E&OE...
Thank you very much Bob, Cynthia, Michael Gallacher, Craig Baumann, Greg Piper, two newly elected members of the New South Wales Parliament, one Liberal, one independent, my fellow Australians. There are a lot of characteristics about Bob Baldwin and they're all admirable, and one that, you know, has struck me a lot over the years, he's a very competitive bloke. I came to a gathering, I think it was here, wasn't it? No Beresfield, a couple of years ago and there were about 1400 people there and I made the mistake in the Party Room a few months later of saying that the second largest gathering I'd been to, organised by one of my local members, had been Bob Baldwin's gathering at Beresfield, but I said it had been exceeded by Mal Brough, who's one of my Queensland colleagues, for a gathering that he organised on the Sunshine Coast of 1500. So Bob muttering under this breath as he walked out the Party Room, he says, I'll beat Brough, don't you worry. So here we are, we have 2000 people here in the Hunter, well done Bob Baldwin.
On the way over here from a wonderful visit to the men and women of the RAAF Base at Williamtown; and amongst the people I met were part of the contingent of 75 personnel who are going to operate the radar service out of Kandahar, which is a remarkable contribution by a small number of highly qualified Australians to the allied operation (inaudible) in this country; On the way over I was thinking to myself, what are some of the great characteristics of the Australian people that mark them out from the people of other countries? We think of our egalitarian spirit, we think of our willingness to treat people according to what they contribute and who they are, rather than the school they went to, or the colour of their skin, or what their name is or what their religion might be. There are many particular characteristics of Australians that we know and we're very proud of. And one characteristic that we sometimes don't think about as much as we should is that Australians have a great capacity to achieve a sense of proportion and a sense of balance about great and important public policy issues. We are not a nation of extremes, we're not people who overreact, we're not people who suddenly take u-turns on the way we handle our affairs; we're people who have a great capacity to get the balance of things right.
I think of our health system. Now our health system has got a lot of flaws, I know that, and it could always be made better, but one of the reasons that I think we have to...one of the things we have to bear in mind, is for all its flaws, our health system is a lot better than the health system of most other countries. And one of the reasons for that is that we have a sense of balance. We don't say the health system should be run entirely by the Government or by the public sector, and we don't think it should be run entirely by the private sector, and be completely in private hands. We have a good sense of balance. We have Medicare - which we all like and the Government has strongly supported and added to - but we also have a very strong private health system. We subsidise the cost of private health insurance, we subsidise and maintain private hospitals as well as public hospitals; in other words, we get the balance right, we don't go one way or the other.
Same thing applies with our schools. Here we are meeting in an independent school, started only a few years ago, apparently it's flourished with the support of the parents and also generous government support in this part of the Hunter. But in saying that we respect the central role of public schools, of government schools in our education system. We have a good mix, we support both, we don't say to people as some of the teacher unions do, that you give all your funding to government schools and you give no funding to independent schools, we support both. In fact, about 67 per cent of Australian children go to government schools and they get 75 per cent of all government funding. And some of you may have seen that advertisement, that dishonest advertisement on television that has me arriving...allegedly me, arriving at a government school, and the children are out there waving the Australian flags, and instead of arriving and getting out and greeting them, my car keeps going. And the story out of all of that is that that terrible John Howard, he doesn't care about government schools. Well I care a lot about government schools, I was totally educated in the government school system of New South Wales and I'm very grateful to the public education system for what it provided for me. But the point I make is that we are not rejecting one in favour of the other. We respect the right of parents to choose where they send their children. In other words, we achieve that very good sense of balance. We support government schools and we support independent schools as well.
And another thing that we do very well in this country is that we achieve the right balance when it comes to our social security system. We are not like the Americans, and I like the Americans on a lot of things and I admire the contribution America makes to the leadership of the western world, but I think America's welfare system is sometimes a bit too harsh and I don't think the safety net is good enough. And what we manage to do in this country is that we provide a good social security system, but by the same token we require people to give something back in return. We don't say to somebody you can be on welfare for life. We say if you're going to be on welfare you've got to give something back. I'm not talking here about retired people, I'm talking here about people of working age and that's why we support programs like work for the dole. But on the other hand, unlike a lot of European countries, we don't have a some kind of nanny state approach to people and adopting the attitude that no matter what their circumstances are, the state owes them a living. We expect people who are able to do so to look after themselves and pay for themselves, reserving our welfare dollars for those people who are in genuine need of assistance, and heaven knows, there are plenty in our community, even in a very prosperous era in our nation's life that are in need of assistance.
