Well Ross, my parliamentary colleagues Brett Mason and George Brandis, Senators for Queensland, Michael Caltabiano, ladies and gentlemen.
It is a real pleasure for me to be in the electorate of Bonner, to be associated with this young, enthusiastic, articulate new representative that the people of Bonner had the great sense to send to Canberra last October. Now this is a community gathering and I know it brings together people who do all sorts of things to make this wonderful community stick together and work in a way that makes it a very liveable part of Australia. And I want to acknowledge first up that all of the wonderful service organisations, and as I moved around in the few moments before I came up here I met people from the Lions organisation, from Meals on Wheels and from other local organisations. And this is a snapshot of what makes Australia tick. It's got people at different ages, at different backgrounds, belonging to different organisations, all of whom work harmoniously with each other to make our society a wonderful country and to make our nation the wonderful place it is in which to live.
Ross comes to Federal Parliament with tremendous energy and commitment. And in the seven months that he's been a Member he's already impressed me and all of his colleagues with his tireless desire to win things for his electorate and his tireless commitment to the people that were good enough to elect him in October of last year. And I want to say that it's the first Member that Bonner has had and I hope he remains its member for many, many years into the future. I know that will be the intention of a lot of people in this room, maybe not everybody and we live in a democracy and governments are elected to govern for the people who voted against them as well for the people who voted for them. And my message to you today is that this country is doing very well, this country is very widely respected around the world, the economy in this country is in as good a shape as it's been at any time since the end of World War II, we have the lowest unemployment in 30 years, we have a fiscal or budget position that is the envy of most other nations around the world, we've been able to bring in major tax reforms in the last Budget, we have kept faith with our commitments in relation to the health system, in relation to all of the other essential provisions that are needed to sustain not only a society built on incentive and effort, but also a society that recognises the importance of looking after the more vulnerable in our community.
We live in a world that is constantly challenging, not only for Australia but for the nations of our region. And I don't need to remind you, and you know we brought in the excellent Baby Bonus in the Budget before last, and I can say there has been a welcome increase in the birth rate over the last two quarters and I don't know that it's going to necessarily going to be maintained but it's something to warmly welcome. But we do live in a region which has not been without its challenges and without its difficulties and the one thing that I find as Prime Minister when I travel around our own region and travel around the world that this country has won for itself a new respect and a new standing because it's been willing to stick up for the things that it believes in. International relations can be a very difficult issue. We face at the moment as a country some difficult issues that involve the fate and the future of individuals. And all of us hope that in the working out of those issues the right and fair and just and true thing is determined and determined in relation to the fate of those individuals.
This country was willing to take a stand in relation to the freeing of East Timor and it remains one of the great international achievements that we were willing to take a stand to help the people of East Timor and since then we have rebuilt in a magnificent way our relationship with the people of Indonesia. We have been able to achieve not only a continuation of the very close relationship with the United States, but we've also been able to build a very strong relationship with the countries of north Asia and most particularly in recent years with China which has become one of Australia's strongest markets. And it's demonstrated that those people who said that somehow or other you had to make a choice between being friendly with the United States and offending the nations of Asia, or being friendly with the nations of Asia and cold-shouldering the United States has demonstrated that those people were wrong.
But of course the most important responsibility that any government is to make sure that conditions at home are as good as they possibly can be. And that does mean managing the economy well, it does mean keeping the country out of debt, it does mean reducing taxation when we can, it does mean having strong health services and a strong education system and also having a very strong defence force. And all of those things have received great priority from this Government in the nine and a half years that we have now been in office, or a little over nine years rather that we have been in office. And the last Budget presented by Peter Costello brought together so many of those achievements, Ross mentioned that when we came to office this country's government debt at a federal level was $96 billion. We've repaid $90 billion of that $96 billion. And we now have a debt level which is the envy of other industrialised countries around the world. But we've been able to do that whilst at the same time massively increasing expenditure on health, increasing in a very significant way the tax benefits that flow to low and middle income earners with children, and also injecting very large amounts of money into education, particularly providing the parents of Australia with the right to choose the school that educates their children. It's a very strong Liberal Party principle that parents should decide where their children are educated, not governments and not teacher unions but parents should decide where their children are educated and upholding the freedom of choice, be it a government school, a Catholic parish school, a GPS school or some other kind of independent school we believe very strongly in the principle of parental choice and it's one that has been an increasing number of Australian parents exercise their undoubted right to choose the school that their children must be educated in.
But having said all of these things about what we have achieved, I wouldn't want anybody to imagine that I think the process of change and improvement and reform in this country is ever completed. We face a number of quite daunting issues, we are like all other western countries, we are an ageing population and we make absolutely certain that we keep our health services and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, which is aligned to those health services, on a sound and affordable basis. It means we must encourage people to remain in the workforce as long as they want to. It means we should provide incentive for people who are now out of the workforce to enter the workforce if they wish to and they're able to do so. We also as a continent, and a very dry continent, face the greatest conservation challenge of our time and that is water. Water is a bigger conservation challenge than the preservation of the Tasmanian forests, even though that's an important issue. But the great conservation challenge of our time is water and we are still as a country in the grip of severe drought and I'll be going to many of the worst drought affected areas of Australia on Friday in parts of Western New South Wales. And it's very important that we as a community (interruption)... it's alright, nothing compared to Question Time. But we really have to understand the challenge that this represents and I hope later in the week to say something about a couple of, indeed tomorrow, a number of water projects that are of particular relevance to the people of Queensland and I'll be making some announcements along with the Premier of Queensland because it is a joint effort in relation to those projects.
But my friends I don't want to make any longer speech. Thank you very much for the support that you gave to Ross. He won't let you down, he will deliver in spades on the investment that you made in him in October of last year and he will do it extremely well and he'll do it with great style and great enthusiasm. I wish you well, thank you for your contribution to the Bonner community and thank you most importantly for the contribution that all of you make so magnificently to our wonderful country Australia.
Thank you.
[ends]