Thank you for that fantastic welcome. To Tony Campolongo, the Club President, my other parliamentary colleagues, Councillor Oliveri, who got a wonderful round of applause - doing well, that's a good reception, I do a good line in noisy receptions, and that's pretty good - to my fellow Australians. It's a wonderful experience for me, somebody of course who grew up in another part of Sydney, but has always called Sydney his original home, it's a great experience to come here to the Marconi Club -which is very much part of the story of post-World War II Australia. And as I moved around the tables tonight it was reminder to me of the incredible contribution that post-World War II migration from Italy has made to the shaping of the modern Australia.
I say that of course without in any way downplaying the contribution of people who've come from other countries. But this is an Italian club, it is the Marconi Club and I think we ought to say that. And the contribution that Australians of Italian heritage have made to our country is remarkable. And they've made a bit of an impact on my Federal Parliamentary Liberal Party-Santoro, Gambaro, Vasta, Ciobo, Barresi, Corey Bernardi and Connie Fierravanti-Wells-now that's not bad for the people who are in our Party. But the contribution that so many of you made, and of course in the early years of that great migration, when it wasn't so easy, it was tough going and the process of winning acceptance, and the process of integrating and assimilating in to the Australian community was not always easy. And with the passage of time and the coming of the good years, those times are sometimes forgotten.
But the value of clubs like Marconi, which brought people together, enabled Australian-Italians to mix with each other and preserve the culture and the habits of the old country, but also through the club they became a great contributing part of the Australian community. And of course in no part of Australian life, certainly on the playing fields, did clubs such as Marconi contribute in a greater degree than they did in relation to soccer. And of course the way in which the flame was kept burning, the torch was carried in relation to that particular code of football, through the many lean years - I mean it's flavour of the month at the present time, everybody is talking about the World Cup - it wasn't always flavour of the month, but it was always played, very, very extensively at a district level and it's clubs like Marconi that sort of kept that going.
So I want, first and foremost, tonight to pay a special tribute to those people of Italian descent who have contributed massively to the building of the phenomenon which is modern Australia. And the modern Australia is a phenomenon. We're only 20 million people, but gee in so many areas we punch above our weight. We punch above our weight on the sporting field. We punch above our weight in things far removed from the sporting field like medical research, and of course very importantly we are punching above our weight so far as our economy is concerned.
We've now had 15 years of unbroken economic growth. Yesterday we recorded for the first time since 1976 an unemployment rate that was below five per cent, and that is a fantastic result. And the reason we have that low unemployment, and in the end the greatest single measure of whether an economy is doing well is whether it is able to provide all of its citizens who want to work with a job. And when you get unemployment down to 4.9 per cent you really are reaching a situation of virtually full employment. And there are many parts of Australia where not only have we reached a point of full employment, but we've gone beyond it, and we're starting to see significant shortages of labour - particularly in areas of skilled tradesman. But I don't want to get in to the complications of that tonight. But the point I want to make is that this is a country which is living through economic times the like of which it hasn't had since World War II. There was a time when the Australian economy in the 1960s was growing very strongly, but it was a lot more cloistered and protected than it is now. It relied on tariff laws, it relied on controls, it relied on subsidies, it relied on bounties, but now it's an open, less regulated economy where people are competing and they're winning their share of world markets, and we're not only doing it in areas like mining where we have some natural advantages, but we're also doing it in service industries and we're also exporting a lot more manufactured goods than we sometimes realise. So it's a wonderful story.
