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TRANSCRIPT OF THE PRIME MINISTER, THE HON P J KEATING MP
SPEECH AT ALP FUNDRAISING DINNER, TERRACE INTERCONTINENTAL
HOTEL, ADELAIDE, 7 OCTOBER 1994
E OE PROOF COPY
My Cabinet colleagues that I am pleased to have with me tonight, Leader of
the Opposition Mike . Rann who I am also delighted to have with us tonight,
John Hill, Party Secretary, and most particularly you, ladies and gentlemen,
thank you for joining us and being with us. It is an occasion to come to a
State and to focus upon its problems, and to get to understand it, perhaps
better than its fortunes being touched in the normal ebb and flow of events, of
national events, be they in Canberra or elsewhere. And no doubt, the
Cabinet coming here today as Nick has said has focused us up on South
Australia: its strengths and its weaknesses, its capacities and its needs and
I think that as a consequence of doing that, and as he said, getting the
buearacracy focussed on it as well, is a good thing for us and a good thing I
hope for South Australia because I think, as he said, in the next day or two,
some announcements will come from it. But the real value is probably, what
we get through gatherings such as these: an idea of what is happening in
South Australia, and how we can better integrate it into the mainstream of the
economy and society in this country. So, that is why we're pleased to be
here, and I'm sure and know that we will enjoy the opportunity.
I think that there are a lot of superlatives thrown around in public life
adjectives are dreamt up every day of the week but I'm quite sure that one
could say truthfully, almost advisedly, that this is probably going to be the
most exciting decade in our history. Because I don't think that there has ever
been a time when we are more, see ourselves more, as a nation with an
identity of our own, I don't think we have ever enjoyed the confidence we
currently enjoy about our capacity to do things in the world. We have never,
ever had markets the size we have, with the proximity we now have them in
the past our markets were always in Europe, and some in North America.
Now, the fastest growing part of the world is on our doorstep in Asia. We are
more appreciative, I think, of Australia and what we have been given of the
opportunity we have had than perhaps any generation has ever been. We
now know, because of the mobility our generation enjoys through the 747 and
television, we can appreciate what Australia is, and know that not all nations
have been endowed as we have. And it is unique. We are the only nation in
the world that has a continent to itself, and that big moat of the Pacific
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around us gives us that security, that natural security, and of course the
temperate nature and the tolerant society we have bred here makes this I'm
sure, the best place in the world to live.
It's certainly going to be the best place to be living and doing business,
particularly in this part of the world. And I don't think you could have said
these things in the decades past. And I like to think and I was speaking to a
Labor audience earlier tonight saying it was a century ago you started to
see some of these things in the 1890' s. The parallels between the 1890' s
and the 1990' s are quite striking it was the period of the great drought, it
was the period of our deepest recession, it was a period when Australian
nationhood was really brought together, when the threads were bound
together. When the States and the nation decided to federate to cede
powers to a greater national government. And the social experimentation,
and the sense of being an Australian that developed in that decade, and went
on to the First World War. I mean, we have all lived with the consequences
of the First World War it having automatically introduced the Second. But
one of the great consequences sad consequences for us was it snuffed out
Australian nationhood, and we went back into that conservative sort of
cocoon. And even after the British Parliament passed the Statute of
Westminster and said, " look, you can actually have the place and run it
yourself', we said " oh, no no thank-you not quite yet". They said " we're
actually going to give it to you." " Oh no, no, no, we don't quite want it." And
we then went through the torpor what I call the Menzies years. The Rip Van
Winkle years, when the place culturally went to sleep, and we regarded
Britain as home etc. And, you know, people say there was quite a nice thing
on Menzies last week on 565 and they say well, you shouldn't be too hard
on Menzies for his time. You know, this was a view that was about that we
didn't assert our Australian identity we didn't assert the notion of being an
Australian, we didn't have that inner confidence about ourselves. We did
regard ourselves as a Branch Office and as some sort of derivative place.
Well, this may be fair political analysis, but George Washington wouldn't
have had a bar of it, I can assure you. And he had the jump on Menzies by
about 150 or 200 years, and so I don't think it necessarily follows that you
have got to say that but it was a state of mind. And a state of mind not only
that was one that tied us up, in a sense, to markets in the Northern
Hemisphere, as sensible as that was, and as understandable and obvious as
that was at the time, but it sapped our confidence in ourselves. And the
reassertion of Australian values and our confidence, we saw a glimpse of it
during the Whitlam Government, and it basically faded again, and that is why
I think that now, with the great changes of the 1980' s behind us the, opening
up of Australia, the knocking down of the tariff wall, the removal of exchange
controls, the free-flow of funds, the free-flow of goods, the competitive
culture, the Accord, the change in relative wages, the lift in the profit share,
the strong rates of employment growth, the development of the sophisticated
Social Security system all of that has put us in a position where now we can
actually understand that our identity and our confidence can be not simply an
adjunct of what we do, but a central power-house, a central powering
element, that pulls into it all of those changes, and uses and springs from the
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changes that were made in the 80' s and are still being made. And that's why
I think that you can go back through the decades but there are none where
you could see Australia in the position where it can be quite as excited about
the prospects as now. Because here we are, opened up to the world. No
longer sitting behind a tariff wall. No longer sitting with double-digit inflation.
