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Thank you very much Phillip, to Dennis Napthine, the Leader of the Opposition in Victoria, Vasan, all of my parliamentary colleagues, both federal and state, ladies and gentleman.
The first time that I visited India was in 1964. It was long before I had entered parliament, I had read quite a bit about India, I understood many of the things we had in common, the most important of which is represented by names like Laxman and Tendulkar, which of course transcends anything else as far as the common bonds between our two societies are concerned. And I remember going there in 1964 and I wandered into a sitting of the Supreme Court of India and having not long graduated from the Sydney University Law School I still retained some memory of the Constitutional law that I had been taught and there I sat down in the Supreme Court of India and heard a Constitutional law case and it was all very, it was all to become very familiar. It was an argument between the Federal Government and the State Government. The only difference is that it was India and not Australia but you know as the years went by I was to be reminded of that and to cap it all off the lawyers were arguing about the balance of power between the federal government and the state government and the lawyer for the state government quoted a couple of cases decided by the High Court of Australia in furtherance of his argument and it just bought home to me that although there are enormous differences in size and culture and history between India and Australia there are many, many things that we have in common. Beyond of course the one that I treasure so much and that is our common love of that great game.
But ladies and gentlemen may I say how much I appreciate the warmth of the welcome that was extended to me tonight. Can I congratulate the Lotus Liberal Club for the tremendous support that it has been extending to the Liberal Party now for a number of years, it really is very warmly appreciated.
This gathering here tonight is very much the face of the modern Australia. It brings together all of the elements of our very rich and diverse community. Our traditions, the addition to those traditions and the changing of those traditions that have come from so many different groups, which are in their different ways tributaries to the river of the modern Australian community. And it is a night of course that brings together many ethnic groups but it is a night that is being particularly sponsored by the Young Liberals of Victoria and by the Liberal Indian Community here in the Eastern Suburbs of Melbourne. And I had the opportunity having visited India for the first time in 1964, I had the opportunity to go back there in the year 2000 and visit the current Indian Prime Minister and to meet many of his senior Ministers and to have brought home to me the very important links that exist between Australia and India and I know that is important to many people here tonight.
But even more important to everybody here tonight irrespective of whether you were born in Australia or where you were born overseas, we are above everything else we are Australians together. And the great strength of what we have been able to achieve in Australia is that yes, everybody is entitled to retain and treasure and protect their cultural identity and their heritage. Everybody has a soft spot for the country in which they were born and nobody should ever be expected to give up that soft spot, nobody. But while we respect that, we've also achieved in this country a sense of cohesion and a sense of unity and it's something that is the envy of the rest of the world and there are number of reasons why we have done it. One of the reasons is that we are essentially a classless society, we inherited many wonderful things from our British and Irish forebears but one thing we didn't inherit, thankfully, is class distinction. We are an open, egalitarian community.
We have extended the gift of welcome to people from 140 different nations around the world and there is no society around the world that has done it quite in the way that we have been able to do it. And when you think that over the last 10 years we have seen the disintegration of the old Yugoslavia and we have amongst the Australian community hundreds of thousands of Australians who owe their background to the old Yugoslavia whether they be Serbian or Slovenian or Croatian or whatever and despite all of the difficulties that have occurred in that former country, those difficulties have not really been played out within the Australian community. Because although many Australians of those particular heritages would have followed the events often anxiously and with a great deal of feeling they recognised that they've moved on from that and they now live as Australians more than anything else within the Australian community. And I think it is a tremendous tribute to the sense of unity and cohesion in the Australian community and the same thing has been played out with the very difficult circumstances that exist in the Middle East and people, whatever their feelings are about that, they always remember that above everything else we are Australian and the unity of the Australian community is far more important than any depth of feeling people may have about something that is happening or occurring in their former homeland.
So we have a lot to be thankful for in this country, we have achieved more in terms of social and ethnic cohesion in Australia than I believe any society on earth. And that is why we have a right to look the rest of the world in the eye and say we will decide who comes here and on what terms. Because we have an immigration policy which is non-discriminatory. We don't exclude people on the grounds of their race or their religion. We abolished the White Australia Policy in the 1960s and we have a very strong commitment to the non-discriminatory immigration policy and nations that have that approach have a right within the embrace of a non-discriminatory approach to immigration to decide who comes here and in what circumstances. And the other point I would make is that this is the second most generous country in the world in taking refugees after Canada on a per capita basis.
