
secondary school, where the university system was falling
to pieces, underfunded and under utilised. And so we
started on that long road of getting from three kids in
ten completing secondary school to seven in ten, now
moving to nine in ten, we rebuilt our university system
added 50 per cent of places, and in a great historic
decision of two weeks ago, in which your Premier played
an historic part, we're now going to build a National
Training Authority to do for technical education what we
did for universities.
Now what we want to be is smart soclety. A smart society
where kids are given an opportunity for training and good
jobs. And we regard those years of 15 to 19 as a period
of vocational preparation and we stream them through to
the sort of clever jobs, the high quality jobs that we
know that this country needs. Because what we don't want
to go sell is selling our labour cheaply, we don't want
to compete in the international division of labour in our
neighbourhood in the world. I don't want to see
Australians working for $ 1.30 a day as is the lot of the
workers of Indonesia. That is not the league we want to
be playing in, we don't want to be pushing wages down and
selling our labour cheaply, we want to be selling our
brains, our creativity, our ability and become as we've
always been, a smart society which is capable of research
and development, producing innovative products and going
getting a premium for them and selling clever goods out
there. That's Australia's role, that's Australia's
future, not downgrading our people saying that they are
incapable of it and that they've got to cut their wages
to be competitive. That's not the society we want.
in this great transition where we've lowered the tariff
walls, where we've floated the exchange rate, where we've
restarted Australian manufactuxring sotathsyr
elaborately transformed manufactured exports where
greater than rural exports or mining exports. That sort
of important transition, the transition to services
industries like tourism, which are now helping the
Queensland economy, didn't exist a decade ago. And which
have come along because of this great transition, this
great external transition. And it's that transition
which is going to underpin our standard of living.
So I put to you that a Labor Government, it took a Labor
Government to introduce a market economy into Australia.
A Labor Government to itouearemrkteconomy
into Australia. But we did it with a Labor heart, we did
it with a Labor heart. Because we grafted onto that
economic policy a social policy which we think is the
kind of policy that sticks with the central tenants of
Labor's thought and philosophy, and keeps that
egalitarianism and fairness of Australia together. And
such things and the right of access to medical services
is a basic right and we have it there with Medicare.
Equal access to education, as I mentioned, giving all
children the right to secondary education or tertiary or
vocational education. Access to education is a basic
Australian right, a right of everybody. Or the right to
support women with childcare, or the aged with age care,
decent pensions, geriatric assessment, the Home and
Community Care program, the Hostel program, the Nursing
H~ ome program. These are all the great reforms of Labor
in the
And of couree, no greater than access to occupational
superannuation for the whole workforce, a right to a
decent-r4t ement income. And it's that right to a
decent retirement income which will do these two things:
not only when my generation, when the baby boomers turn
and there are twice as many retired aged people in the
community as there is today, we won't put that terrible
burden on our children to pay for us, that tremendous
inter generational transfer which will occur as a huge
aged population relies upon their children to provide for
themi in later years, now's the time to provide for
ourselves by saving and producing a decent retirement
income. But in so doing, build 8 pool of national
savings which will fund our development, fund our
investment and fund our growth into the future.
Because the problem we're all going to face in the 1990s
is that the world economy of today was last like this
before the first World War. This is the first time since
1914 that the old Soviet States have rejoined the world
economy, since China is now rejoining the world economy,
India, the Americas, South America. And they'll be all
out there in the ' 90s bidding for savings, bidding for
investment capital, to rebuild Russia to rebuild eastern
Europe, East Germany, India, China, South America, and we
don't want to be out there with the savings begging bowl
trying to fund our current account deficit. We've made
the step already to do it with occupational
superannuation, to put those savings into place.
we'll have there by the end of this decade about $ 800
billion, $ 800,000 million which is about five times our
6
national debt, and we'll be in that comfortable position
of being able to fund our investment programs and with it
bring on the employment which is entirely necessary for
giving us the kind of society that we've always believed
we should have, one where a right to a job is a basic
Australian right.
So ladies arnd gentlemen, these are the things that Labor
has done. We've introduced a market economy, we've
opened Australia up, we've started to produce clever
things again, we've opened ourselves up for services, but
we've done it with a decent social policy. We've done it
with a social policy that looks after the sick, the aged,
the young, the poor, women, migrants. We've done it to
keep Australia together. We've done it the Labor way.
