E&OE..................
Thank you very much Ken Randall and my fellow Australians. More than five and a half years ago, the Australian people gave me the opportunity of serving as their Prime Minister. It has not only been an opportunity for change and improvement but has also been an immense personal privilege to be Prime Minister of this magnificent country. Today, in my final national dress, I ask the Australian people for a renewed mandate to continue many of the policies that have been successful over the last five and a half years, but also to implement a number of new initiatives announced in the lead up to the election and during the campaign.
Like all Prime Ministers before me, I have brought my own personal style, some of my own personal beliefs, my own personal commitments and my own personal passions to this job. Every day of the five and a half years has been spent in what I have tried to make the service of all of the Australian people. I have done some things that people haven';t liked, I have, on occasions, been in accord with popular opinion, on other occasions I have been against it. I believe very passionately that this is the greatest country in the world and I have tried in my time in office, and I will try again if I have that opportunity to make it an even better nation.
All of us are driven by certain personal philosophical values. They are grounded in our up bringing, they are part of what connects us with our nation, they are part of what connects us with all the things we experience in life. I';ve had a number of personal beliefs that resonate, of course very deeply with the political party, the Liberal Party, that I have been privileged to lead. And over the last five and a half years the commitments to self reliance, to having a go, for pulling together but always providing a fair go for the less fortunate in the Australian community have been the guiding lights of the policies that I have introduced. There are, my friends, two great issues that overlay the whole of this election campaign and that will be crucial in resolving the minds of those Australians who are yet to decide how they are going to vote. And those issues are of national security and economic management. All else flows from national security and economic management. And my claim to re-election, my request to the Australian people to re-elect me is based on my belief that I, more than my opponent, can give better and stronger and more certain leadership to the Australian leadership to the Australian people in those two areas.
When I speak of national security I don';t just speak of the way in which this nation has properly and honourably responded to the terrorist attack of the eleventh of September. I speak also of the long preparation of the White Paper, I speak of the public consultation the commitment of an additional $32 billion over a decade to the defence of this country, the build up that enabled us to magnificently save the people of East Timor two years ago. I speak also, of course, and contemporaneously of our response to the terrorist attack, of our joining the Coalition against terrorism. I';ve said before and I say it again because I believe it, that attack of eleventh of September was as much an attack on Australia as it was on America. It not only killed Australians in the World Trade Centre, but it also assaulted the very values on which this nation is built. National security also importantly included effective protection of our borders. That has been an issue of debate in this campaign, and quite properly so. Protecting Australia';s borders against illegal immigration is an important national responsibility. Every nation has the right as an exercise of its fundamental sovereignty, to decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they will come. It is important of course in the wake of the attacks on the eleventh of September to do as we have done, to join the worldwide response, to take additional security precautions in Australia, to do a number of things that we would not have ordinarily have done, but we must do because of the heightened security threat in our own country. But it is also important that we get on with our own lives that we stare down what the terrorists seek to create around the world and that is a paralysis, not only of fear but also an economic paralysis.
The terrorists win if they intimidate us out of living our lives. The terrorists win if they dislocate our economy. The terrorists win if they make us turn one upon the other and it is very important with these challenges that we reach out to all within the Australian community, irrespective of their religion of their race. And particularly to those in the community of Arab decent or of the Islamic faith, because this war against terrorism is not a war between Islam and the rest of the world, it is a war between good and evil. And they';re good men and women in all faiths and indeed of no faith at all. So ladies and gentlemen, national security will be for years into the future an important issue. It will define the way we relate to the rest of the world and my qualifications I put to the Australian people as superior in that area to those of my opponent.
The other great area of course, the area of economic management. There can be no argument, and even in their more desperately rhetorical tones, not even our political opponents mount a serious argument against the proposition that the economic strength of this nation is infinitely greater than what it was five and a half years ago. And the world that was changed forever after the eleventh of September, is not only a world facing far greater security challenges but it is also a world facing far greater economic challenges. And because of the measures that we have taken and because of what we have done over the last five and a half years, this country is better able to cope with that new world environment. We have delivered very strong economic growth. We now have interest rates, which for the average home buyer are $350 a month, at least, lower than what they were in March 1996. We have dramatically reformed our industrial relations system, and although roll back of the GST was nothing other than a damp squib because Labor proposes to keep ninety six to ninety seven percent of tax reform, I can say to my fellow Australians that if Labor were to win on Saturday, roll back of the industrial relations system would be no damp squib.
