Thank you very much Mrs Thorton, ladies and gentlemen. Janette and I are very honoured to be part of this wonderful occasion which celebrates 60 years of extraordinary personal dedication and collective achievement. And I have to say that I was very touched by Mrs Thorton's speech. It was a wonderful encapsulation of a story of dedication in the face of great difficulty and great challenge. The Spastic Centre has been a wonderful Australian achievement. And I stress that it's been a wonderful Australian achievement because it pioneered a response based on collective family endeavour to great family challenge and great individual pain, and individual indignity. And the fact that in this area as in so many others, Australia was able to show the rest of world how it was done, is a particular source of pride to all of us tonight. As somebody who as you know grew up in Sydney the Spastic Centre was one of those organisations, one of those great organisations that from early childhood you understood to be a body that was about helping people who were less fortunate, and had disabilities and were challenged in a way that others in the community were not.
And with all the advances of medical science, to be reminded tonight that once every 18 hours a child is born with cerebral palsy is an arresting statistic. We have seen most extraordinary advances and I predicted in the next 25 years of this century, the advances will double, even treble, but there will still be enormous challenges and I share the hope and the pray with Mrs Thorton that there will be that end point that we ultimately reach.
I do want to commend the centre on the concept of the foundation to show a lead around the world in research, particularly in the Asian Pacific area is tremendously important, not only for the centre and the cause of assisting people with cerebral palsy, and trying to understand better the causes, and in time responses to those causes is something not only very important for Australians, but also very, very important for people within our region because just as we as a community within Australia have a responsibility to help those who are deserving of it, so we as a nation have a responsibility to provide a lead in our own region through research and all the other very laudable goals of the foundation.
We are very proud of our community instinct. We are a generous people. We are a people that respond to need and great causes within our community, and we demonstrated that very dramatically earlier this year with our response to the tsunami. It remains the pride of Australians that on a per capita basis our response was more generous than that of any country in the world. And it is an example, but the latest example of how generous we are as a people.
Can I in launching the foundation wish it well, it will of course (in case there was any doubt about it) attract tax deductibility, and can I also say that as an additional source of support I'm very pleased to announce that the Commonwealth Government will contribute $500,000 to the foundation.
It's a very big goal, the target that you've set yourselves, but having heard those stories of Neville Wran's intimidation and having heard Mrs Thorton deny it, I don't think you'll have too much trouble reaching that target. Thank you very much and I hope you have a wonderful night.
[ends]