Let me just say a few things and then I understand we're going to have an open set of questions about things near and dear to your hearts.
Firstly, about the role of the churches in Australia in shaping the country that we have become.
I have said throughout my public life that I am proud of the role played by the Christian churches in shaping this country Australia.
Right back to its earliest days and the arrival of the first Christian chaplain in the colony in the First Fleet, Richard Johnson, through to the arrival of the first Catholic priests not long after, and the arrival of various other Christian traditions in this country, the way in which so many of the social institutions of this country have been shaped by the Christian church.
The earliest efforts in bringing about universal education rested on the back of the efforts of the Christian churches. The beginnings of our public hospitals began on the back of the efforts of the Christian churches. The beginnings of basic social institutions such as orphanages, and such as care for the poor, began off the back of the Christian churches.
And the key values which underpin the Judeo-Christian ethic which has been alive in this country for the last two centuries have been shaped so much by the traditions which you represent in this room.
It is often only in the absence of those traditions that you begin to feel what it would be like had Australia been placed differently. That is not to say that those in the Christian traditions have always got it right. You and we have, mistakes have been made by each of the traditions represented in this room. But that should not cause us to conclude that the glass have been overwhelming full rather than empty.
So many people in this country have benefitted from the great tradition of Christian charity and church intervention in society and in people's lives when they have been so singularly distressed. This would be quite a different - and I believe poorer - country were it not for that contribution.
So that is me. It does not mean in this country Australia we are therefore hostile to other religious traditions, we are not.
We are the country which resolved in the 1890s that we would not have an established religion. That reflected the great wisdom of our founding fathers that there should be none and that in fact we should be open to all.
I read some years ago the great debates in the United States at the time following the Revolutionary War as to whether they should have an established religion there, and as soon as the Episcopalians worked out that the Presbyterians were trying to beat them to the jump, they decided they wouldn't have an established religion either. I think there was great wisdom in those deliberations of the 1890s.
And as a consequence in the absence of an established religion, we therefore do welcome, with open arms people of other religious traditions, be they Muslims, be they people of the Jewish tradition, or people of Buddhist faith or other faiths. That is the right and proper thing in a country which respects freedom of religious expression.
And of course in our great Australian family there are those of no faith. And that does not mean that people of no faith therefore have nothing to contribute to debates about morals, to debates about ethics and to debates about values; they do. The great thing about our country Australia is that it tolerates people of faith, of many faiths and those with no faith, and that is the proper workings of a country such as ours rooted in the principles of democracy and respect for the law.
In terms of our engagement with matters I think of real relevance to the churches represented here and those listening to and watching the broadcast, I think one of our first priorities as a Government has been to engage with churches in what you're doing in schools, in the education system of Australia.
We've been out there investing in probably the biggest school modernisation program that this country has ever seen, in fact it is. And we have been completely blind to the question of whether a school is a State school or a non-State school, a Government school or a non-Government school, a Catholic school or a Christian school, an independent Christian school, an Anglican school or whatever school.
The key thing is as I travel around the country is how so many schools, run by churches, which have frankly been struggling to make sure that they've got the most up to date facilities. Basic things like libraries, basic things like learning centres, basic things like science centres, state of the art language centres. And I would like to simply emphasise one core point - that as we have done this as part of our national economic stimulus strategy, we have done so to make sure that all Australians, wherever they go to school, wherever they choose to send their children to school, have been benefitted from this program.
I was in Melbourne not long ago opening a school, a Catholic parish school called St Luke the Evangelist - hi to anyone who happens to be watching from St Luke the Evangelist this evening. But what gave me a particular delight in opening their new learning centre was the fact that as the parish priest, a delightful Irish-Australian said, 'we've been a little bit down of heel at late, we haven't had a new building for 40 years'. And that gives my heart genuine joy when I see those changes occurring on the ground.
Also in the state school system of Australia, you know that the Government has supported the continuation of the school chaplaincy program. It's been a matter of some controversy in various parts of the country. The reason we've decided to support its continuation is because we actually think it's the right thing to do.
In my experience of chaplaincies on the ground they perform a very, very good role. Some schools may choose, through their parent communities, not to have one, that's their choice. If they wish to use that funding to support a school counsellor of no particular religious tradition that's their choice,.
But I am pretty pleased by the extent to which this has been taken up right across the country. We'll go through our own evaluation as to whether it works everywhere well. I'm told by every school community I go to it's working fantastically well, but we need to measure that because it involves the expenditure of Government funds.
