PRIME MINISTER
PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT OF ADDRESS BY THE PRIME XINISTER,
THE HON P J KEATING NP, TO A FUNDRAISING DINNER FOR
PER DUNCAN NP, CANPANIA CLUB, HODEURY NORTH# ADELAIDE
28 aLW 1992
JrUNE
E& OE PROOF COPY
Thank you very much Peter ( Duncan), Julie, my Cabinet
colleague Neal Blewett, distinguished parliamentary
colleagues in Federal and State Parliament, distinguished
members of local government, ladies and gentlemen, boys
and girls, there are a few of them here too.
Well it's lovely to be here and its nice to be here with
Peter. It's always a measure of a colleague when you go
to his or her electorate to see how much real and support
they have and how much genuine affection with which they
are held, and if tonight's 700-odd is any demonstration
of that then Peter Duncan is held in pretty high regard.
And that great humanity of him comes through, and that's
why he has got so much support. I'm glad I've had his
support as he is glad he's said to have supported me. I
didn't win by many so I needed it. So thank you Peter,
thank you for the faith, and I hope I won't let you down.
When I was coming here tonight I said to my staff who
will be there? They said the Left will be there, and I
said I'm a bit of a ' Leftie' myself so I'll get on
alright with them. I said all the Left Wing things we've
done like capital gains taxes, fringe benefits taxes,
occupational super, I've been in all those. And they
said there's a few Poms there too, and I said I'll be OK
with them too, It's only the ones in tabloids that I have
a problem with. It's not the local ones, they know what
I'm saying. And & part from that, they said there are a
good supporters of the Labor Party and other people in
the community who are interested in public life and
interested in a fair go. And I said, in that case we'll
do well.
I am very pleased to be in this part of Adelaide and it's
nice to be back in South Australia once more. Peter said
I'll be coming to South Australia more, and it's true I
will because Australia these days does have some
disparity in prosperity between States, and that's why it
is important to get around the States. South Australia
has its share of troubles which are not exclusively of
its own making, just the way in which the nation has
changed. And it is important, I think, for all of us in
national politics to come through you to understand about
the place and to try to focus things the right way.
I think the most important thing for us to know is that
Australia and Australians have a great opportunity in the
world. That's the most important thing to know. Not
many people, in fact we are unique in the sense that we
have a continent to ourselves. No other nation on earth
has a continent to themselves. And not just any
continent, but the oldest continent. The oldest
continent where we came to a place with the oldest
civilisation. The High Court, in a very land mark
decision a week or two ago, made that clear when they
rebuked the doctrine of Terra Nullius. That this was an
unclaimed place when the British arrived.
And we know that we are in a subtle country, an old
country, where the residences of the country changed the
way we all are and make us unique. Even though we may
have European antecedents, we are a unique country
because of the way in which Australia is unique. And
most of us in the Labor Party know that we'll never come
to terms fully with this country until we come to terms
with the original Australians, the Aboriginals.
One of my staff was in a group that climbed the Himalayas
and somebody said to him ' you don't have mountains like
this in Australia'. He said, ' no, ours are fifty times
older than this and they've since worn down'. And that's
a fact this is an old place and the subtleties of the
landscape and the nature of the place have changed us and
mad us unique, uniquely Australian. We're not British,
we're not Dutch, we're not Italian, we're not Lebanese,
we're not Vietnamese, we're not Chines, we are
Australians. And it is time for us to declare that we are Australians,
to make that declaration. It's psychologically important
to us the more often we make it. And it's economically
important.
Our colleagues in the Coalition parties believe that talk
about our nationalism, our Australianess, is a
distraction, thfey say, from the economic facts and
economic life. But there are enough facts around to know
that there can be no distraction from the recession and
unemployment and other things.
It is important to know, and important to our economics,
to * our future, to our trading future, to assert ourselves
economically as we assert ourselves psychologically and
nationally. It's an important link to make.
The great national spirit of one hundred years ago in
another recession, in 1890, put the Australian Labor
Party together and drove the forces of our Federation.
And that nationalism, that high-spiritedness of
Australia, ran until it was snuf fed out in the first
World war. And in that great radical act, where so many
young Australians went and fought, and 60 000 in 4
million died, that radical act was then by our
conservative opponents wrapped in the flag and turned
into a conservative thing. And it has remained a
conservative thing, and the great nationhood and
nationalism of the period died with it.
