7 October 2001
E&OE……………………………………………………………………………………
Thank you very much Danna for those very kind words of welcome and introduction. To my other parliamentary colleagues – Bruce Baird, Senator Marise Payne, and Malcolm Kerr, Senator Helen Coonan – to Mr Bernard Hurley the President of the Menai Catholic Club, candidates and my fellow Australians.
I have a special tinge of affection and indeed political emotion about today’s campaign launch. It’s not only an occasion for me to launch Danna’s campaign, but it’s also an opportunity for me to release a document which is a chronicle of the last five-and-a-half years of achievement and also a road map of the major initiatives for the next three years that the Coalition Government has already put in place.
To me the prize of Hughes has always been rather special. It was one of those seats that swung magnificently to us on the night of the 2nd of March in 1996. It was a seat that we were able to hold, indeed in slightly even more impressive terms in 1998. It represents an area of Sydney which brings together all of the great aspirations of the mainstream of the Australian community. This part of Sydney which I know so very well, the electorates of Hughes, the electorate of Cook and just of course across the George’s River into the electorate of Barton and then into the St George area is a part of Sydney which has always represented to me what middle Australia is all about. And if you listen to the people of this part of Sydney you’ve got a pretty good idea of what the people of Australia are thinking and what the people of Australia want from their leaders. And I want to say to you Danna and to you Bruce in particular who are the sitting federal members for the electorates of Hughes and Cook what a fantastic job both of you have done in representing the aspiration of the people of the Sutherland Shire.
But today is as well a nationally important day in the campaign to win the support of the Australian people on the 10th of November. It’s an opportunity for me to release a document that brings together the great achievements of the Government I’ve led over the last five-and-a-half years. It reminds the Australian people that by the end of this financial year we will have repaid $58 billion of the $96 billion of federal government debt that Mr Beazley so unkindly left us in March of 1996. It will also remind us that in the five-and-a-half years that we have been in government we haven’t seen the education of school leavers exclusively in terms of going to university important though that is. 70% of young men and women who leave school do not go to university. They go into apprenticeships, they go into traineeships, they go into other areas of tertiary education. And one of the proudest achievements of my Government is that in the last five-and-a-half years we have more than doubled the number of young men and women in apprenticeships and traineeships around Australia. We have done for the sons and daughters of the working men and women of Australia something that a Labor government was unwilling and unable to do. We have given them tertiary education opportunities that they never had under a Labor government because the level of apprenticeships stagnated at a figure of about 150,000 for almost 20 years. And we have lifted it to more than double that figure.
This document will also remind you that in March of 1996 it cost $350 a month more to service a mortgage on a housing loan. And that indeed was lower than what had been the peak under the Hawke/Keating years with interest rates of 17% or 18% on a housing loan, with interest rates of more than that on a small business loan, when farmers were paying bill rates of 21% and 22%. It will also remind you that in the last five-and-a-half years we’ve created 900,000 new jobs. It will remind you that unemployment peaked under the Labor Party when Mr Beazley was Employment Minister at a figure of just on 11%.
The document will remind you of the many courageous things this Government has done of a non-economic kind. It will remind you of how we seized the moment in the tragedy of Port Arthur to implement uniform national gun laws to bring a measure of safety particularly to the women and children of Australian society which has been the envy of the rest of the world over the last five-and-a-half years. It will remind you of the leadership that Australia displayed in giving freedom to the people of East Timor in assembling in a record short period of time an international force gathering a United Nations mandate and then under the command of General Cosgrove magnificently implementing that mandate. To the great credit of the men and women of the Australian Defence Force, many of them drawn of course from establishments within the electorate Hughes, and to the enormous credit of Australian and the enormously increased standing of Australia in world circles.
So my friends it is a document which extensively lists the achievements of the Government over the last five-and-a-half years. It will remind the Australian people of the great commitment we’ve made through the Natural Heritage Trust to the environment of Australia. It will remind the Australian people that the white paper on defence brought down at the end of last year is the most detailed, comprehensive, blueprint of Australia’s defence needs produced in a generation. And it commits Australia to additional expenditure totalling some $27 billion over the years ahead.
It is a reminder of how industrial relations reform has lifted the productivity of the Australian economy. It will remind you of the epic fight to reform Australia’s waterfront so courageously waged by Peter Reith as Minister for Workplace Relations which has brought about a dramatic improvement in the productivity of the Australian waterfront. It will remind you of the great performance on the trade front of how as a result of the many reforms and the competitive character of the Australian exchange rate we have now seen reductions on the level of our current account deficit that would have been undreamt of ten years ago.
It’s also a reminder my friends of the many things that we have announced over the last year that will work their way through Australian society and the Australian economy over the next few years. I’ve mentioned the long term commitment to extra resources to defence. But over the last year we’ve also invested additional resources in tackling the problem of water quality and salinity. There is no greater environmental challenge in Australia than the challenge of water quality and salinity. We are a dry continent and we need to invest over the long term through a partnership between the Commonwealth and the state governments and local communities in order to tackle that problem.
