I like the MC's neighbours, they are very nice. Bruce, Danna, to my other parliamentary colleagues, the President of the Sutherland Shire, other distinguished guests, ladies and gentleman. It is great to be back here, I want to say thank you very, very warmly to Bruce for those very generous words of welcome and of introduction, and can I say how superbly the Shire has been served by its Federal representatives since 1996. Those of us who were focussed on election night on the 2nd March 1996, and I guess that includes just about everybody in this room, will remember great highlights of that night, and one of the great highlights of that night, of course, was when the news came through that the seat of Hughes had fallen to the Liberal Party with a swing of 12 per cent which was one of the quite extraordinary - one of the quite extraordinary victories and the fascinating things about the seat of Hughes was that in 1998 the majority was even higher despite the fact that 1998 was not an election where our vote was quite as strong as it had been 1996, but both Danna and Bruce have built these two seats into bastions of support and bastions of solidarity, if I can use a socialist expression, dear me, for the Liberal Party cause and I thank them both for the wonderful work that they do on behalf of the Government [inaudible] on behalf of the Government.
The national anthem that was sung tonight by the choir of Inaburra School, it's the second time today I have heard the national anthem or joined in the singing of the national anthem by a school choir. The other occasion was the choir of the Al-Faisal Islamic School in Auburn earlier today where I attended a function to lay the foundation stone for a school extension. It's interesting, the choir there stood in front of the Australian flag. The choir there sung it in a rich Australian accent and it sung the national anthem with the same sense of commitment and the same sense of enthusiasm about involvement in this country. I mentioned that anecdotally to make a point briefly, and that is to underline the great importance at a time when we are rightly concerned about the possible emergence of terrorist behaviour within our own community, and most specifically within sections of the Islamic community - to emphasise that the overwhelming membership of that community is as scared of terrorism and as enthusiastic in its repudiation of all that it represents, as is the rest of the Australian community and whilst supporting necessary measures to make sure that the terrorist threat does not become real within our own communities we must simultaneously reach out to all Australians, and to understand that the best way of combating the potential for terrorism in our community is a policy of working with, and not working separately from, the Islamic community of Australia.
This country is as the old saying goes, and it is an old saying now, a very lucky country. But another old saying tells us that we make our own luck and just as individuals we have made our own luck and there are a lot of people in this room tonight who have made their own luck because they have worked hard, they've taken a punt, they've taken a risk, they've been prepared to invest in their future and their family's future and they have been properly rewarded, so the same thing can be said about Australia.
We are living at present in the strongest economic conditions this country has seen since the end of World War II. There was a time in the 50s and 60s when there was a lot of prosperity but I don't think it was as soundly based as it is now. In those days we had a very closed and protected economy, we had very high tariffs, we had a controlled exchange rate, we had foreign exchange controls, we had a highly regulated and centralised wage fixation system and we tended to be rather inward looking. But as the years have gone by and the world has changed forever economically, this country has now become a major exporter in areas that we didn't dream of in the past. We have become expert in the service industries. In the 1950s and 60s, young Australians, in many cases, felt it was beneath them to go into hospitality or recreation, they did. If you're a young person, if you were a person dining out in those days, you often avoided getting served by an Australian waiter because it was regarded as something that somehow or another Australians didn't do.
But all that has changed and we now find that one of the strongest industries this country has is to be found in recreation and hospitality and the way in which young Australians enthusiastically embraced the service industries is a sheer delight to see and it underpins the enormous strength and it's just one illustration of the way in which this country has changed, and changed profoundly for the better. But the fact that we have such strong economic conditions now, should not be a reason why we make the terrible mistake of thinking that having got to this situation we should rest on our laurels and not embrace further reform so that in a few years time when there is a gathering like this again you won't look back and say why on earth didn't the government make the necessary changes to continue to deliver the economic strength and prosperity we used to have.
And let me illustrate my point by reference to a country, that when I became a junior minister in the Fraser Government in the middle 1970s, in 1976 when I first became a minister after the 1975 election, I was the very junior Minister for Business and Consumer Affairs and at that time the country that was held up as the great exemplar, the one to follow, the economic model that the rest of the world should follow was the then Federal Republic of West Germany and people used to say to us, look the Germans have got it right. We used to have German ministers come out to Australia and they would tell us how it was done, they didn't do it in a patronising way, they were perfectly gracious people and they were very happy to visit our country and nothing that I say is in any way meant to denigrate the German people, but simply to illustrate a point. It's a parable about economic reform as they had gone through a period of enormous expansion and growth after the end of World War II and people wrote and talked about the German economic miracle and Germany's output and production and GDP growth, with an exchange rate strength and stability, was the envy of the rest of the world.