Then, of course we had the ' 20s under the conservatives,
the 130s in the recession, the ' 40s largely in the War,
the Rip Van Wrinkle years of Menzies until the end of the
160s, and then the do-nothing years of Fraser, and then
finally a chance under Labor to get back to those goals
and threads. To get back to the sense of Australia being
a nation and claiming the place as being a unique place,
a derivative of no other place, and a place where we can
make our way in the world and hold our head up in the
world. Now it is an accident of history that a largely European
country has been developed in the bottom of Asia. That's
now changing as we see people from the Middle East, and
from the Asia-Pacific coming to our shores and being part
of our community. But the fact is the we are now in a
unique position to make Australia part of the Asia-
Pacific, part of the fastest growing region of the world,
and truly define our place in the neighbourhood.
Because at least now we are saying to people in Asia we
want to be here, we want to be part of you, we want to
part of our local community. We don't want to fly over
you to Los Angeles, or fly over to you in London, or pay
lip service to the region, we want to be part of it. And
they are basically welcoming us with open arms.
So this is our great chance to find our place in the
region, in the neighbourhood, to be part of it, to be
relevant, and to share in the wealth and growth of this
very prosperous area. That more than anything else is
what will change the face of Australia, change the race
of South Australia, and change the face of Adelaide.
That single fact.
Now I know, and you all know, that the most important
thing for us now is to get back to recovery. Because the
Labor Party has never believed that unemployment is a
residual that drops out of the policies. This is not the
British conservative government, it's not the US
Republicans, it's certainly not the Liberal Party of
Australia. We don't believe the unemployed are the
people at the end of the queue, the shock absorbers who
take the shock out of the system to protect the economic
viability of everybody else.
And we know that this kind of society cannot tick over
with unemployment rates of 10 per cent, or 10 per cent
plus, or higher in some places. And so we want to get
back to remaking Australia so we can have product growth
and better rates of employment.
But that can only happen by looking forward. It won't
happen by looking backwards, as John Howard would have us
do looking back to the dead-end Jobs, looking back to
the 1950s where he thought things were fine. well they
might hove been, but they won't provide the increments to
growth and wealth that we have today.
The things that are going to put us up the international
scale are technological qhange and education.-And it is
to that withwh ich thisa Government has committed itself
to open Australia up, to make it internationally
competAiive find Australia doing the interesting, novel
things, which add value to products and let us find
places and niches around the world, which give us that
external orientation that we never had. That is, selling
the most valuable resource of all the creativity of our
people. And not the resources which Malcolm Fraser had
ready for us in the mineral boom of the late 1970s,
because that was just another mound of minerals that
somebody found. Or, not another paddock full of wheat,
or even wool, as important as those things are, but the
most important resource of all our creativity and, of
course, our children.
In 1983, three children in ten completed secondary
school. Seven in ten were left untrained. That's how
much regard the Liberal and National Parties had for
Australia's youth. They were happy to see seven in ten
spill out of school on the labour market untrained. That
retention rate today is not eight in ten eight in ten
children now complete secondary school. And between the
middle 1980s and now this Government added 122 000 places
to universities, we've created the equivalent of twelve
new universities, or added 50 per cent extra places to
tertiary education. So that as those kids stay on in
school, 35-40 per cent of them go onto tertiary
education.
And now as a result of our One Nation statement, we are
working on building up the-sy-stenM-6that sits below that
technical and further education, or TAFE. So that the
six to seven out of ten who come out of secondary school
and don't go to university are not cascading into
shopping mall plazas, railway stations, or somewhere, but
they are cascading into training and education. So if we
want to move Australia up the international division of
labour, we move it up with education, creativity, and
skills. And that's the sort of society we're trying to build.
One that has a f ocus on research and development, product
innovation, staffed by a clever workforce with creativity
and ideas. Selling those ideas around the world which
will make Australia a better place. And not staying in
the industrial museum, the industrial archaeology, which
the Liberal and National Parties left us in the late ' 709
and the early 1980s.
and the opposition's policy is basically to let the
unemployed carry the weight of the recession and the
recovery so that those who are in comfortable positions
can carry on.