A competitive country where competitive breezes have been well and truly
flowed through the economy, where people good managers, investors,
people with some clever instincts can now do well because when we
opened up the financial markets in the 80' s, we gave a freedom to the clever
that was formerly, under regulation, only enjoyed by the wealthy. This is the
great levelling up of de-regulation it actually gives the clever a chance
against the wealthy who formerly were able to take more than their share of
the rations supply of savings that came out of this banking system of the day.
It is a great irony that it took a Labor Government to give Australia a market
economy, but it did. And that is why if there is to be the outward
manifestation of this change, it is as I said in the last election that is,
outward meaning into the growing markets of the Asia-Pacific better to have
the authors of the policy running the policy than the usurpers. That is why it
was important as Nick said to win the 1993 election. Important for Labor,
important for the country.
Now, I think that if we take stock of where we are and understand the
changes which have been made, a number of important ones come to mind.
One, I think, is education. This has been in the past Australia's great
comparative advantage. There is only one other country in Asia that has an
education system like us, and that's Japan. But in 1983, only 3 kids in
completed secondary school. This year it's 8 in 10, and it will soon be 9 in
And we are streaming 40% of those students into universities where we
have added 65% of places since 1985, and we are now building up the
Cinderella of Australian education Technical and Further Education,
vocational education to play the proper role it should have always played in
skills formation in this country. This great change which is going to power
product innovation and opportunity in this country is also doing one other
thing. And that is this massive participation rate in schools is now being
enjoyed by Australian young women who were not enjoying this before. In my
generation, young women invariably mostly didn't go on to complete
secondary school, and the number of university places granted to them were
few. Now there are more women in universities than there are young men.
So, this is a very liberating change as well as one which is innovating and
pushing the economy along. And it is, I think, playing to our real strengths
and our comparative advantage, which is not basically the wool we shear
from the sheep, or the coal we dig from the open-cut mines, or the iron-ore
mountains we wear down, but rather from the skills which we have, and the
capacity to do innovative and clever things. And we are now seeing that, and
we are seeing it in places like South Australia where smaller companies and
even larger companies are doing things of world class in a world
environment, and being competitive. And that is off the back of good
management, which is essentially powered along by innovations and
education.
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Education is one of these things which gives communities a chance. We
have, as a party, said that we believe that Australia will be stronger if we
move along together that we believe in the policies of inclusion. That's a
word which is now dropped around the political landscape most parties say
it and don't mean it. We say it, and mean it. That is, that we will be stronger
if we are together. That is why the Government, in the course of the election
campaign, said we would not leave the unemployed behind that it is
insufferable for a society to damn around 300,000 people who through no
fault of their own find themselves to be long-term unemployed. And why it is
also an economically inefficient thing as well as an inequitable thing to allow
people to drop off the end of the queue and become an underclass. We are
too wealthy for that to happen, and when the Government decided and I had
the pleasure of introducing the White Paper, Working Nation, which devoted
a very large parcel of resources to the long-term unemployed we drew a line
in the sand which said we will not have an underclass. If America wants an
underclass, it can have one. If Britain wants an underclass, it can have one.
But we wont have one. And as a consequence, we are already starting to
see a very high proportion of long-term unemployed people taken up in the
labour market we have had 4% employment growth this year, over 360,000
jobs 75,000 of those have gone to the long-term unemployed. If we were
looking at comparable numbers in the 80' s, it would have been only 7 to
10,000 jobs that went to long-term unemployed. So these programs are
working they're starting to work now as a large systemic change, and the
other important thing from it is that we are going to need skills formation in
this recovery as it burbles along, there is going to be pressure in the labour
market, and we can't afford to have a block of people unemployed, or their
resources under-employed their skills under-employed. We are not going to
see skills formation from migration as we have done in other recoveries, and
that is why in this one it is important that we bring this category of people
along, and bring them back into the mainstream of society, So the White
Paper is one thing it's an equity issue, it's a social justice issue, but it is'also
an economic issue.