But I'm pretty confident this program is going to continue because I see from so many of our school principals, and some of the most hardened and difficult high schools in our country, and some of the primary schools who are dealing with real challenges in various parts of Australia, how much they value the role of a school chaplain who has formed something of the social glue, the spiritual glue, of a school community.
So I hope through those specific actions - what we've done on chaplaincies, what we've done more broadly on school building programs - and our broader continued investment in the non-Government education system, that you'll be clear that our bona fides are real.
Another great contribution of course by the churches has been what you do in the area of health, hospitals and broader support for those with disabilities.
We've taken this challenge to heart as a Government. I said prior to the last election that I feared that our health and hospital system may not survive unless we fundamentally reformed it. I know some will see this as a political debate. To me it's a debate about human decency - that anyone who is sick, irrespective of where they come from, should be able to have access to first class health care.
So our reforms to bring in a new National Health and Hospitals Network is part and parcel of that. For the first time the Australian Government will be the dominant funder of the public hospital system of Australia - first time. In the past State Governments have provided one third, on average, of the running costs. We now will be the 60 per cent funder of the capital costs, the running costs, the teaching costs, the research costs, the training costs of hospitals.
We're also going to become the exclusive funder of the primary healthcare system - that is, the system outside of hospitals, and, for the first time, the exclusive funder of the aged care network of Australia.
These are big reforms, and I am concerned that in the absence of having done these reforms that the system would have simply reached tipping point as state governments are increasingly incapable, frankly, of funding the future needs of the public hospital system.
Which brings me to another challenge which I believe we share in common, and that is how do we deal with the problem of homelessness and affordable housing.
For us as a government this is pretty basic. We've set ourselves a target of halving homelessness. The Census statistic says that as of a couple of years ago that we had something like 100,000 Australians out there homeless; some 10,000 Australians each night sleeping rough.
That strikes me as off. It shouldn't be the case. We're a wealthy country. We should be able to do better than that.
You know, as representatives of the Christian churches, there are some folk who are sometimes very hard to help and I understand that too. But you know, when I go round to the homeless centres of Australia, and I've been to a lot in the last two and a half years I've been in this position, and I ask them 'have they got enough room at the inn?', they usually don't. They are turning people away. Often, for one person accepted, nine are turned away. That should not be the case. We need to change that.
One of the things that we are changing is we're now investing in 20,000 new units of social housing right across Australia as part of the Government's economic stimulus strategy. We're also fixing up tens of thousands of others which have actually fallen into disrepair and were no longer properly habitable.
We're also working with the non-government sector in projects like Common Ground. Common Ground, in our large cities, is in a process now of building a number of free-standing, hotel-like accommodation at the lowest level for people who need, literally, somewhere to stay the night. It's modelled on what's happened in New York and other cities in the United States.
My wife, Therese, who is heavily involved in this, will be opening the first of those facilities, I think, in the next month or two in Melbourne, I think, and that is happening around the rest of the country as well.
Also, investing in homelessness programs because, as you know, homelessness itself is usually a final manifestation of a whole bunch of other problems, whether it's mental illness, whether it's family breakdown, or whether it's problems with criminality, and all these things tend to connected. And so, there is also a large investment from the Government through the outreach of church, charitable and community organisations to do something about the causes of homelessness. How do you actually prevent people from falling into homelessness through better debt management just before the house is literally returned to the bank? How do you actually help people train and become trained to enter the workforce in order to become more resilient and self-reliant?
This is a very big investment by the Australian Government and something about which I feel passionately, because no Australian should have to sleep rough at night. We shouldn't be a country like that. We should be able to do better. And so partnering with you in the church and charitable sector for us is pretty important on that front as well.
We're also pretty, shall I say, hardline on the question of welfare as well. We don't believe that simply extending a welfare cheque is the end of the Government's responsibility. The welfare reforms that we're about to introduce in the Northern Territory are profound. These impose a whole series of new conditionalities, not just for Indigenous Australians, but now for non-indigenous Australians as well on a non-discriminatory basis in the Northern Territory, and prospectively, depending on how that goes, for the country at large, that people who are on welfare long-term actually have to meet a whole series of new conditions with the objective of bringing them off welfare.
This welfare reform is tough, it's hard. It's also compassionate. It's trying to get the balance right. But we believe that intergenerational welfare dependency is just wrong. It's actually bad for people.
And therefore I would draw your attention carefully to what we have just outlined in the parliament in the last week or so about our program for welfare reform, starting with the entire community in the Territory, but moving progressively to the rest of the country, depending on the success of those particular reforms.
In the workplace, you probably know which tradition we come from on that score. We actually believe fairness and the great Australian fair go belief is based on and anchored in a fair go for all in the workplace; that you should have an opportunity to bargain for the conditions that you've got at work.