I said today in another place, that if we take the view
that the Federal Director of the Liberal Party
articulated this morning on television, supporting his
leader John Hewson, that people on unemployment benefits
should go off them after 9 months and find accommodation
in the St Vincent de Paul Society, or the Smith Family,
or any other similar organisation the voluntary
agencies which are already stretched to capacity the
notion that somebody with a spouse and children, or a
single person, should find themselves after 9 months cut
of f from support by the government, stigmnatise the
unemployed, and basically told they're on their own, they
can go down to the soup kitchen, or they can go down to
some other voluntary agency to get some basic modicum of
assistance, or if they don't have accommodation to huddle
under a carton, as you the people huddling all around the
United States looking for warmth in the winter, we'll
have a Los Angeles on our hands in this country at some
stage. That it, the social strife which has racked the
United States is basically generated by poverty.
And in the Labor Party, we won't sign up to those sort of
policies. We're not going to tip the unemployed of f
unemployment benefits after 9 months. We're not going to
be running heartless policies like that. We're not going
to let the unfortunate carry the stigma and shock of
economic policies and economic adjustment. Yet they are
the policies of the coalition.
And then on top of that they want to introduce a 15 per
cent consumption tax, which is a very large level of tax,
when one considers that the average rate of income tax in
this country is just over 23 per cent, is an enormous
addition to the burden of taxation in Australia. And as
the Governor of the Central Bank said during the week, it
will add 6 to 7 percentage points to inflation. It will
take our inflation rate to the record low levels of 1 1/ 2
per cent where we have it at the moment, to around 7 or 8
or maybe 9 per cent once more. And with it will go
interest rates as well, and guess who pays the piper
the low and middle paid people who will see a transfer of
wealth from them to the higher paid.
These are the policies of unfairness which our colleagues
in the coalition are offering Australia. That is, if
you're not basically well-off you are a bludger, if
you're unemployed it's your fault, if you go down looking
f or the job search allowance or unemployment benefits
then you are only sponging on the system, that you are
basically to be swatted off the system after 9 months.
On medicine, Dr Howson stood up a couple of weeks ago at
the AMA and said we'll let the AM set the common fee,
not the government, the doctors. Hie's opposed to all of
the unions except the doctors union, where he'll let the
AMA set the fees for medical consultations.
Then he'll cut Medicare to pieces and say you can
privately insure yourself. And you'll go and privately
insure yourself, which will cost about $ 22-23 a week
extra for the average family so that doctors can charge
what they like, and charge what the traffic will bear
under a privately insured system.
And we'll end up with a position like the United States,
where if you're in an accident or you're critically ill,
you'll go up to a hospital door but if you don't have the
blue cross card in your pocket they don't admit you.
They just turn you back, sick, sore, or sorry. That's Dr
Hewson's Australia.
These are the spiteful policies of the current coalition.
These are the policies which would make Menzies and
Malcolm Fraser look like Bolsheviks. Who would roll in
their graves at this approach to say that if you can't
help yourself you're kicked out. If structural change
has made you unemployed, you're stigmatised and you bear
the burden of it, if you're sick you can only get medical
protection if you can afford it, and if your children
want a place in university it's OK if you pay it for them
full fees and then there's a place for you, but beyond
that, if you're a child of the low paid or middle paid,
there's no place for you in universities or other forms
of training unless you pay full fees.
They call it opportunity to succeed, freedom to achieve.
Freedom to achieve providing your parents have got
$ 12 000 to $ 15 000 for university place per year.
That's an income of $ 30 000 before tax to put one child
through one university course for one year.
And let me take their industrial relation policies.
They're now saying they'll let federal awards expire.
They will let the industrial relations system turn down,
so that an employee cannot band together with his or her
brothers or sisters and make an industrial agreement with
an employer as a union, but only can we see negotiations,
says Dr Hewson, between an individual person and their
employer. That is, no role for unions. And we'll all
have to say, what hope in the end does an individual
person have with an employer? The whole balance of
society which has come from the right to organise, and
collaborate in industrial negotiation would disappear.
And to add insult to injury they want all the federal
awards to expire, and all the conditions under them
rates of pay, conditions of employment, annual leave,
sick pay all go with them. And you only get the award
back if the employer and the employee opt back into the
system. But if the employer doesn't agree to opt back
into the system, the award expires. So all the things
that people have fought for a century holiday, sick
leave, rates of pay go out the door and you're left
tied up as an individual person with a common law
contract between yourself and your employer.
This is the tough world which Dr Howson has ready for
people. Slipping back to early Thatcherite policies of
the late 1970s, or the ' greed is good' policies of
President Reagan's America. if you're not a millionaire,
you're a bludger, you're a layabout. Well we've seen in
that country the extremes widen between the wealthy and
the poor, that finally the poor took to the streets of
Los Angeles and said something about it.
