Thank you very much Ian. Danielle Blain, Matt Birney, my Ministerial and other Parliamentary Colleagues, fellow Liberals. And can I in extending a particular welcome to my Federal Parliamentary Colleagues acknowledge that in a short period of time, a matter of two or three weeks, we Liberals will celebrate a very significant event, and that's the 25th Anniversary of the election of Charles Wilson Tuckey to the Federal Parliament. I think we should record our gratitude for quiet understated service. But Wilson thank you for your great capacity to represent the rural people of this country. There are arguably left in Australia only three truly rural electorates in the sense that the electorates are not dominated by rural hub cities, but rather by a collection of what can truly be called still country towns. The electorate of Maranoa in Queensland, the electorate of Gwydir in New South Wales and the electorate of O'Connor in Western Australia. And Wilson, you represent those rural interests. You do it with vigour and you do it with conviction and the party owes you a great debt of gratitude for a quarter of a century of service to the people of your electorate.
My friends, it is always a great pleasure to address a State Conference of the Liberal Party in Western Australia and I do so at a time when the Liberal Party's stocks Federally are strong. But it's important that we see our good fortune and our strength at a national level in true perspective. We Australians have always been exceptionally good at pulling together and dealing with adversity. In times of war, in times of natural disaster, in times of economic downturn, we always find great reserves of resilience and of courage and determination.
Today may I put it to you our great challenge is to summon up those same characteristics at a time of great economic prosperity. Can I put it to you that the politics of prosperity are no less challenging than the politics of adversity. And the biggest challenge of all is to avoid the pitfall of complacency. Complacency is the giant killer of Australian politics, particularly when it comes to economic management. And as soon as any Government decides that it can put its feet up, that the hard work has been done, that the economy will look after itself, that no more reform is needed, that Government has signed its own death warrant.
We are now almost a year on from a memorable electoral victory on the 9th of October last year. And the question I posed to the Australian people at the beginning of that election campaign I think almost eleven and a half months ago is just as relevant today as it was then. And that question was a very simple proposition and it's again a very simple proposition. When you look at the two sides of politics, who do you really trust to get the big things right? Who do you really trust to take the difficult but necessary decisions to keep Australia safe and to secure our future economic prosperity?
This week I convened a special meeting of State Premiers and Chief Ministers to discuss issues of national security, to achieve a balance between our traditional liberties and the new threatening terrorist environment in which sadly we now live and we are condemned to live for a number of years into the future. What was required was a careful balancing of those interests. We needed to go further than the current law had taken us, but we had to avoid the pitfalls of going too far. We were determined to get the balance right and I believe that we achieved the right balance.
Just as we achieved the right balance in relation to national security we have a supreme responsibility to take the bold decisions that are needed in relation to our economic future, and all the more so because the portents are good. All the more so because the opportunities are great and nowhere in Australia is that more apparent than here in Western Australia with its enormous ongoing contribution to the export wealth of our nation. This imperative demands not only stable, united, cohesive, thoughtful Government, but it also requires a willingness to take bold decisions in the longer term national interest so that we can prepare ourselves for the challenges of coming decades. To secure higher living standards in an evermore competitive world, to reap the benefits of Asia's economic reawakening. To ensure that our people have the skills they need in the 21st Century workforce. To maintain a competitive tax system while investing adequately in our physical and our social infrastructure. To ensure that Australians continue to have access to world class health and education systems as well as a strong and effective social security safety net. And to reform our welfare system and to build a culture of greater individual responsibility and self reliance.
And my friends, having come so far as we have over the last nine and a half years, history will judge us very harshly if we now lapse into complacency. If we now believe that enough has been done, if we now embrace the politics of reform fatigue, as has the Labor Party. As somebody rightly said a few weeks ago after reading a speech that Mr Beazley had given to an economic conference in Melbourne that the Opposition Leader had to be the first example of the leader of a major political party in Australia who had acquired reform fatigue while still being in opposition.
And of these future building blocks none is more important than the ongoing need for further workplace relations reform. We are seeing year by year a major cultural shift taking place in the Australian workforce with the rise of what I have described as the enterprise worker. The attitude of Australia and Australians towards work has been transformed over the past two decades. The reputation for adaptability, the reputation for innovation, the reputation for industry of Australian workers is now widely recognised around the world. And more and more Australians are now eager to shape their own destiny at work, whether as paid employees or in the expanding world of self employment. A short while ago, the Australian Bureau of Statistics released what I regard as an historic statistic, particularly for people who belong to the Liberal Party. And it recorded that there are now more people who are self employed in Australia at 1.9 million than there are who belong to trade unions at 1.8 million. We now have more than 1 million Australians who run their own businesses from home and a growing proportion of those self employed people running their own businesses from home are of course women who find in the opportunities of the modern world, the more flexible environment in which we live, a greater capacity to combine work and family responsibilities.