Now that was 1976, you fast-forward 29 years to 2005 and you find the Germany situation in the world now is very different - it's still a strong country, it's still got great potential and it is still one of the wealthiest countries in the world but it is no longer regarded as the example, and the reason why is that Germany made the mistake that I am determined Australia will not make, and that is having reached a position of great economic strength and having been seen in many respects as outperforming the rest of the world it did tend to sit back and say well we've made it and we don't need to make any further reform and Germany now has an unemployment level which in nominal terms is as high as it was during the Great Depression and when you think of the impact of the Great Depression on Germany, you understand the import of that, it's an unemployment rate of almost 11 per cent, it's the highest, I think, in western Europe. It has an over-regulated labour market and it's in need of very fundamental reform and the point I make again is that having reached that position of relative economic strength, it did tend to rest on its laurels and assume that virtue in a sense would have its own reward when it came to economic management and nothing more had to be done.
And that is something that Australia must resist the temptation to do, because right at the moment I have a lot of people saying to me John, the country's in great shape, you've paid off all of that debt, you've got the lowest unemployment level in 30 years, interest rates are low, you cut tax in the last Budget, this is as good, I have never had to work so hard but I've never made so much money, it's fantastic - go away, don't do anything, don't touch it, something might go wrong, please don't do any more, you've got it right. Now a lot of people say that to me, why are you talking about reform? I am talking about reform because I don't want Australia to make the same mistake as other countries have made and I have often in recent months used the metaphor to describe Australia's economic challenge of participating in a race towards an ever receding finishing line, and economic reform is a bit like that, you never get there, you think you are getting there, but then it keeps disappearing and the reason why you keep going is that there are other blokes in the race and if you don't keep going they will go past you and that is what will happen to Australia. We will begin to lose our position in that race if we don't undertake some further reform. And I make these comments very much in the context of the reforms we are now proposing to workplace relations, they are difficult, they attract criticism, not only from our political opponents from the trade union movement, there is some question in the wisdom of them in the sense of saying 'well everything is going alright at the moment, why do you need to do anymore?' I need to do more, we need to do more as a nation because economic performance is always relative and unless you keep going and you keep thrusting towards a goal, you are going to fall behind and those wonderful unemployment rates that we spoke of will only continue to be available to us if we continue to embrace the reform process.
I want to change our workplace relations system, not radically, not in an extreme way, we are not going to sweep away fundamental protection but we are going to do three very important things. We are going to get rid of the absurd encumbrance of the existing unfair dismissal laws on small and medium-sized businesses.
And when you hear the unions and some in the Labor Party and some commentators talk about the unfair dismissal laws, you would think they were contained in the Magna Carta, that they go back to, you know that meeting between the barons and King John at Runnymede, in fact they were actually introduced by Baron Laurie Brereton in 1994, a bare 11 years ago and they haven't worked and you all know why they haven't worked - because if you can't let go of somebody who is an encumbrance to your business and making life difficult for your hard working employees, then you don't take somebody else on in the future through fear that you might end up with two of them, and that is fundamentally the problem.
And by getting rid of these laws we will actually generate jobs because we will remove the intimidatory effect and the fact that small firms can't afford to pay go-away money and I had a meeting of 25 businesses of small and medium size in Adelaide last week and 13 out of the 25 gave me their war stories of problems with unfair dismissal laws, so that is the first thing we want to do. The second thing we want to do is to alter the link between the award system and workplace agreements, we are not going to abolish the award system, the award system will continue to operate but we will have a simplified standard for entering into workplace agreements and much of the complexity of the existing system of entering into workplace agreements is going to be changed and therefore workplace agreements will become more popular. They won't become mandatory, people will still be able to have their union represent them through collective agreements if that is their wish, but equally if it is their wish, to have a workplace agreement, that wish will be respected.
