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Kerry, to Tony Staley, Michael Osborne, Michael Yabsley, to my numerous
State and federal parliamentary colleagues, ladies and gentlemen.
There's something about addressing a gathering from the stage
of the Sydney Town Hall that tickles my political fancy. This particular
stage is normally known as the stage from which conferences of the
New South Wales Labor Party are addressed. And over the years many
a rowdy gathering has taken place in this Town Hall but it doesn't
belong to the Labor Party it belongs to the people of Sydney. I really
am delighted that the division has chosen this venue for tonight's
gathering. And can I start by thanking Kerry for her very kind words
of introduction and can I also wish her well and commit myself and
my federal parliamentary colleagues in New South Wales in doing everything
in our power to secure her election as the next Premier of New South
Wales and the defeat of the Carr Government.
It won't be easy but it is eminently achievable and the Carr
Government is an eminently beatable Government if you can describe
governments in that fashion. You have our goodwill, our good wishes
and both from a personal and a political point of view I am very committed
to doing everything I can to bring about the result we all want on
the 27th of March next year.
Ladies and gentlemen, tonight is a marvellous moment on which to reflect
on a remarkable year. Parliament got up last night and right at the
end we secured the support of the two Independents thus passing into
law the Private Health Insurance Rebate legislation which was one
of the key elements of our taxation policy. It's the first downpayment
on the introduction of the Coalition's taxation plan and once
again this country has a non means tested fully available private
health insurance rebate which, when the new tax system comes into
operation, will mean that 81 per cent of Australians have full tax
deductibility of their private health insurance premiums. We have
had a remarkable year and the greatest thing to me about the election
result on the 3rd of October is that it demonstrated that
there is a reward in politics and there is a reward in public life
for actually asking the community to support fundamental change and
fundamental reform.
All of my political life I have seen politics about bringing about
change for the better and for the improvement of the community. I
don't believe in change for its own sake. I have often said that
the art of statecraft in the modern age is to preserve those practices
from the past that continue to serve the nation well whilst at the
same time being willing to challenge and discard those practices that
no longer serve the country well. And we had an opportunity in this
election campaign to lay out a very important economic road map for
Australia in the area of taxation. And the truth is that as many in
this room will know because in different ways you have been intimately
involved in and associated with the operation of the Australian economy
and the interface between that economy and the Government of Australia
for many years. You all know that our taxation system has been crying
aloud for reform for two decades.
I came into Parliament, as Kerry reminded you, in 1974. A year later
we had the Aspry Report named after a very prominent judge at the
time of the New South Wales full court. And that report tabled in
1975, 23 years ago, recommended the introduction of a broad-based
indirect tax, in other words, a GST. And year after year the issue
would come up and people would solemnly say: yes, we have got to get
around to it. And the former Coalition Government looked at it on
a couple of occasions and discarded it. To his credit my predecessor
as Prime Minister Paul Keating advocated it in 1985 only to be torpedoed
by the trade union movement then led, let me remind you, by Simon
Crean who is now the Deputy Leader of the Federal Opposition and Bill
Kelty and a rather wishy-washy Prime Minister on that subject at the
time, Bob Hawke. Then John Hewson tried to his credit and very bravely
in 1993 to advocate it. And it was defeated then by a ferocious fear
campaign led by my predecessor.
It may have been clever politics, it may have given them a great afterglow
on the night of the election in 1993 but it wasn't serving the
national interest. And I have never forgotten the conversation I had
with Mr Keating in his office in 1985 when I was the Deputy Leader
of the Opposition and Shadow Treasurer and I went into his office
and I'd arranged to get a copy of the white paper on taxation
reform and we discussed between us the need for that reform even though
we were on opposite sides of politics. And he said that he thought
it was something that had to be done for the long-term interests of
Australia.
Now, I believed that then and so did he. He, of course, had a different
view when he was Prime Minister in 1993 and more is the pity as far
as the national interest was concerned at that time. But we have needed
this reform for two decades. So many of the other things that we needed
to change in this country so far as the economy and the business community
are concerned have been attended to. We have deregulated our financial
system, we have relaxed the tariff barriers, we have embraced sensible
policies of privatisation, we have embraced sensible competition policies.
All of those things have made the Australian economy stronger and
more competitive.
And can I tell you that the best thing and the thing that has given
me the greatest sense of pride and satisfaction over the last 12 months
was the experience that I had in Kuala Lumpur only a few weeks ago
at the APEC meeting. To feel and to know that Australia had won a
new respect in our region. For two reasons, because we had a strong
domestic economy and we were recognised as having got our own economic
house in order. And also because of that strength we had been able
to offer assistance. We have been able to be true regional mates to
countries such as Indonesia and Korea and Thailand that needed our
assistance. And one sensed that there was a recognition that Australia
was performing well. And by any measure as I said to the Parliament
yesterday in the last Question Time, Australians go to Christmas 1998
with our economy in a stronger more healthy condition than it has
been at any time since the late 1960s.