We've not been, as somebody said of Dr Hewson the other
night who described him as a feral abacus, we are not a
feral abacus. We're not about simply ticking of f numbers
as though people don't matter, counting beads as though
people don't matter. We're about developing Australia,
interlocking it with the Asia Pacific, having an
efficient economy but at the same time having a decent
social policy.
And we all know we're going through a phase where we're
getting more output from fewer people. And it's
producing unemployment. We're getting more production
from a smaller workforce. Loads of productivity, it's
called productivity, and we need it to be efficient.
That is, we're getting much more production from those
who produce it. So what does that mean if we're going to
get unemployment down? What it means to get unemployment
down is that we've got to produce even more output. if a
given level of output produces only so much employment
and it's not enough, the only thing to do is to produce
even more output, and that means that the Australian
economy has to grow at a reasonably fast pace. And to
have it grow at a fast pace, and still control inflation
can only be done with an incomes policy. It can't be
done with interest rates, it can't be done with a central
bank jumping on the economy because to do that it cuts
the speed down and therefore cuts the employment growth
o f-f.
We've always had employment as an express objective of
Government policy. It hasn't been a residual that fell
out of the numbers. And when I used to stand up in the
OECD in the 1980s and talk about employment being the
express objective, some of those European Finance
Ministers would look at me as though I had a case of
leprosy. Because they are interested only in their
current accounts and inflation.
We on the other hand have always had employment as a
c~ lear and express objective. And that means you must run
with a high workforce growth of this country, even with
modest immigration growth, without natural population
growth, with workforce growth of 1.6 per cent a year, you
n % A J L V L I I U V 1 11 F V Q I A
have got to run the ecoinmy at a reasonable speed. Every
time we have done that before our incomes Policy, before
the Accord, that speed spilled Into 8 price and wage
round, and we ended up with higher inflation, lower
growth, and higher unemployment. We beat that dismal
legacy in the 19809 with an incomes policy. We ran the
economy at quite a speed but still had decelerating
inflation. So much so, that yesterday we chalked up the
lowest figure in just on thirty years with 1.2 per cent.
So, having the mechanism in place to let the economy grow
and not kill it with interest rates to save inflation,
and tolerate a pool of unemployment, means that you must
have a conversation with organised labour and with
business. Now, whether you call it cooperation, or
discussion, or an Accord really doesn't matter. There
has got to be a discussion about national income
determination how much national income goes to wages
and how much goes to profits. And it is in that model
with the ACTU we have been able to run Australia quite
fast and still have decelerating inflation.
In contras4t D~ r niewson's model has unemployment as a break
upon wage increases. In his model unemployment is
actually sitting there as a tool, to actually moderate
wage claims and to moderate inflation, but of course you
will have no conversation with organised labour, and the
central bank would simply be in instructed to lift the
interest rates to sit on the economy. And so in his
model, not only is employment not an express objective,
unemployment becomes a tool of government policy. We
reject that absolutely, totally.
In the end the difference between the Labor Party and its
opponents is a matter of heart. The Labor Party has it
and they don't. The Labor Party grew with the soul of
this country and the Liberal Party has tried to graft
itself onto it, all these years. But this was never
plainer then now, as Dr Hewson and that rotten remnant of
the New R~ ights agenda, Fightback, comes-as the creed of
the new conservative parties. But in the end, the proper
end of economic policy is social improvement, and the
notion we have heard him speak about in the last day or
two about cutting wages, taking kids to $ 3.00 an hour,
getting rid of awards, rates of pay, and conditions of
employment to go to three quarters of average weekly
earnings, or some such figure for the average person, is
not social improvement.
The point of economic policy is to lift people up, not
push them down. Dr Hewson thinks it's a crime for me to
say I want to see Australians with higher real wages. Dr
Heweon I do. And I make no apologies for it. And we can
do it by the sort of economic policies that Australia can
have. But you won't get anywhere economically by destroying the
country socially. So don't my word for it, ask all of
those people who fell through the social trap door in
Britain and the United States. All those people, You can
almost draw a line in Britain for the people who are
lucky enough to enjoy the best of the British economy
living South of London, arnd all the rest living in the
North, broadly living in the North, who don't have that
social improvement. Or in the United States, if you are
unemployed there, like or Hewson after nine months, after
six months your out with no support, no income support,
no unemployment benefits, and if you are cold you huddle
over a railway grate and try and live in the warm
exhaust. That's not for us, and we are not having it.