And the third thing we want to do is to establish a national system of industrial relations, Australia is a single economic unit, it may not have been the case 30 or 40 years ago. When I practiced law in Sydney, more than 30 years ago, it wasn't long since we had the practice, it sounds quaint now, that if you formed a company in NSW and it wanted to carry on business in Victoria, it had to register in Victoria as believe it or not, a foreign company. It's true and the registration procedure was virtually identical to the registration procedure if you wanted to register the company and to carry on business in New Zealand or in the United Kingdom. When I practiced law 30 years ago, there were no national legal firms - all of the firms were based essentially in the capital cities or the suburbs and the country towns of individual states. Now many of them still are but we've had the growth of national firms. Now I mention that from my own experience to make the point that we are overwhelmingly now living in one single national economic unit and the idea of having six or eight or nine separate industrial relations systems is plainly absurd and there are many other differences of that kind that we need to do away with. It may astonish many of you to know that somebody who obtained a hairdressing qualification in Western Australia can carry on his or her trade or occupation in London but they can't carry it on in Queensland without going through a further process of qualification, now that is astonishing, it is absurd that we have something of that kind now. One of the reasons why we have those differences is the existence of the union-driven state-based award system, because they dictate the circumstances under which in many cases, people will obtain qualifications.
So they are the three major changes that we have in mind - fixing the unfair dismissal, a burden on small and medium sized businesses, making it easier to go into workplace agreements and establishing a national system. Now people say to me, will you guarantee Prime Minister that every single worker in Australia will be better off under your system and I say well you know I think I have done a reasonable job but I can't guarantee the futures of 10 million people in the Australian workforce. But what I can do is as I have frequently done in Parliament and Bruce and Danna would have heard it, time without number, I can say that my guarantee is my record and if you look back over the last 9 « years, the thing that makes me most proud as Prime Minister when it comes to economic management, more than any other thing is that the average worker in this country has been better off under this Government than it ever was under the two previous Labor governments.
We have presided over real wage rises of about 14 per cent, I don't want to bore you with statistics, versus about 2-3 per cent under the former government and they are not my figures, they are not Peter Costello's figures or Kevin Andrews' figures, they are the figures produced by the independent Commonwealth Government statistician. So my friends, we have come a long way, we have a lot to be proud of about this country's economic achievements, it is true that we are living in very strong economic circumstances and conditions but it will only stay that way if we are prepared to keep making changes and keep reforming our system so that we keep ahead of those people who are competing against us in the never-ending thrust towards that ever receding finishing line, because unless we continue to do that, we will go the way of others that have thought, having got to a certain point, resting on one's laurels is all that one needs to do.
Can I finally say to all of you that it is an occasion for the Liberal Party to feel proud of what it has achieved at a national level. It has been a strong government, it's been a very united government but it's also been a government not just of one person, I have never sought to run a one-person team, I have never seen myself as a one-man band, I have been supported by a number of outstanding and highly talented senior ministers. I pay particular tribute to the tremendous work that Peter Costello has done as the Deputy Leader and as the Treasurer. He has been in my view, the best treasurer that this country has produced and he deserves enormous credit for the tremendous work that he has done.
I also want to pay great tribute to the solidarity, there is that word again, heavens above, the strength of the Coalition with the National Party - it's one of the great strengths of this Government and I have had in Tim Fischer and John Anderson, and now more recently in Mark Vaile, wonderful support from the leaders of the National Party and can I also say that Alexander Downer whose now been continuously along with Peter Costello, the only other Minister who has served in the same portfolio to which he was appointed in 1996, has done a really superb job representing the interests of this country overseas, he really has. The list could go on, Philip Ruddock who did such a great job in immigration and now as Attorney General, Tony Abbott as Health Minister - you notice how health although it remains a very big and difficult issue at a state level, at a federal level, many of the issues that were the subject of attack a few years ago, are a lot more muted in their treatment. And to Brendan Nelson who did a great job in negotiating the changes to higher education through the Parliament and so the list would go on and I won't go through all of them. I simply want to say that our success has been due to the team, our strength and our success has been due to the wonderful support that all of you have given us and I echo very much the warm appreciation and gratitude that Bruce has expressed. I know on behalf of all the members of the parliamentary party, I thank you very much for your support, I welcome your attendance tonight and I look forward to working with all of you to make sure that the strength of the Liberal Government and the strength of the Liberal Party at a national level is maintained unabated. Thank you.
[ends]