What we would see is a wholesale destruction of the industrial relations reforms introduced by this government over the last five and a half years. And they have not been reforms that have led to lower wages and more strikes and fewer jobs, they have been reforms that through the heightened productivity that they have brought forth have led to higher wages, more jobs and fewer strikes. I mean, we have had a trifecta of success despite the warnings that were delivered in March of 1996 by Bill Kelty and Paul Keating who forecast, metaphorically speaking, blood on the industrial relations'; streets of Australia. The reverse has, in fact, been the case.
We';ve also, of course, seen the Australian waterfront';s productivity soar as a result of the courageous stand taken by Peter Reith and the Government in 1998. They said we could never reach 25 container movements an hour. It has gone from just under 17 to just over 27. There has been a remarkable change on the Australian waterfront. It';s one of the reasons why our trade performance now is so much better than it was a few years ago.
And, of course, of all of the financial symbols that marks and defines the success of this Government over the last five-and-a-half years is that by the end of this financial year we will have repaid $58 billion of the $96 billion of Government debt that we inherited from Mr Beazley and Mr Keating in March of 1996. But that is not some kind of dusty statistic. What it has done, because it';s reduced the annual interest bill on Government debt, it';s allowed us to invest about $4 billion a year more in necessary public and human services. It';s one of the reasons why we have been able to increase by 43% Commonwealth spending on Government schools, even though in that period enrolments in those schools have only risen by 1.8%. It';s one of the reasons why over the lifetime of the health agreements we will, compared with the last health agreement of the previous government, we';ll increase funding for public hospitals by 28% after inflation. And it';s also a great source of pride to me because 70% of Australians who leave school do not go on to university, we have more than doubled the apprenticeships in this country over the last five-and-a-half years. They languished at 120,000 to 130,000 for years. We';ve now taken them to more than 310,000. And there';s been an enormous increase in the number of women and a significant increase in the number of indigenous people who are part of that great surge in apprenticeships.
But, ladies and gentlemen, that is about past achievement. They are impressive, they are undeniable and those achievements have provided the foundation for the strength that Australia now has to face an undoubtedly more difficult world economic environment. But because of the reforms, because of taxation reform, because of industrial relations reform, because of the repayment of debt, just as we were able in 1997 to stare down the Asian economic downturn, we';ll be able to stare down and come through, not completely unaffected but far better than would otherwise have been the case, the economic challenges that we now face.
But my friends, a forward agenda for an election campaign is not only about the policies that are announced during the campaign period itself. It is a long continuum of planning and policy announcements which project years into the future. And over the past 12 months this Government has made major announcements in many areas and the full impact of many of those announcements will be felt over the next three years. We believe that our policies can give the Australian economy continued economic growth, the London Economist predicting, next calendar year, better than most industrialised nations.
We propose, if re-elected, further reforms in the area of industrial relations. We';ll try again to further liberalise those unfair dismissal laws. We';ll require secret ballots in relation to certain strike action. We';ll empower the ACCC to take action on behalf of small businesses that are not in an economic position to do so against more formidable opponents. We intend, importantly, to put down the first planks of the long-term reform of the welfare system. Money was provided, $1.7 billion, in the last budget and it will be a Coalition Government, not a Labor government, that will begin the process of serious reform and strengthening of the welfare system, all within the underlying commitment that we are not going to reduce the strength and the quality of the safety net. And one of the great achievements of this Government over the last five-and-a-half years is to remove forever the notion that in some way the Liberal and National Parties are the enemy of the social security safety net. And that, in fact, has even been acknowledged by the President of ACOSS, not always the person who frequently praises the policies of this Government.
We';ll see over the next three years the full impact of the science and innovation programme that I laid down at the beginning of this year which will double basic research grants that will provide generous Federation fellowships to retain and bring back the brightest of the best. We are doing these things. Our opponents continue to talk about them. We';ll review the competition laws, an important commitment for the business community. It is time we had another look at whether the competition laws of this country preserve the right balance between large and small within our community but, equally, allow for the development of sufficient critical mass amongst our larger corporations that they can fully participate in a globalised economic environment.
Many of you will remember that when I last addressed the National Press Club, and that meeting took place in the Great Hall of Parliament House, I identified three issues that I believed would be very important domestically to this country in the years ahead. And those issues were the ageing of the population, the constant challenging attempt for families, particularly young families, to balance the responsibilities of work and family. And, finally, in the area of the environment, the whole challenge of water quality and salinity.