We do have a very strong level of economic growth, we have historically
low levels of inflation, we have a budget strongly in surplus turned
around to that condition in only two-and-a-half years, we have strong
levels of business investment. But most importantly of all, I think,
we have a situation where the business community and those responsible
for the future economic growth of this country believe that we have
a Government that is committed to taking whatever decisions are needed
in the long-term national interests of Australia. And that is the
message that came out of the result on the 3rd of October.
It was a risk. There were many people who told me you were crazy to
go to an election introducing...proposing the introduction of a
new taxation system. And in a sense, we were defying conventional
wisdom in doing so. But when you look at it in another respect there
was really no other way of doing it given the history of attempts
previously to reform the Australian taxation system. I couldn't
have gone to the election on the 3rd of October saying
I am not going to reform the taxation system when I knew in my heart
that reform was necessary. What was the point of being in a position
of power and authority unless you are prepared to use it in the national
interests? I have had all the jobs in politics. I have been Opposition
Leader, I have been Treasurer, I have been a senior Minister, I have
been out of favour, I have been back in favour, I have been Prime
Minister. But really you go into public life to do positive things
and to do - to bring about change. You don't go into public life
to occupy office and to enjoy power for its own sake. There is nothing
in the end to be derived from that. So, in a way, although it was
difficult, it was also, in another sense, a fairly simple choice.
The only way we could ever get this great reform embraced was to confront
the Australian community with it in an election campaign. Risked all
and having won it, know that we enjoyed the ultimate moral authority
to implement it. And we had a Federal Executive meeting in Canberra
today and one of the young Liberal representatives said during the
meeting, the thing that he enjoyed most about the last election campaign
was that he could stare any of his political opponents in the eye
and feel that we had the moral high ground in that campaign because
we were arguing for something that everybody, Labor and Liberal alike,
knew deep down was necessary for the long-term economic benefit of
Australia. So I feel pretty happy about the outcome of the election
and I think all of the party supporters had every reason to feel very
pleased about the outcome.
And it's not just the area of taxation reform over the last year
that we can draw some pride from but there have been a number of other
major events over the last year that, as time has gone by, have worked
even more to the credit of the Government than appeared at the time.
And one of those, of course, was the very traumatic circumstance of
the, I believe, increasingly successful attempt in April of this year
to reform the Australian waterfront. At the time we ran into a lot
of criticism. A number of court decisions didn't quite go in
the way anticipated but that is the nature of a nation that lives
under the rule of law. And I make no further comment about those decisions.
But that wasn't easy. And I want to pay tribute here tonight
to the courage that was displayed on that occasion by Chris Corrigan,
the head of Patricks. And I also want to pay tribute to the tenacity
and strength of my Minister for Industrial Relations, Peter Reith,
who endured all of the intimidation and all of the pressure and all
of the personal strain and stress that goes with a senior Minister
who is in the eye of an industrial storm of that character. And as
the weeks and then months have gone by we are now starting to get
a productivity dividend, not so much here in Sydney but that will
ultimately come because once you start getting efficiency gains in
other parts of the country inevitably it will flow through to the
other ports in the country. The Australian waterfront will never be
the same again. There have been fundamental changes and reforms. And
that was something that, for decades, Australians also knew had to
be tackled, something had to be done about it.
We were able, over the last year, to resolve that incredibly difficult
native title issue. And I don't think there was a person of goodwill
in this country who wanted the Wik legislation to be an issue in the
last election campaign. I never did and I don't think Liberals
of goodwill and decency wanted it to be either. But we weren't
prepared to surrender what we regarded as important conditions of
an honourable settlement and we needed to maintain the commitment
that we made to the different sections of the Australian community
in 1997.
We achieved a remarkably good outcome just a year ago, almost to the
day, at the climate change convention in Kyoto. And, of course, we
were able, in May of this year, to bring down a budget which a year
ahead of time had turned a deficit of $10.5 billion inherited in March
of 1996 into a very comfortable surplus. And I want to pay tribute
to the tremendous commitment of Peter Costello as the Treasurer and
Deputy Leader of the Party to the economic stewardship of Australia
over the last two-and-three-quarter years.
I think on the broader scale we have been able, in the last year in
particular, to finally but nonetheless significantly rebalance Australia's
foreign relationships. There was nothing fundamentally wrong with
many of the foreign policy directions of the former government. There
were questions of emphasis and there were nuances about it which I
didn't think were suitable for Australia's longer term interests.
I had the sense, when I became Prime Minister, that this country was
rather an anxious outsider to the Asian Pacific region knocking on
the door seeking admission. I felt that we had to move away from an
Asia only' policy to an Asia first' policy recognising
that our prime area of commitment and interest, both economically
and politically and strategically, had to be the Asian Pacific region
but also knowing that we had long-term interests with other parts
of the world.