Now you might think to yourself, what's he getting at? He's talked about balance and he's talked about balance in the education system, balance in the health system, balance in the social security system, he must be getting at something. Well he is getting at something and he's getting at something that's very directly related to the coal industry which is so very important in the Hunter Valley. And what he's getting at is simply this, that we have a huge debate going on at the present time about climate change. Climate change is obviously an issue that everybody in the Australian community wants to address. But above all, what I am pleading for in relation to climate change, is that we achieve a sense of balance, that we don't make the mistake of overreacting; we don't make the mistake of adopting policies that will impose unreasonable economic burdens on this country, we don't adopt policies that will do damage to the coal industry of this country, we don't listen to those people who say that maybe the coal industry has got too big and maybe the time is to curb it, or to limit its expansion. We don't forget the fact that there are thousands of families in the Hunter, in Queensland, in other parts of New South Wales and other parts of the nation that depend very heavily on the coal industry. We don't listen to people like Senator Brown and Peter Garrett who say there've got to be limits on the coal industry. What we do is say to ourselves, and we say to the rest of the world, that we are prepared to play our part in reducing the growth of greenhouse gas emissions, but it's got to be done in a practical balanced way. It's got to be done in a way that doesn't do disproportionate damage to the Australian economy, it's got to be done against the recognition that Australia's contribution to greenhouse gas emissions is only 1.6 per cent of the world total every year and let me give you a description that really does explain it more than anything else. And that is that if we close down every industry in Australia tomorrow that contributed to the growth of greenhouse gas emissions, it would take exactly nine months of activity in China to equal all of the greenhouse gas emissions that no long occurred in Australia because we had closed down our industries. Now that describes to you the scale of what is involved, and what I want in relation to climate change is for this country to play its part, I want us to embrace practical things. I want us to do what we're doing in relation to light bulbs. I want there to be more water tanks, I want there to be more solar panels, I want to us encourage countries in our region to stop tearing down their forests and start planting trees again. I want to have clean coal technology. I want us to be open minded about embracing nuclear power because if we do embrace clean coal technology nuclear power will become more economically feasible and we mustn't be so foolish as to close our minds against the possible use of nuclear power years into the future. In other words, I want us to bring that age old Australian commonsense, that age old Australian capacity of balance to the debate about climate change. I want us to be part of the solution. I want us to provide leadership where we can but I do not want this country's future damaged by overreaction.
I want us in other words to do what Australians always do. They look at something, they think about it, they separate the wheat from the chaff, they don't take any notice of the fanatics and they think to themselves this is a problem and we've got to do something about it and we've got to play our part but we're not going to damage the economy and we're not going to destroy the jobs of Australians. And I think it's very important on this issue that we do keep a sense of balance because we have a wonderful economy at the present time; hasn't happened by accident. It's taken a lot of hard work and the hard work, of course, has been the hard work of the men and women of this country, and also along the way some very good policy decisions, some of which weren't popular when they were introduced, but the benefit of them has been demonstrated with the passage of time.
We haven't had such low unemployment for 32 years. You have to go back to the middle 1970s to get unemployment as low as it is now and the last year, wonderfully, we've seen the number of people who are on long term unemployed lists, in other words, people who'd been out of work for a year or more, the number of those has fallen by 25 per cent in the last year. It's the biggest yearly fall in the long term unemployed since we began to keep separate statistics for that section of our population. Now that's got to tell you something. It's got to tell you that this is a wonderful market for jobs seekers, the like of which we haven't seen.
There is a contribution, a big contribution being made to that by the resources boom, but that's not the only explanation. It goes wider and deeper than that. It means we have a competitiveness in our economy which has been delivered by a series of reforms over a long period of time and we shouldn't take that for granted. It's not on autopilot. It's something that's only been achieved by a lot of hard work by both the people of Australia and by the Government of Australia.
So we shouldn't imagine that we can embrace targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions when we don't know what they mean. We should be very careful that the measures we take are sensible measures that are not going to destroy jobs, and Bob is right, speaking here in the Hunter region of New South Wales and of Australia, Bob is right to think solicitously and carefully about the future of the coal industry. It's very important to the Hunter and it's very important to the families of this region.
My friends, could I finish in a sense where Bob began and that is to talk about his arm twisting proclivities and to talk about his great capacity to campaign hard for the people of Paterson and for the people of this electorate. And it is true that there's probably nobody in the Parliament, certainly on our side and I am sure on the other side, that places as great a premium on getting road funding for his area than does Bob Baldwin. He's constantly campaigning and as a result of his constant campaigning I have got a couple of announcements that I want to make.
As you know, for 20 years Janette and myself and our three children used to holiday at Hawks Nest. We're very familiar with this area. It always amused the political commentators that I would holiday at Hawks Nest but it is a wonderful spot and my children still speak with enormous affection and we always, Janette and I, always remember the sense of excitement that surged in the back seat as we turned off that little turnoff after Karuah as we turned off to the right to go off to Hawks Nest and to Tea Gardens. So not just in recognition of that, although it does tickle me very much to think of that when I mention what I am about to mention, but as a result of strenuous representations that have been made by Mr Baldwin I am very pleased to announce this afternoon that the Government will contribute $10 million towards the construction of what they call a grade separated, or