We had real concerns with the previous set of laws, called WorkChoices. We didn't think that was right and fair.
We became very concerned when people's right at work were being traded away down to nothing, and that the most defenceless people, those in the lowest-paid occupations, were not getting a fair go - losing their penalty rates, losing their shift allowances, losing their overtime.
So, for us that's pretty basic as well. That's why we said, prior to the last election, we'd get rid of Work Choices, and that's why we have done that. It's a pretty basic difference between us.
And, speaking of work, the availability of jobs itself is for us a pretty fundamental belief. People think that this global financial crisis that the world has gone through in the last 18 months or so has somehow just passed Australia by, almost by accident or by miracle. It didn't. We actually chose to step into the economy and make a difference.
I've already spoken about this school building program - that's $15 billion worth of investment, partly to provide jobs for tradies, for small businesses, right across the country when the building sector was actually collapsing; partly also to make sure that your schools would have a lasting and positive legacy from this investment. But our fundamental driving factor was not to see mass unemployment.
Right round the world today, if you're a pastor in a church somewhere in the American mid-west, to the south, you'd be staring at double-digit unemployment and above. Right across the UK and Europe at present, you're seeing manifestations of unemployment between 8 and 18 and 19 per cent.
Here, we chose to make a difference, and through the measures that we took to stimulate the economy, amidst huge controversy, we actually kept the economy out of recession. But most importantly we kept hundreds of thousands of Australians in work. The thought of creating a generation of people thrown out of work with a decade to come back and to recover, and perhaps never recover, was something we didn't want to see.
The dignity of having a job is, for us, a fundamental human dignity, and that is why we acted in the way we did, and the result is pretty plain. Australia has 5.2 per cent unemployment. It's the second-lowest unemployment level of all the major advanced economies.
Had we generated in Australia the unemployment rate we now see in the United States - it's just under 10 - half a million Australians more would be out of work. Our total workforce is about 10 or 11 million. That's a lot of people.
Imagine what would be happening in each of your parishes, in each of your church communities, if such a large slice of people, frankly, weren't able to work and properly cater for their families and their basic needs.
So, protecting jobs, particularly through this extraordinary, abnormal global economic event has been a fundamental value of this Government at work.
Also, our action on climate change. There's been much debate about this. Our view is very simple - climate change is real, it's happening, and we cannot simply put our heads into the sand and pretend that it's not.
In terms of action on climate change, we've put forward three or four concrete measures. One, an emissions trading scheme as a good way to actually bring down, the most effective and cheapest way of bringing down greenhouse gas emissions. We put our proposed legislation to the parliament three times, and three times it was voted down by our political opponents, and of course it therefore requires a new parliament to deal with it.
The other way you act on climate change is to radically invest in renewable energy - solar, wind, geothermal - and we we're doing that, the biggest renewable energy investment the country has ever seen.
Thirdly, energy efficiency, so we actually consume less and we are proper custodians of a sustainable planet.
And, beyond that, to work globally, because what we do here nationally represents 1.5 per cent of global emissions, so, with the Chinese, with the Indians, with the Americans and others to make sure that the planet is pulling together.
Copenhagen was a hard conference, but it was a necessary conference, because if we take, I believe, carefully the requirement on this generation to be proper stewards of God's creation it means that we should act responsibly in the care of this planet and this creation as well.
So we will continue to work on those agendas as well.
As I know I've been given the bell, and I think it's probably about time to wind up, I just finish on one point. These are some of the actions we've undertaken at home, here within this wider community called Australia. Wesley, the father and Methodist, said, when asked what his parish was and where his parish was, said quite correctly that the world was his parish, and so too it is in terms of our wider responsibilities.
We are proudly, in this country and under this Government, increasing our level of overseas development cooperation to 0.5 per cent of gross national income. What's that mean in practical terms? We've increased was we gift to the rest of the world from $3.2 billion when the Government was elected to now about $4.4-$4.5 billion. This has been a big change.
We are now engaged in aid programs in Africa. In the past, there were very few. We have now used the Millennium Development Goals and through the Micah Challenge and others supporting that to make a difference to extreme poverty around the world and within our own region. In partnership with the rest of the world, I think we can make a difference.
Therefore, what we do at home should also be reflected in that which we seek to do abroad.
There are many other things I'm sure that you'll wish to ask about, whether it's about asylum seekers or whether it's about questions of broader morality or other concerns which you as churches would have, and I'm pleased to seek to answer each of those questions.
I thank you very much.