And over the last year I've spoken a lot of the special intersection
that I believe Australia occupies. We are quite unique. We are a projection
of western civilisation in this part of the world. We have very deep
and special links with the nations of North America and we share so
much in common with them culturally and politically. But here we are
in the Asian Pacific region with a vibrant population of Australians
of Asian descent, increasing the relevance of Australia to the Asian
Pacific area by the many people-to-people links that that produces.
And you don't have many countries in the world that have such
a conjunction of that history, geography, shared political values,
economic circumstance and so forth. And I can't think of a time
in Australia's recent history where we are a more attractive
magnet as an investment haven in this part of the world.
Given everything that has happened in the Asian Pacific region over
the last couple of years, isn't it good that Australia has the
following characteristics? We have a stable political system. We have
a strong economy. We have a deregulated financial system. We have
a stable and prudentially regulated banking system. We have a strong
and internationally respected legal system and we speak the English
language. I can't think of a more fortunate conjunction. When
you add all of those things together, if we can't make this country
one of the great financial centres of the world over the next few
years then we're not trying hard enough. And it really is, very
specifically, and I talk generally about Australia as a financial
centre, but I know that there are many people in this city who have
a very strong and understandably deep commitment to achieving that
goal.
So we have a lot to be not smug about or not complacent about but
we are entitled as a political party and we are entitled as a government
and a group of men and women who have worked together over a number
of years to achieve our political goal, we are entitled to achieve
as we come to the end of this year, we are entitled to feel that we
have achieved a great deal. We have turned on its head some of the
conventional wisdom about Australian politics. The last election campaign
destroyed the mythology of the ascendancy of the Labor Party, particularly
here in New South Wales when it came to marginal seat campaigning.
And I want to thank Remo and his colleagues for the tremendous work
they did in holding so many marginal seats here in New South Wales.
It played a very, very major role in securing our re-election on the
3rd of October.
I want to thank all of you for the tremendous loyalty and support
that you've given me. There are many people in this room tonight
who've been political friends of mine the whole time that I've
been in Parliament. And many of you have counted me as a friend when
I haven't had the job that I've got at the present time
and when perhaps I sort of hadn't had very influential jobs at
all in politics and I remember that and I appreciate that very, very
deeply. I really do. But I can't tell you what a sense of satisfaction
and pleasure that it gives me to be able to say and to be able to
reflect and to know it is true that we have won re-election on the
strength of what we have put to the Australian public and not off
the back of 13 years of accumulating hostility to a former government
and accumulating desire to bring about a change of government. And
the mandate that we received on the 3rd of October in many
ways was more emphatic than the mandate we received in March of 1996
because it was achieved in more difficult circumstances. And the fact
that by voting for us in October of this year the Australian people
were voting for difficult but, nonetheless, necessary fundamental
change, means that the Australian people properly led, with a proposition
adequately explained, with the benefits for average Australians fully
spelt out, with the essential fairness of the proposition evident
from the beginning, that the Australian people will embrace necessary
change. And that gives me a source of tremendous hope and tremendous
optimism, not only about taxation reform but about other things as
well.
We are going to have our difficulties with the Senate, we're
going to have our arguments, but the greatest thing we have going
for us is that the people voted for the programme that we are now
trying to implement. Imagine the difficulty of trying to get through
the Senate something you'd kept from the Australian people at
the previous election. And every time I have an argument with the
Senate about something that we put up at the previous election they
are in a defensive position, the Labor Party and the Democrats, and
we are in a position of occupying the political and moral high ground.
But, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for tonight. It touches
Janette and I very deeply that you've all come along tonight.
We do feel that it's been a great year for the Liberal Party.
We don't forget the fact that there are many people in Australia
who will not be sharing as bountiful a Christmas as, I guess, most
of us will share and none of us should ever forget that. There is
still a lot that remains to be done in terms of bridging some of the
gaps between the well-off and the not so well-off within our community.
And it remains as one of the challenges of the kind of society that
we want Australia to remain and perhaps, in a sense, even more to
become.
But let us not pass up the opportunity as Liberals and as Liberal
supporters of reflecting on a remarkable year of achievement. The
Australian economy is in great shape. That is significantly due to
the decisions that the Government has taken over the last two-and-a-half
years and it is significantly due to the sense of direction that the
Government has given to the business community and to the Australian
people over that period of time. I thank the business community of
Sydney for its support for the Liberal Party. I know it has been generous.
I thank the Liberal Party organisation here in New South Wales for
its support. I wish all of you a merry Christmas. I hope that 1999
is even better for the Australian people and that the dreams and the
goals that we have for our country and for our families are fully
realised.
Thank you.