Or, in the United States if you are sick and you get
admitted to a hospital and you get to the door, even if
you are acutely sick, if that blue cross card isn't in
your pocket they turn you away. Now you couldn't
comprehend anybody with medical training turning someone
acutely sick away because they are not insured and they
don't have the card with them. That's what happens in
the United States. We will never let it happen here.
They get to this position where Dr Hewson is so down on
-unions, but he is not down on the -DoctoruFn'aio n. He
turned up to the AMA about six weeks ago on a weekend and
said he will let the AMA set the common fee. Not the
Commonwealth Government, which is now paying a large part
of the health bill, but the AMA. And he will let doctors
basically generate the incomes they think the traffic
will bear. But If you are a working person three
quarters of your pay for you and $ 3.00 an hour if you are
a kid. That's his policy. And we are not copping that,
policy, and we are not copping it for this reason that
people will not be able to afford medical insurance. we
are not having a position where low income people, or
even middle income people with children, can't afford to
insure themselves when they are sick and get access to
medical insurance. Because under Medicare now you can be
on an income in the $ 20,000s with a coul of children
and pay no levy whatsoever, and society gives you that
right to medical treatment because those of us who are
earning the higher Incomes pay it for you under Medicare,
which is an equitable policy.
These are the things which are important. The same with
education, Dr 1fewson has a voucherpoigy. Voucher
policies have never worked anywhere in the world. You
get virtually a bus ticket which has so many dollars
written on it, you go and check it in at a university, or
someone else. And he says this puts incentive into the
system and the freedom to achieve. It costs $ 120,000 to
train somebody for a Medical degree. What freedom does
an ordinary working persons child have if they don't have
the $ 120,000 for the full fee place, or the child of a
working family that might want an Arts degree which is
going to cost of the order of $ 20,000 to $ 30,000? They
haven't got it. When we get as a society where the
bright kids get jammed out of the education system
because their parents can't afford it, that's the time to
pack it in, that's the sort Of policy he wants to put in
education. These are the things that the next election will be
decided on. It will be about bringing a recovery on,
consolidating the recovery, having a role for Government
to lift that spending, to be the catalyst in a recovery,
to bring private Investment back up, and to see it go on.
And at the same time to build on all of the social
advances we have made and the things I have been talking
about health care, education, childcare, age care, all
of the other things, support for Aboriginals, migrants,
all of these areas are the things which we will continue.
But he has basically one policy with two prongs: higher
prices end lower wages that's the policy. 15 per cent
addition to prices, which will blow our inflation rate to
pieces in an exercise in economic vandalism, that would
be entirely culpable given the fact that we now after
twenty years have the inflation rate under 2 per cent, to
add a net 6 or 7 per centage points to the price system
to take it back to double digits would be unconscionable.
That's what he wants to do. And while he lifts those
prices he cuts people's wages. Now you all know If you
are on $ 20,000 to $ 30,000, whether you tax someone's
income or their expenditure is entirely beside the point,
because they are one in the same. An ordinary person
spends every cent that they earn, so whether you tax it
as income or as expenditure it is all the same. But the
person on the high income spends only a proportion of
their salary and saves the rest, and those people have
the benefit of the proposals put by Dr Hewson and the tax
benefits for them are paid for by the low income and
middle income people who spend all their income in the
supermarket or in their daily living.
The OST will blow our inflation rate to pieces and with
it d6r~ 1nterest rates. It will effect a huge transfer of
wealth from the low and middle income earners to the high
income earners. It will essentially derail Australian
investment while at the same time the consensus we have
had for a decade now about wages, profits end national
incomes will be put asunder as he tries to abolish
centralised wage fixation, the only thing in national
wage cases which protects the low paid, as he tries to
knock them off, knock of f federal awards and cut people'ss
wages. This is what he holds. We don't need lower
wages, the wage share and GDP at the moment Is in the
1960s, at 1960s levels. We don't need to sell cheap
labour to the rest of the world, we need to sell our
brains to the rest of the world making smart products and
educating people, and lifting our people up. And that's
the difference between us.