And if you go through the history of Australia, the acceptance even in the late 1930s and the early '40s of Jewish refugees from Europe. The acceptance after the war of what were called displaced persons from many of the refugee camps of Europe and the fact that in the 1970s on a per capita basis Australia took more Indo-Chinese refugees than any country in the world including the United States. Now with that background we are entitled, as we have done in recent weeks and will continue to do, to resist within the limits of the law and within the limits of decent humane behaviour we'll continue to resist the attempts of those who would come here illegally and without any kind of authority. We're not seeking in any way to deny to genuine refugees the opportunity to come to Australia along with the opportunity of going to other societies. We'll continue to maintain a generous refugee programme but what we ask is that everybody must be assessed equally, everybody must be assessed in accordance with the international rules because there are millions of refugees whose entitlement and whose claim on grounds of equity and fairness is vastly superior to many people who would seek to come here illegally. And that is why it is important that we take the stand that we have. Now I don't seek to guarantee to you and I can't that we can stop all illegal entry into this country but I can promise you is that we will try and reduce it as much as we can. We will try to continue to send signals to those who would come here illegally that we will do everything within our power to stop it and that is why we took the stance we did last week. It is why we will pursue as vigorously as we can with the government of Indonesia the negotiation of a bilateral agreement about the movement of people out of that country and that is why Alexander Downer and Peter Reith and Philip Ruddock, and can I say what a magnificent job Philip Ruddock has done in a very difficult portfolio over the last few, and that is why the three of them are going to Jakarta in two days time. It won't be easy, we've been trying to negotiate an agreement with the Government of Indonesia now for some time and we will continue to persevere but I hope in the end that it might be possible to do so but I also hope that the events of the past couple of weeks have not only, as it undoubtable has, focussed the Australian community on this issue but also I hope focussed the attention on the world community on the need for a more concerted, cooperative, collaborative effort between the various nations of the world and the various of the international agencies to try and deal with this very difficult and at this time quite grievous problem.
But I haven't only come here tonight to talk about that issue, much at all as it has preoccupied my time and preoccupied the attention of the Australian community but also to say a couple of words about the challenge that lies ahead for the Liberal Party over the next two or three months. We are going to have an election and, sometime, before the end of the year. I have said all along that it would be towards the end of the year as each week goes by, people tend to believe me a little bit more.
The latest constitutional date to hold an election, I'm told is the twelfth of January the year 2002. I can assure you I won't interrupt the Boxing Day test, that would be sacrilegious and I won't interrupt the New Year's Test in Sydney either, that would be equally sacrilegious so I think on that basis I can let you into a secret. We will have the election before the end of the year. Just exactly when, like all other Prime Ministers I'll decide that at some stage a bit closer to where it has to be held. But it will be a tough fight. We are doing better now than we were doing a few months ago but it is still going to be very hard to win a third term. We have a very good story, we have a very good record, we have affected a lot of big changes that this country has needed for a long time and over the past five and half years we have been a very active government and I promised myself when I became Prime Minister that I wasn't going to squander the opportunity of having the highest and most priveleged office in Australia. That I was going to use the, whatever period of time that the people of Australia gave me in cooperation with my colleagues, I was going to use that time to change those things that ought to be change but equally to defend and protect those things that continued to serve the country and continued to stand us in very good stead.