Another is Mabo. Now, some may say well, it doesn't affect us very much.
The High Court said that there is a Native Title coming from indigenous
custom title a native title in the common law but that the title is subordinate
to the Crown. That is, that the title is subordinate to issues of interest in land
by land managers or land ministers of the States. So in other words, a
freehold title extinguishes native title. And therefore, one would say, in the
capital cities, well, why should I worry about that? Mabo doesn't mean much
to me. Out in the back blocks, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders can
have access to land if they can establish the traditional connection with it.
The important thing is that the principal, perhaps defining feature of
Aboriginal culture, is the association that Aboriginal people have with the
land. And we cannot, absolutely cannot, go on saying that we are a fair
society, that we believe in justice, we believe in inclusion, but we don't
believe in inclusion for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. You
can't say that, and give meaning to the word inclusion. And you can't go on
in this part of the world holding your head up particularly in Asia saying,
" well, here we are, the largely European tribe who happened to inherit a
continent, but we're here, but our indiginies aren't. There's no equal place for
them". Now, Mabo was a wrong that needed to be... the whole notion of terra
nullius, that the continent was basically without people and without a culture,
was wrong and needed to be righted. And the High Court made that
decision, and the Government supported the High Court by putting the
legislative framework to give effect to the decision into place. That is, the
Court didn't say what the title was, how it will be dispensed etc, who should
have it all those mechanisms were put into place in the Mabo legislation.
To have not done it would have been to have denied Aboriginal people
justice. To have not done it would have been to hang the High Court out to
dry. Now we often hear our conservative opponents talking about the rule of law.
They are always interested in the rule of law until it affects them, and when a
majority on the High Court found in favour of Mabo, they sailed right into the
Chief Justice and all the other judges and the former position of respect that
the Court had was very quickly being assailed by those who basically didn't
believe that black people should be given land. Now, it is very hard to create
institutions in any country, and as you know in our constitution we established
the High Court in a position of some substantial pre-eminence under
separation of powers from the legislative branch of the government, and we
have seen for an 1890' s constitution in a period of telecommunications and
television and aviation and all these things that were not really around in
those days we have seen a change to the powers of the Commonwealth and
delineation of powers by the Commonwealth and the States through the High
Court. And so, therefore, I thought, and the Government thought, that the
High Court having made an historic and courageous decision, that we should
keep the institution strong, and in the doing of it, provide justice to Aboriginal
people. That has happened it's a very great change in our society. It's
another element of the inclusion that I speak of in saying that if we are to go
along together, it has to be together.
So you look at these things Mabo, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
Australians, long-term unemployed these are all the sorts of things that will
bind Australia together. And as we grow as this recovery comes through,
this low-inflationary recovery we will be able to hold our head up high, and
we will approach the world we live in and say, " here we are as Australians,
we are a unique people with an identity of our own, at peace with each other
in a society where we will not have underclasses. Where we are as one".
Not everybody will have an equal distribution, an equal lump of the wealth or
the opportunity, but at least we will be committed truly committed to the
notion of equality, and with it of course, fraternity. This gives us the entry
ticket to play in the bigger game on the world stage, and this Government has
thought about that, and it has thought about how we can not only create
structures within Australia for Australia, but outside of Australia for
Australians.
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And this is where we have committed ourselves in international forums to
things like the Uruguay Round, and the GATT, in which Australia played a
very important role over 7 years putting the Cannes group together and
prosecuting the fight against the Europeans on agriculture, and other nations
on services and property rights etc, to get a result which will change the world
in terms of free trade and opportunity. Particularly now we are seeing for the
first time since the First World War, Russia rejoining the world economy,
South America rejoining the world economy and for the first time ever, India
joining the world economy, China joining the world economy, and providing a
back-drop set of rules under GATT which will allow that to happen. That is
one thing that this Government has been involved with, and it will mark out for
a trading nation like Australia huge opportunities over the longer run.
Another is APEC. APEC is the development of an Asia-Pacific economic
community. It started off as a fledgling information exchange body we have
now got it up to a Heads Of Government body, and its second Heads Of
Government meeting is in Bogor in Indonesia next month, and that will be
attended by the 18 leaders of the 18 member states of APEC, including of
course the President of the United States, the Prime Minister of Japan, the
President of China, the President of Indonesia of course is the Host, and all
of the other Heads of Governments from around the region. Why have we
interested ourselves in this? Basically, to see that Asia, that the big decision
that is going to be made in Asia in the next 5-7 years, is an Asia-Pacific
decision, and not an Asian decision. In other words, Asia the
comprehension of Asia is a Pan-Pacific view, and not simply a continental
Asian issue where we see largely the world developing into three blocks the
European Union, NAFTA travelling through Central and South America, the
Americans extending their dialogue with the Latins and running into South
America, staying at home, and China becoming the dominant central
economic force in an Asian economic union of some kind. It's in our interest
to see that the United States economically and strategically engages in Asia.
