E&OE...
Thank you very much Steve, Paul Omodei, Danielle Blain, my federal and state parliamentary colleagues, over the last 10 years I've accumulated in my mind a lot of relevant statistics, but I think the one that resonates with me more than any was the statistic that came out about 18 months ago which showed that the number of self employed people for the first time ever had passed the number of trade unionists in Australia. Now, I don't say that in denigration of trade unionists, I say it in praise of small business and Steve the first small businessman that I knew was my father and he owned, as many people know, he owned a petrol service station in the inner suburbs of Sydney and the first job I had would have been the subject of a complaint to the Office of Workplace Services if, in terms of the remuneration I received, if that law had been in operation in the early 1950s. But I grew up believing in small business, I grew up believing that the best thing you could do in life economically was to start something with your own resources and work very hard and make it better and pass it on to your children and that is exactly what my father did and I'll ever be grateful for the fact that he started with absolutely nothing because he was the eldest of nine children, he worked very hard and built up a business and it meant that the four sons that he and my mother had were able all to do extremely well and have great good fortune in life. And it really angers me when people denigrate from time to time the contribution of small business and they are very happy to peddle stories around about the unreasonable small business boss and, of course, from time to time just as there are bad employees there are some bad employers and the importance of our workplace relations laws is that they achieve a balance so that the bad employer is caught and equally you have an employment environment where somebody is plainly a negative influence on a firm it's possible for that person to be let go in reasonable circumstances in a way it wasn't before.
Now, I have a very simple message for all of you and I deliver it with I hope the greatest of humility and that is that we are very proud of the good economic environment that's been created over the last 10 years. You want stability, you want as little regulation as possible, you want taxes to be even lower, you want good industrial relations laws and you want a fair set of rules so small business can operate. Of the many things that we've done for small business I think by far the most important is the economic stability that we have delivered. If you can have predictability, if you can remember as part of the distant experience of being in small business interest rates of 21 and 22 per cent which as I look around the room I guess many of you laboured under in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. If you can have a set of industrial relations laws that allows for termination of people who are clearly a negative influence on a firm, but equally create a situation that if people are dismissed for illegal reasons and they're clearly defined in the legislation then the weight of the law will come upon those people and there's no doubt in my mind that if there is a change of government at the end of this year, whenever the federal election is held, the first thing in the gun sights of the new government will be the repeal of our industrial relations laws and whatever the soft selling you're now getting from Julia Gillard about talking to small business, the nightmare of unfair dismissal laws will return and they will re-establish an industrial relations system that's dominated by the union movement.
This is very important to Western Australia, it's even more important to Western Australia than any other part of the country because the percentage of Australian Workplace Agreements in Western Australia is something like four times what it is in other parts of the country. There's something in the order of 200,000 I think people employed in Western Australia under Australian Workplace Agreements and this is not only important in the mining industry which is such a crucial and pivotal part of the Western Australian economy, it is also enormously important in other sections of the business community and I regard the passage of those WorkChoices laws as being one of the really fundamental achievements of this government. We did have tariff reform under the former government and I've never been reluctant to give them credit for that and that was important for a great exporting state and we did have financial deregulation which we pioneered in government with the Campbell Report but that was put into effect by the former government and they had our support in relation to that but the one great thing, well the two great things they were unable to do was reform the tax system and reform our workplace relations system and the changes first made by Peter Reith in 1996, the massive changes to the waterfront in 1998 which lifted the crane rate from something like 17 an hour to 27 which was predicted at the time to be absolutely impossible to achieve, plus WorkChoices that came into operation just under a year ago have been of enormous benefit to this country.
Now we have the lowest unemployment rate for 32 years and it's lowest of all here in Western Australia. Now some of that is undoubtedly due to the mining industry boom and the contribution of the resource sector and there's no doubt that Western Australia's economy is moving ahead more strongly than the economy of any other part of the country, but the mining industry doesn't explain why you have unemployment rates of three and four per cent in the Sutherland Shire in Sydney, Cronulla Beach is a long way from the Pilbara and it really doesn't explain that. It doesn't explain the very low unemployment rates in many other parts of the country. So it's a bit of a fiction to say that we have low unemployment because of the resources boom, the resources boom has made a contribution, but the general health and strength of the economy and the growth of the service sector has also played a major part and to think that we have an unemployment rate nationally of 4.5 per cent and that is against the situation where in the last six months we've had a participation rate which has been the highest on record. We also have the lowest number of industrial disputes since figures began to be kept the year before World War I broke out, they first started to be kept in 1913 and we now have the lowest and this is spectacular in the construction industry and you know how important and how frequently reported upon the construction industry is in Western Australia. The dramatic drop in the space of a year, and that's the result not only of WorkChoices, but even more particularly the introduction of the legislation to establish an independent building construction industry authority which flowed out of the first report of the former Mr Justice Cole. He carried out an inquiry into the building industry. It took a lot of courage but the legislation was introduced and that legislation would go if there were a change of government.
Now I spell these things out starkly because there are some fundamental choices and what is at stake in this area is where the big changes would take place to the detriment of small business if there were a change of Government.
Can I just say two other things because I would like to take a couple of questions and then have the opportunity of meeting you. The first thing I want to say is how delighted I am that you've got a candidate of the profile of Steve to run in this electorate. I mean I am a great believer of getting men and women into Parliament who have had flesh and blood life's experience. You have got to have people who've actually run something or achieved something. This bloke has run a company, he's also I know done an enormous amount for Australian Rules football in this area and that is terrific. I said to Danielle