We are an ageing population, which of course is one of the reasons why the Government reformed the Australian taxation system. And of the many things that we have done over past years none was more difficult, none was strewn with more politically inspired obstacles, none was the subject of more bitter recrimination and negative attack from the Labor Party than our, I believe, successful policy of reforming the Australian taxation system. And one of the great values of that system is that it has given us a revenue base that will grow with the economy into the future and as a result give us the resources, the tools, to provide a growing number of services for an ageing population. And if there';s one thing I would say in relation to the whole taxation debate amongst many with even greater conviction than most and that is those people who presume to be relevant to the future of this country yet simultaneously attack the very taxation reform that provides us with a revenue capacity to provide the services into the future are guilty of a very grievous contradiction. I have tried and the Coalition has tried during the course of this election campaign in different ways and within the constraints of limited budget resources to address each of those three areas – the ageing of the population, work and family and the particular challenge of water quality and salinity.
Our proposals in relation to superannuation I believe when further disseminated and more widely understood throughout the Australian community, particularly the proposal to decouple paid employment from a superannuation entitlement and the development of superannuation from birth and the interlinkages of that with the other superannuation changes we have made will make an enormous contribution to encouraging the young to provide for their superannuation at a very early age. And I can';t think of anything conceptually which is more important in a nation whose population is ageing.
The proposal in relation to the first child tax refund will, I believe, provide further targeted but very welcome relief for that most difficult period of all for young couples and that is when they lose an income when the first child is born. We';ve already provided, through our tax reforms, very significant benefits for low-income families both couple families and also sole parent. And it may have come as a surprise to many in the community and to many of our critics that the survey by NATSEM which demonstrated that the greatest winners out of tax reform have, in fact, been the low income families, the single income families and the sole parents families, are diametrically opposed to the mantra put around that somehow or other tax reform was something for the upper, middle and high income earners. That first child tax rebate will add further to the assistance and make a welcome contribution towards further easing the pressures of balancing work and family. And it';s against the background of a government which has provided thousands of more childcare places and a government which according to the ABS is actually reduced the cost of childcare by something like nine per cent over the last 12 months. We haven';t heard much criticism about childcare and the government during this election campaign and that is no surprise to me because our policies have in fact increased the availability of childcare to Australian parents and have in fact at the same time reduced it.
In the area of course of salinity we are the first Government, first Commonwealth Government in the history of Australia to propose a national plan. We';ve committed $700 million and if that is matched dollar for dollar by the states we';ll have a fund of at least $1.4 billion to begin developing an overall national response to this huge environmental problem. And over and above that what we have done is that we have dedicated at least $360 million out of the $1 billion reinvestment in the Natural Heritage Trust announced at the beginning of the campaign to the fight against salinity. It remains a matter of national concern that if we don';t do something about this issue in 20 years time the drinking water for the people of Adelaide will be unfit for consumption in three out of five days. We do have a long term plan for that and we do have a long term commitment to do something about that particular problem.
So ladies and gentlemen let me go back to what I said at the beginning. This election campaign is overwhelmingly about who is better able and what is team of people are better able to manage the affairs of this nation, to provide stewardship to this nation in these very difficult times. At the beginning of the election campaign my opponent, the Leader of the Opposition, in the television debate posed the rhetorical question, ask yourself whether you feel better off now then you did five and a half years ago. There';s only been one poll done on that and for what it';s worth it recorded that the majority of people answered they did feel better off. And perhaps that is not the answer that the Leader of the Opposition wanted. But although the past is relevant, it guides as both us to the present and to the future. This election particularly in the light of what happened on the 11 September is very much about he future. It is about the future capacity of the Coalition compared with the Australian Labor Party. It is very much about our future economic capacities. Because in the end you can promise the earth in relation to things like health and education and all those other very valuable services which are so important in our community. But unless you deliver a growing economy you have no capacity to deliver in relation to those commitments. And in the end a capacity to deliver a growing economy, a capacity to provide the wherewithal to provide and supply those additional resources for all those public services is fundamental.
I have now been in public life for 27 years. I have served as five and a half years as Prime Minister of this country. I seek with enormous energy and commitment and dedication the opportunity of serving my country again as Prime Minister. We do face very challenging and difficult times. But they ought not to daunt us and the spirit of the Australian people, the capacity of the Australian people to combine and work together to meet a common challenge has always been a hallmark of this nation';s existence and a hallmark of this nation';s contribution to the world. We face twin challenges in the immediate years ahead of leadership on national security and economic management. I ask my fellow Australians to again give me the opportunity and the privilege of leading them because I believe I am better qualified than my opponent to provide that leadership in those two areas which will so totally define the direction in which this nation goes in the years ahead.
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