And what is so striking about the self employed figure and what is so striking about many other figures is that we truly live in what I have described as a workers' market. And that workers' market, a workers' market like we have never had before in the history of this country, has been created by the coalition. It has not been created by the self styled worker's party, the Australian Labor Party. And just as I was able to declare when opening the Liberal Party's campaign for the election last year for the seats we held and hoped to win in Western Sydney, that we had brought a quadrella of benefits to the people of Western Sydney, of lower interest rates, lower taxation, more jobs and greater job security. So I can say that this government can claim proudly that it is the Government that has created a workers' market like never before. Because not only is our unemployment at a 30 year low, but our real wages have risen by just under 15% over the last nine and a half years. And this is the record of a government which stands accused by the Labor Party of wanting to destroy the living standards of the working men and women of this country. I say again and repeatedly and I say it defiantly, look at our record. The working men and women of this country have had no better friend than the government that I've been proud to lead over the last nine and a half years.
But not only is our unemployment at a 30 year low, not only have we created 1.7 million more jobs since we were elected, not only have we in the last year generated 400,000 jobs, which is the largest number of jobs ever generated in a 12 month period since the records began to be kept, but in addition to that the participation rate now stands at 64.8% at a record high. In other words, so confident are people of their job opportunities now, a greater percentage than ever before are looking for work. All of this indicates that we are indeed living in a workers' market. Not a cause for complacency, but a cause for reflection and stock taking in the face of the fear campaign being run by the Australian Labor Party and the trade union movement in response to our proposals for workplace relations reform. I ask the rhetorical question, why would a Government proud of that record of concern and service to the working men and women of Australia, why would that Government set about embracing policies designed to undermine their living standards and to cut their working conditions? It is a preposterous argument. I've often been asked to give guarantees. The best guarantee I can give is the guarantee of my record in helping the working men and women of Australia over the last nine and a half years.
Australian workers are in very high demand. And the trend is even more favourable as the share of new entrants into the labour market falls with the ageing of our population. Working Australians should seize this opportunity and not be influenced by the fear campaign of our opponents. Our 1996 reforms; not as far as we would have wanted to go, but certainly more than the Labor Party would have supported, have demonstrated the benefits for people in negotiating workplace arrangements. There is nothing radical or extreme in what we are proposing. It is a measured and significant improvement on the reforms that were introduced in 1996. And Australian workers should take advantage of the greater choice and flexibility offered by our workplace reforms, because they will be negotiating from a position of strength, not from a position of weakness, backed by a strong set of safeguards protected by law.
So when we look at the political scene now we see one side of politics, that occupied by the coalition, laying the foundation of Australia's future economic strength. We see a Federal Labor Party confused and divided and lacking in leadership. Labor still, after nine and a half years, has no clear coherent message to communicate to the Australian people. Let me take a few examples. Let me take an example very important to all of us and that is the example of education. In the last nine and a half years, this Government at a federal level has been the champion of choice in education and we have done more to expand parental choice in this country than any previous Federal Government. We are spending record amounts on both government and non-government schools. Approximately 31% of all Australian school children are now educated in independent schools. And importantly the expansion in independent schools has not been at the top end of the market, has not been in those schools which are the traditional targets of the envy politics of the Labor Party, rather they have been in low fee, outer suburban independent schools where the expansion has been significant and where the choice has been made available to working parents who want that choice, who want a school that caters for their particular values and their particular priorities. We have been the champion of choice.
We've not only been the champion of choice between government and non-government schools, we've also been the champion of choice within the government sector. A strong government school sector is imperative to the future education standards of this country. I am proud, as somebody who was fully educated in my school education at a government school, I'm very proud of the contribution that government education has made to the development of Australians through the generations.
Now we have a very proud record of choice, but in recent days I've heard Mr Beazley extolling the virtues of choice in education. Yet where was his passion for choice when he led the Labor Party in 2001 and embraced the politics of envy in attacking independent schools? Every time they got up in Parliament and sneered at people who went to Kings School or Scots, or Melbourne Grammar, they were not just sneering at those schools, they were sneering at the whole independent school sector. And they were in fact denigrating the choice that parents make in relation to their education needs of their children. Mr Beazley now seeks to reinvent himself as somebody who believes in choice, yet in reality on not only the occasion of the 2001 election but again in 2004 where the Labor Party developed their hit list of schools, which they have still not disavowed. I listened in vain for Mr Beazley to tell us, when he spoke at the education conference in Sydney a few days ago, for him to disavow the hit list. Its still there. It's there because the ideology of the teacher unions of this country still dictate the education policies of the Australian Labor Party.
Now Madam President. Old habits die hard don't they? Do we also for this you know, reformed leader can we have a look at the issue of taxation? It's fascinating. Remember a few months ago, Mr Beazley opposed the tax cuts contained in the budget and the only reason those tax cuts became law was because the Coalition had won a majority in the Senate at the last election and that majority came into effect on the 1st of July. He trotted out his usual soak-the-rich rhetoric. He was opposed to changes - we were going to lift the point at which the top rate of tax came into operation at $125,000. He was still mired in this belief that somehow or other people earning 60, 70, 80 thousand dollars a year were rich. I wonder when was the last time he visited the mining areas of Western Australia, the last time he talked to a police sergeant in Western Sydney doing some overtime? I wonder how out of touch he really is when he imagines that those levels of income and remuneration represent riches. One minute he's criticising tax cuts as too generous to people on higher income and yet in recent days he's been calling for tax cuts for people on the top rate.