Now one of the ways we can do this is to open up trade and investment
opportunities for all the countries of the Asia-Pacific, and this will mean'that
the United States will not then be focussing on South America, but will be
focussing on the opportunities of the great growth of the Asian markets, and
in the doing of it, maintaining that unique strategic relationship it has with
Japan, and in the doing of that, keeping the strategic environment in North
Asia much more passive. This then becomes a very strong point for us in
terms of the environment in which we live.
As APEC goes on and we adopt a trade-liberalising agenda, we then open up
in our immediate neighbourhood as we get trading barriers tariff and nontariff
barriers down so we are doing something above the GATT. We got
the GATT as a back-drop, but we add to that through APEC, so APEC
becomes a GATT-plus outcome. Now, it is a very big issue and it's a very
hard thing to do, and it may take us some time. But we are in there trying,
and that is why President Soeharto's Chairmanship of this meeting in
Indonesia in November of this year is going to be so important. So there is
APEC.
The other issue is the developing of our relations with Indonesia. This is the
fourth largest country in the world it's just on 200 million people. It is an
archipelago 8 flying hours across. It has been held together by President
Soeharto's new order Government now for over a quarter of a century. In my
view, it poses no strategic threat to Australia. We pose no strategic threat to
it, therefore we should be friends, and that is what this Government is
seeking to do to develop a relationship of trust, understanding and value
with the Government and the people of Indonesia. This will open up
tremendous trading opportunities for Australia, and will develop a relationship
which will make us stronger, and them stronger. And then, as perhaps we
open up the opportunities of AFTA the ASEAN free-trade area where we
have a proposal to look at Australasia that's CER, the trade agreement
between Australia and New Zealand being part of AFTA, an extension of
AFTA, we would then not only see a people to people relationship with
Indonesia, but a trading relationship with ASEAN. ASEAN, with Australia it's
worth remembering that the Australian economy is about the same size of all
the ASEAN economies combined -that's Indonesia, Singapore, the
Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand -they are together just larger than
Australia. Put Australia and New Zealand together, and we are as large as
ASEAN, put the two together and it is a market of $ 1000 billion and 300
million people. When we make that connection, Australia's trade
opportunities will really blossom.
And that is why I say, think of any other decade where this was possible, and
you can't think of one. So, the structures inside Australia the opening up,
the great social changes like access and opportunity in education,
universality of access in health, age care, child care, occupational
superannuation for the workforce, strong rates of employment growth,
economic policy focussed on employment, wage restraint for economic
growth and employment growth via the Accord, a change to the
competitiveness and the competitive culture by low tariffs and the removal of
exchange controls, the inculcation of a competitive culture inside Australia
and the opportunities of that abroad, the opening up of the structures and the
development of the structures outside of Australia for Australia all of these
things are things which this Labor Party, and this Labor Government have
fashioned for this nation. So, when we come to South Australia and we see
the things we are doing here, and people say " where is South Australia's
place in this?" And I say, " in the centre of it". Because the culture here has
always been one which has been about making do, changing, adapting,
finding a role for itself in the country where natural opportunities haven't
existed that's happening today. That is happening in the innovative
products we are seeing from this state. We are seeing it in services, we're
seeing it in regions and we say, if we create the environment both
economically, socially and we get that right, we get that sense of
togetherness, that sense of inclusion right, and we are accepted as a nation
with a culture and an identity of our own in Asia, South Australia will have no
trouble at all finding its place in all that. So, when we come here and we talk
to you, we try to listen for those little bits of information which have their place
in the matrix, but the matrix is the much bigger picture of Australia's place in
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the world. And that is why, when you hear our opponents say the republic is
basically a distraction, you say that's wrong the republic is central to our
economic fortunes. Because otherwise, you go around Asia with the Queen
of Great Britain the Head of State of another country as your Head of
State. That is, for this country, untenable. Untenable. And that is why, over
time, the whole question about identity, inclusion, inclusiveness, social justice
and social democracy rejecting the hard-hearted views of Thatcher or
Reagan, or the centralised economies of the old Eastern Bloc but going for
something new and better, a good competitive economy grafted on with an
equitable social policy and an enlightened foreign policy, are concurrences of
policy events that I don't think Australia has ever had before. This is why I
say, this is the most exciting decade in our nation's history, and why I think
South Australians should think that too. Thank you.
ends.