It also reminds the Australian community of the ongoing commitment in the area of road funding, our ongoing commitment in areas of health and education. In the five-and-a-half years that we have been in government there has been a massive increase in the federal government supplementation of the cost of running government schools throughout Australia. We are the party and the government that is committed to high standards of quality and excellence in all areas of education. We have a dual commitment to both the government education system and the independent education sector. I am forever grateful for the high quality education that I received from the state government high school that I attended here in Sydney and I’m very grateful for the start in life that that education system afforded to me. But I also believe very strongly in the right of parents to decide what school their children should attend. And we will have none of this envy politics that comes from the Australian Labor Party that seeks to reopen old divisions and old wounds on an issue that I thought had been resolved a generation ago. The overwhelming majority of parents who send their children to independent schools make very significant personal sacrifices in order to do so and their sacrifice should be honoured and not denigrated and made the object of an attack based on class division and outdated notions of elitism.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is also a document that will remind the Australian people of how we have resuscitated private health insurance in this country. When we came to government something like only 33% of Australians had private health insurance and that was in a state of virtual free fall and I think it got as low as about 31%. And as a result of the tax subsidies we have introduced it is now back at 45%. And what that means as a result of that annual injection of about $2.5 billion into private health insurance not only have we expanded the viability of private hospitals in Australia, but we have begun to take the pressure off the public hospital system which is the inevitable consequence of reviving private health insurance. But not content with that we have also increased by 28% in real terms in the current five year duration of the Medicare agreements the amount of money being provided by the federal government to state governments to run public hospitals. And when I hear Mr Beazley saying that he’s going to talk about health during the course of this election campaign I ask myself where are the dramatic new initiatives that are in any way going to seriously replace the underpinning that we have provided for health and indeed for education in the five-and-a-half years we have been in government.
But ladies and gentlemen, we have done something far more important for the provision of resources for health and education than all of those things that I have just mentioned. And this is something that Mr Beazley threatens. This is something that he’s fought against for the last three years and that is that we introduced a broad based indirect tax, a goods and services tax, as part of the program of comprehensive taxation reform. And you might think to yourselves well what’s that got to do with the funding of health and education. I’ll tell you what it’s got to do with the funding of health and education. Because all of the proceeds of the GST go to the state governments as the years go by and the revenue from the GST rises because the nature of a broadbased indirect tax is that the revenue yield grows as the economy grows. And as more money flows in the coffers of the states, they have more resources to spend on public schools, public hospitals, police and all the other public services for which the state governments are responsible. And the reality is that the political leader in Australia and the politician in Australia who opposes the GST is opposing additional expenditure on schools, additional expenditure on hospitals, additional expenditure on police, additional expenditure on roads because the GST will provide the growth revenue in the years ahead and that is the fundamental reason why we brought in taxation reform. It’s the fundamental reason why we went against conventional wisdom and argued for tax reform in 1998. Because if we had persisted with the old indirect taxation system, it was making a declining contribution to funding Government services where the GST will make a rising contribution, the only way you could have provided more resources for those public services in the years ahead would have been to increase income tax because if your indirect tax yield is falling and not rising and you want to provide the same level of services you have no alternative but to dig deeper into the hip pocket of the average Australian working man and woman through increases in his or her level of income tax.
And that is the great dilemma facing Mr Beazley and the Labor Party in this election campaign, they champion extra spending on health and education yet they oppose the vehicle by which that extra spending will become available in the years ahead. You can’t have it both ways, you can’t say that you love spending more money on health and education but you hate the way that you’re going to find the more money to spend on health and education. And that’s an issue that Mr Beazley has to answer and if in the end he says oh no well we won’t have as much rollback as we originally intended he will be revealed as being somebody who’s embraced monumental political hypocrisy over the last three years.
Introducing tax reform was not easy. There were many people who told us in 1998 that we were politically crazy to even try it. But I have known in all the time that I’ve been Prime Minister that it was necessary at various stages to take difficult decisions. And when we decided before the 1998 election to seek a mandate for tax reform, one of the major reasons we decided to seek that mandate was that we knew as the years went by with an aging population unless we introduced a broadbased indirect tax to fund the growing demands for public services of that aging population we would be failing to match the need of the nation as years went by. And that is why we took the risk, that is why we embraced taxation reform and it is to the eternal discredit of the Australian Labor Party that they have adopted an opportunistic approach towards taxation reform. At every turn they’ve tried to frustrate to sow fear and doubt, to denigrate and to try and prevent us introducing a long needed reform. And it’s up to the Australian people of course on the 10 November to pass a judgement on that. And I hope that judgement will be harsh.