So, ladies and gentlemen I say this, I think as a Party
we have been very fair in this sense. We have never said
to Australian business, look we believe it can be all
done on the public sector. When I became Treasurer the
-4
Commonwealth public Sector was over 30 per cent of the
size of the economy, it is now about 24. It is 6 per
cent of GDP smaller, or about $ 25 billion a year smaller.
Ipso Facto the private economy is $ 25 billion bigger. We
shifted the profit share so that people in business can
af ford to invest by a higher level of profit, which we
effected in the late 1980s and is fundamentally still
there. As the volumes pick up the profits will go on the
bottom line and the profit share will come up as we saw
in last quarter's National Accounts. we have got that in
place, we have got a 39 per cent tax rate in place for
companies, we have got full dividend imputation, we are
one of the few countries in the world that only tax
equity and dividends once where most other countries tax
them twice. We have got all of that sitting in place and
a stock of savings coming down the pipeline of
superannuation to fund the investments this country is
going to need. We have given business a fair break, and
as we come out of the recession into a strong recovery
all of those benefits and low inflation will count for
Australian business.
But while we have done that we have understood the real
traditions of Australia and we have stuck to them.
Unlike the Coalition who say we are the tradition
breakers, they're the people who attack the tradition,
and the tradition is equality, egalitarianism, and
fairness. That is, we don't have an under class left
behind, we pull everybody along. We have business
pulling along, tugging along, and with it the workforce
and with it the aged, the sick, the poor and the young,
with proper social policies. And if some group drops
back we lean our caring arm out and pull them up, pull
them up with us, and move along as a community and a
society. And that's the basic difference between us and the
conservative parties. The Labor Party is a true
political party, it has feelings, it has a soul. it is
not simply an organisation committed to getting votes
like some sort of business group, or some sort of
business organisation, it's a political party with
feelings, with substance, with loyalties. And our
political party demands that as we progress ourselves we
take Australian society along, all of us along, and we
produce the sort of country we have always had but a more
prosperous one.
So ladies and gentlemen, that's what the contest is about
in Australia. Never before have we seen such a contrast,
well we have, but not recently between the parties,
between the philosophy of the Coalition and the
philosophy of the Labor Party. And we say to
Australians, you're in a fundamental transition from the
old Australia locked up behind a tariff wall, which
disfavoured the big agricultural and mining States like
Queensland and Western Australia, to the advantage of the
industrialised areas, locked up behind a tariff wall and
TEL: 3. Aug. 92 18: 09 No. 018 P-11/ 1
basically becoming uncompetitive. That's not the sort of
position we want to see. we have taken it, we have
changed that, but we have changed it in a way where we go
forward. We don't need to smash the place socially to
advance ourselves economically. And we won't, that's
what the basic contest will be about.
So when we go to the election sure we will have had the
aftermath of the recession and the attendant
unemployment, and we are doing everything to be rid of
that. But as that goes down we say to Australians, stick
with the change, stick with the basic historic transition
to a modern society, to a modern Industrial state locked
into the Asia-Pacific, one with a great bountiful
continent with fresh air, clean water, space and a decent
environment, loyal to our original Australians, and at
the same time giving ourselves a decent standard of
living. i don't think they will take the hard-hearted
alternative. I don't think they will take the clinical
technician, because in the end I don't think he has got
much to of fer. Pain for pain's sake, misery for misery's
sake, cutting ordinary people back and disadvantaging the
poor never did anything for anybody. And that's why we
have all got to move together as a group, and that's why
it is important for Labor Governments to stick to their
guns, have faith in their creed, and see the difficult
changes through. And that's what has put this Government
of yours together in Queensland under Wayne Goss, that's
what will restore and retain us in the national arena
because we are basically better, we basically can think
better, and as importantly as that, we think with a heart
and 8 soul.
Ladies and gentlemen, I thank you very much for coming,
you have done me a great honour, and the Queensland Labor
Party has done me a great honour in inviting you and
assembling such a large audience of people, arnd I thank
the members of the business community who have come along
tonight. I will just say, you have always been part of
us from the 1980a onwards, as the whole constituency of
Australia is part of us. Whether it is the rural
community, or the business community, or the poor, or the
sick, or the aged, they are part of the Labor family.
And we will go together as a family, and we will stay
together as a family.
Thank you.