And he was at it again yesterday and in the process he was demonstrating his ignorance of economics. He was calling for a further tax cut off the back of the bigger than expected surplus we had in the last financial year, without realising or acknowledging that that bigger than expected surplus was a one off slippage of expenditure and not the result of increased revenue. And the most elementary understanding of the budget would tell you that you can't finance an ongoing tax cut out of a one off expenditure slippage. So we've had a demonstration very clearly in comparing the two parties that the proposition that I put to the Australian people at the beginning of the election campaign last year is as valid today almost a year on as it was when I put that proposition.
We unexpectedly won a majority in the Senate. I've said to party gatherings all around Australia that when I entered the election campaign a year ago, my fervent hope was that we would be returned with an adequate majority in the House of Representatives, and we might, with great good fortune, win one or two more seats in the Senate. I must say that I fantasised a little bit about a slightly better result after attending a certain meeting at the Albert Hall in Launceston where I literally embraced some Australians who'd come to the conclusion that the party that ever since its foundation more than a hundred years ago had said it was for the workers, was no longer a party for the Australian worker.
That environmental policy that the Labor Party took to the last election must represent the most cynical betrayal of the interests of working class Australians that any political party has ever presented. It was a calculated, cynical attempt to buy Green preferences on the mainland of Australia and to hell with the impact on the job security of the struggling families of rural Tasmania. And that was the Labor Party at work. That was cynical Labor at work, driven and dominated by the inner metropolitan elites, without any regard at all for the hardworking people of rural and regional communities.
But my best hopes were exceeded. The best hopes of so many of us were exceeded on election day and we secured a very narrow majority, on a good day as Peter Costello calls it, a very narrow majority in the Senate. Now that gives us enormous opportunity. It also gives us an enormous responsibility. It gives us the opportunity to do things we would otherwise be stopped from doing. It gives us the opportunity to fulfil promises we have made repeatedly over the last nine and a half years, such as the sale of the remaining share of the government in Telstra. We've already achieved three major pieces of legislation we would never have been able to achieve without a majority in the Senate. Telstra legislation, the tax cuts and very importantly for many industries here in Western Australia, the passage of the building and construction industry authority legislation that will bring a sense of law and order to an industry that has been wracked by rorts and improper behaviour over many years. Legislation Labor would never have supported and we would never in a month of Sundays been able to get through the Senate.
So we do have an enormous responsibility but we have to use it wisely and calmly and soberly and sensibly. The Australian people don't want extreme measures. But they want a Government that is strong and determined and clear in communicating what it stands for. The Australian people respond to consistency. They don't like extremism, they have contempt for weakness and indecision and rightly so. And we must keep those political messages in mind, those political realities. We must remember as I said at the beginning of my speech that complacency is the giant killer of Australian politics. We have come a long way, we have achieved a lot, we have a lot to be proud of. But there's a lot more to be done. And if we imagine that we can rest on our oars, we can say the job is finished, that it's all getting a bit too hard, the Australian people will be entitled to look around for an alternative. And they will and they'll do it very deliberately and they'll do it very effectively. You must always keep working hard and running hard to retain the trust and the confidence of the Australian people.
Can I conclude my remarks by thanking all of you. I want to thank Danielle Blain and Paul Everingham in particular for the wonderful leadership of the organisation that they have given over the last twelve months here in Western Australia. It was a truly magnificent effort here in Western Australia. To win two additional seats, to see increases in majorities such as Don Randall's wonderful achievement in Canning, to see the emphatic Senate result. Yes, give Don a clap. And to go to Michael Keenan's little morning tea gathering yesterday of 1100 people, and to Stuart Henry's wonderful victory in Hasluck. It was a truly fantastic result. And I want to thank all of you for the role that you've played. I want to thank all of my Federal Parliamentary colleagues from Western Australia. We have achieved an enormous amount, but we still have a lot of work to do.
And I want to extend the hand of cooperation and friendship to my State colleague Matt Birney and to all of the members of his Parliamentary Party. We are one indivisible Liberal Party. When we work together we succeed. Sure we have separate State and Federal manifestations and clearly there's separate sets of policies on a whole range of issues. But in the end, we have one indivisible goal and that indivisible goal is the election of Liberal Governments, and by definition the expulsion of Labor Government's where they hold office. And they hold office in too many places in Australia at the present time, far too many places. And we all have to work together and work together very strongly to bring about a change.
My friends, thank you very much for your loyalty, your support and you hard work. You delivered to us a wonderful Federal victory and it is now our responsibility to discharge the great responsibilities that you and the Australian people gave us just on a year ago today.
Thank you.
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