I also hope the judgement will be harsh on an opposition which has sought on so many issues to walk both sides of the street. Not only have they sought to do that on illegal immigration but they’ve also sought to do it in relation to many of the spending programmes that are outlined in this document. I constantly hear Mr Beazley complaining about the fact that we’ve spent money over the last 18 months. And he says as a result there may not be as big a surplus for me to get my hands on. That is basically what Mr Beazley is saying. But I don’t hear him criticising the things that we’ve spent the money on. I mean the next time Mr Beazley goes on television and says oh over the last 18 months the Howard Government has spend hundreds of millions of dollars and therefore the budget surplus might be a bit lower. Think to yourself what we’ve spent it on and ask the question did Mr Beazley oppose it? We’ve spend it on defence, did he oppose that? No, he supported it. We’ve spent it on salinity. Did he oppose that? No, he supported it. We’ve spent the money on road funding. Did he oppose that? No, he supported it. We’ve spent the money on cutting petrol excise and getting rid of automatic indexation of petrol excise. You’ll notice that in August of this year the price of petrol didn’t automatically rise as a result of the automatic indexation of the government’s tax tape as it had for the last 15 years, or more than that, 18 years, through a measure introduced by the Hawke Government in 1983. And I can go through the list of all the things that we have spent money on and no issue, on no occasion has the Labor Party said we are opposed to that, you should leave the money for something else. The reality is that he’s walking both sides of the street again. He wants the programme but he doesn’t want any money spent on it. Well you can’t have it both ways. The reality is that we have wisely expended resources on necessary priorities for the Australian people. And the last party in Australia that can lecture us on the size of budget surpluses is the Australian Labor Party. They left us with a Federal Government debt of $96 billion five and a half years ago. They have opposed every attempt that we made to pay back that debt and despite that opposition by the end of this financial year as I mentioned earlier we will have paid back $58 billion of that $96 billion of government debt.
My friends this is going to be a very difficult election campaign for the Coalition. Don’t believe some of the hype of recent weeks. Don’t be mesmerised by generic public opinion polls. Once election campaigns start many of those polls change, they tighten, huge leads evaporate, local campaigns become more important. You can’t win an election generically, people are voting for me in the electorate of Bennelong but they’re voting for Danna and Bruce and all of our other candidates in electorates here. And therefore the force and the strength and the relevance of local election campaigns is tremendously important. But allied with that of course are some fundamental national choices. We are living in a period of uncertainty. There is an unease around the world and in our own nation that I haven’t felt in my 62 years. There is an unease and a sense of foreboding from a combination of circumstances that we must respond to. We must respond to it with determination, but we must also respond to it with a sense of hope and a sense of optimism. And we must respond to it in a traditional Australian way. And the traditional Australian way of course is never to impose the wishes of this nation on others but rather to work with our friends and our allies to defend the values we and they hold dear. And other the weeks and months ahead precisely how that will work out I cannot tell you today. But what I can tell you is that the journey will be a journey together with likeminded people. With nations whose values are the same as ours, with nations who believe that the liberty of the individual and the right of people to follow a political cause, to worship their god or not worship any god at all is the fundamental right that individual men and women have. Australia has been one of the very few, indeed you could number them on the fingers of both hands, very few countries that have remained continuously democratic for the last 100 years. And we have never been reluctant to defend the principles of freedom and the principles of democracy in association with our allies.
The threat we now face is different, it is not an conventional military threat in the sense that the last wars have taught us, it is a new and in some respects a more forbidding and frightening prospect. But it’s important in all of that to remember that we here in Australia have things going for us that no other country has got. We’ve got an economy that’s better able to withstand the economic downturn following not only the weakness of the American economy but the events of the 11 of September. And we have a resilient people that I know and I believe can carry nation forward together with our friends and allies in response to this very real threat.
At a time like this we need certainty and predictability. We need strength, we need resolve, we need a group of men and women, we need a team, and every successful government is a team. It’s not a one-man band, it’s a team. And we need a team that know what it believes in and has got the courage to stick to it. We don’t need a new team that doesn’t know what it believes in, that’s had five and a half years to identify itself to the Australian people and has failed miserably to do it. As you read through the pages of this document you will find it to be a story of a government that has always known its mind. The story of a government that was determined to change those things that needed changing, yet defend those things traditionally which have served Australia well and ought not to be altered. And my plea to you this morning in launching Danna’s campaign is to support a government that has given strength and purpose and direction and certainty to this country over the last five and a half years. That has helped build the esteem of Australia around the world and a government, far more than the alternative, which has within it men and women capable of continuing that stability and that certainty in the three years that lie before us.
So my friends can I conclude by saying this is, as all election campaigns are, difficult and serious. But there's an element of difficulty and an element of seriousness about this campaign that perhaps has been absent for a number of campaigns. And speaking personally can I say to you that I’ve never been more mentally and physically committed and resolved to achieve a goal than I am to the successful leadership of the Coalition during this election campaign. It is important for Australia that we win again. It is important for Australia that we have a majority that will enable us to implement the mandate the Australian people I hope will give us on the 10 November. I ask for your help, knowing it will be a long and hard fight. I take nothing for granted, I assume nothing. The Labor Party will fight tenaciously with all its will and it enormous resources. And nobody should take this election for granted. But if we can get the issues out into the homes and the clubs of this area and all around Australia and I believe in the end the good sense of the Australian people will come on our side. Do that here with an extra edge and an extra energy and you do it I know in support of some magnificent members and magnificent candidates.
Thank you very much.