And as we look back over the last five and half years we have come a long way. We've made our share of mistakes, we haven't don't' everything as well as we might have but fundamentally the country is heading the right direction. We are a stronger country than we were five and half years ago. We are stronger economically we have stronger defences, we have greater respect around the world, we've had the courage to confront some of the great reform issues that we have needed for a long time. Taxation reform has been a huge challenge. It has probably cause a few people in this room a bit of transitory angst in its introduction but we are as a result of that tax system, we do have a sounder revenue base and can I just make one emphatic point to you about the whole debate on taxation and its contribution and the people of this country. My political opponent, the Leader of the Opposition, the alternative Prime Minister of Australia is saying that he wants more resources put into health and education yet in the same breath Mr Beazley says "I want more money put into health and education but I am against the taxation system that will in the end deliver in the end more resources for health and education" And we are an aging population and we therefore have to find a revenue base that will grow with the economy so we have more money in the years ahead to pay for the services that an aging population will need. And that is why fundamentally we brought in a Goods and Services Tax. That is the strongest argument of all for the changes that we made to Australia's taxation system because the old indirect tax system was literally dying on it's feet. It was contributing less and less to the future revenue base of Australia because it was restricted to goods, it didn't apply to services and it was restricted to a dwindling area of the goods sector and if we hadn't have introduced the GST, in the years ahead we would have had to have resorted to much higher levels of personal income tax in order to fund the services that we would need for an aging population and that deep down is why Mr Beazley on the eve of the Aston bi-election when he was asked the question "Do you think Australian's pay too much income tax?" He said "No I don't" and can I say after 27 years in public life when a political leader says that he doesn't think income tax is too high what he is really saying is give me an opportunity and I will make it even higher and that really, is an inherent contradiction in the position that the Labor Party is taking in relation to the funding of health and education services because the GST goes to the States and as the years go by the states will get far more money out of the GST than they would have got out of the old revenue sharing arrangements. Indeed the year after next Queensland will be the first state to be better off and as time goes by all of the other states will be much better off and they will therefore have more money to spend on public hospitals and government schools which are two of the principle areas where provision is made the health and education. So there is a fundamental contradiction in the position the Labor Party takes.
But it is not only in the area of taxation that where we have some stark differences. In an area that is very important to my heart and something that I devoted a great deal of time to in my years in politics and that is changing Australia's Industrial Relations system. Of all the things that might happen if a Labor Government were to be elected at the end of this year, none would grieve me more than the thought that our Industrial Relations reforms would be rolled back and that is what would happen. You would have coast to coast Labor governments because you now have State Labor Governments in five out of six states and if you impose a Federal Labor Government on top of that you would give an almost unprecedented freedom of movement and freedom of action for the Trade Union heavies of this country. You have already seen here in Victoria the re-immergence of Trade Union muscle since the change of state government. You have seen the notorious no ticket, no start rule come back on building sites in Western Australia. As somebody said at lunch time today "If the Labor Party wins the next election you will have every living former ACTU President of the front bench of the Government with the exception of Bob Hawke, he would probably be running around settling all of the disputes that would be created. Well trying to settle them, so it will be a very different picture and don't underestimate the change that would come over this country if you did have to coast to coast State and Federal Labor Governments. So my friends there are a lot of reasons why we should work very hard over the weeks and months ahead. We have changed Australia and strengthened Australia in so many ways. It is more respected around the world as a result of the actions that we have taken in so many areas but don't anybody imagine that that can't be changed and can't be rolled back. We need a third term to bed down, forever, the changes that we have introduced over the last five and half years. Two terms is not enough to really make a permanent difference. The great changes that was made the United Kingdom in the years that Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister. Those great changes have not been rolled back by subsequent Labour Government in that country because they have become imbedded but if you are only in power for five or six years and not a longer period it is possible for a new government to come in and roll back all of those changes. So it is important that the gains we have made on the economic front, the gains we have made with much lower interest rates. That great line of Peter Costello's during the Aston bi-election that the last time Labor held the seat of Aston interest rates were at 17%. Where they are now, $300 a month less is the product of months of paying off your home, is the product of the changes we have made. Any of you in small business? You will remember that during the Keating recession you were paying interest rates of 19% and 20% and our farmers were paying bill rates of 21% and 22% compared with the sort of interest rates we are now paying it almost seems in retrospect something of an economic nightmare.
And we have lots to defend, we have a lot to protect, we have a lot of things that we still must do in the long term interest of Australia. And very importantly we must maintain the great social cohesion and harmony that the Australian community has. So ladies and gentlemen can I say once again how delighted I am to be here tonight and can I pay tribute to Australian's of Indian heritage for the contribution that they have made to our nation. I thank them for what they have done for Australia. May I thank them very warmly for what they have done. In doing so I think all the other groups who are represented here tonight and most importantly of all can I thank the collective Australian community for the tremendous example that it represents to the rest of the world. We are modern and social and community harmony. We respect each other, we emphasis our similarities, we respect our differences and that is the way in which we can live together in cooperation and harmony and that is the why we all together what ever our back ground we celebrate the shear joy of being Australian.
Thank you.