These are the sort of un-Australian policies that the
Coalition are seeking to introduce into Australia. No
sense of togetherness, no sense of community, no sense of
inclusion, no sense of cooperation, no sense of
kindliness to one another, no softness in policy, no
concern for the weak, the sick, the aged, or the young.
Just a hard computer model that comes out the Federal
Liberal Party's Fightback! proposals.
Their Federal Director today brazenly said that the
taxpayer shouldn't have to put up with you if you're
unemployed for 9 months. You can go to a voluntary
agency, which John Hewson has been around making sure
that they're equipped to look after these people. That
is, they're equipped to receive you and hand out someone
else's clothes, or blanket, or food, or throw you on the
mercy of your family because there will be no support
from the state.
They are the things we are opposed to. We want to put
Australia back together. We want it to grow. I can grow
and succeed to become a smarter place while we have the
focus on education, upon technology, upon product
innovation* But in the context of a nice society one
that looks after you when you're sick, one that looks
after you when you're aged, one that looks after you when
you're infirm, one that looks after you when you're young
and gives you an education and a future, one that looks
after You when you're in the middle of your life's work,
and retrains you, or as a woman gives you a child care
place to let you go and work. This is the sort of
society which we believe in.
Ifm always told by John Howson that I'm wearing a Zegna
suit the same as he is, and who am I to say he has
crossed the tracks. So I said to him the other day in
Parliament last night in the Senate we put our hands up
for occupational superannuation. We voted for the
Superannuation Guarantee Charge ( SGC) which will see 9
per cent paid by employers go to employees to give them a
standard of living in retirement which is now twice the
current age pension. All Australian working men and
women. That's what we put our hand up for in the Senate
last Wednesday night. I said to him, where was your
hand? Your hand was down. You had the boots into
ordinary working people again. They might get themselves
an advantage by building up a pool of savings to provide
for a decent standard of living in retirement, they might
even help put together a pool of national savings which
will help with investment and the current account deficit
and our overseas debt. But you and the Liberal Party
voted against it, as you always do.
And that's the difference between us. The boy from
Welfare Avenue crossed the tracks to vote down
occupational superannuation, to vote down Medicare, to
vote down the right to unemployment benefits when you're
unemployed, to vote down the right of education to
children of working class families. These are all the
things that I believe Australians will not tolerate. And
that's why our party stands for the innovators in
Australia and the party which will draw people together
to declare for Australia proud, unique and to hold our
head up in the world.
We know that we have to get the economy cracking again to
get employment going. And we recognise that too many of
our young people are not finding jobs. It is a problem,
a real problem. We're having a national meeting with
employers in a couple of weeks to get to a basis of
agreement on wages, terms and conditions of employment,
and training, that will help provide many thousands of
new jobs for young people, particularly in that 5-19 year
category.
Dr Hewson criticises us for holding a meeting behind
closed doors. Well, does anybody think that the
industrial practices of 40 or 50 years are going to be
traded away under the glare of television cameras, that
there is going to be a real discussion about these
problems other than the genuine one where people can
discuss things and talk genuinely to one another in
private? That can only happen privately. That's what
we're going to have soon. And that will also help on the
employment front, particularly with young people.
So ladies and gentlemen, can I say this. I thank you
very much for coming to support Peter tonight. This is
the start of his campaign for the next election. And I
can't say it's the start of ours because it's going to
start later than this I think. But we're campaigning, in
a sense, all the time. And we're campaigning for the
right to make Australia an interesting country, a country
with economic promise, a country where people are not
left behind, be it the unemployed, the sick, the aged, or
the young, but one where we take the view that everybody
has the right to inclusion, and we sit down cooperatively
as a society and come together and make this country a
greater place than it is already, find our place in the
Asia-Pacific, declare ourselves to be as we are unique
as a nation and to take our place in the world, which
will lift up the prosperity of Australians.
That's what the challenge is about. That's what we're
going to be working to, and are going to be keeping those
Labor principles in mind, for the greater benefit of all
Australians, not just the wealthy, or the well-to-do, but
all Australians, young and old alike, to give them a
decent, prosperous economy, but in a society which is a
soft, nice society where we care for one another, and
where those great humanitarian values of Labor are not
forgotten in the rush to make a quid.
That's what we stand for and that's what we're going to
be fighting for.
Thank you.