And people say to me what is the reason, what is the explanation for it? I like them occasionally to give the Government one or two ticks for some of things that we done, but the fundamental reason why this country has done well over the last 10 or 15 years is through the capacity and the skills of the business men and women and the workers of this country. We are a very innovative people, we're a very adaptive people. I remember once talking to the international boss of one of the largest financial institutions in the world, and he was an American who'd worked for 20 years in Europe, and I said to him you've employed people from all over world, which group of people do you like employing the most, and not surprisingly - because I'm telling you the story - he said the people I like to employ most are Australians, he said. And I said why's that? And he said because they're so adaptable. He said Australians can adapt to changed circumstances and different challenges in a way that no other people in the world can. He said you are all used to travelling, you don't live in one part of your community and stay in your country all your lives, you travel around, you get to know people in other parts of the world because you are a small country, population wise, but a big country area wise, you speak a language which is the international language now and you are able to connect and adapt and change in a way that no other country in the world, no country men and women can do. And I thought about, I thought it was a very interesting compliment to our country. And when you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. We are a people who do adapt and we have adapted a lot over the last 20 years because our economy has changed. We don't all work in large concentrations, we have fewer really large companies employing most of the people, we have a lot more small and medium sized companies employing people. We have an incredibly growing number of small businesses, a very large number of them are businesses operated from home. And in the last 10 years there's been an explosion of home centred, home operated businesses, especially started by the women of this country - some 30 to 40 per cent of those home operated businesses over the last 10 years have been started by women.
And last year for the first time, and I don't say this critically in any way of people who belong to a trade union, it's part of the country to have unions and people have a perfect right to belong to them, but for the first time in our history the number of self-employed people in this country exceeded the number of people who belong to trade unions, and that was an interesting observation on the character of our society. And of course in this part of Australia, here in western Sydney, it really is the home of the aspiring small business operator. A man or woman who starts his or her own business with nothing and works 24 hours a day, so it feels, seven days a week to build that business into something, and in this room there are hundreds of you who've done that. You came, many of you, to this country with absolutely nothing and even worse than absolutely nothing, you owed a lot of money when you came here. But you worked your [inaudible] cases out, you've made wonderful things of your life and you've raised families, and you've created a community and you've given to our country, and you've made this country of ours feel very proud of your contribution, and you've made this country of ours be seen as an exemplar around the world of a nation that can bring together people from different parts of the world. And the other reason why this is a phenomenon of a country, is that we have demonstrated that you can bring people of different backgrounds together and unite them under one flag and one set of values and one core commitment to the future of a nation without in any way asking them to take out of a little corner of the heart, the recall and the affection for the country of their birth and the country of their home culture. Nobody asks people to do that. You who were born in Italy or of Italian descent will always have a particular affection for that country and that is something that we understand and we respect.
But over and above all of those things, what this country has been able to do is to bring people together in a fashion that I don't think any country has been able to do in modern times, and it's a great example to the rest of the world. So we do have a lot to be proud of. We have a lot to see in our achievement, particularly in the years that have gone by since World War II, but we can never take these things for granted. We are where we are because of all of that hard work of which Pat spoke. We are where we are because of the essentially egalitarian nature of this country, where we treat people with respect according to their character and their values and what they put in to the community, not according to their social status or their racial background or their religious beliefs. We treat people on their merits and according to their worth, and we have to work hard to keep it that way. We have to work hard to preserve that commonsense of fairness and those common values that keep us together as a community. And we have to understand that on occasions we've got to stand up in other parts of the world for what we think is right.
Right at the moment, for a relatively small country, we have armed forces in many different parts of the world. We're doing that because it's the right thing to do, it's the right thing to help a country like East Timor, a tiny country of a million people. And many of the citizens of that country in the dark days of World War II, when Australia faced difficulties with the Japanese, looked after our Australian forces in East Timor and protected many of them from captivity by the Japanese and we remember that. And in a sense we repay our debt of an earlier generation but for having done what we've done.
And we are standing up alongside our allies and friends in Afghanistan and Iraq to oppose terrorism. And we are making a contribution to stabilising a tiny country called the Solomon Islands in the Pacific. Now these are big responsibilities, but they are responsibilities that a country with the strength and the unity and the wealth of Australia can do. So when I look out at this gathering I feel a great sense of pride at what you all represent, that vital section of Australia, particularly built on post-World War II migration, something that wonderfully enriched us. And I think of this part of Sydney of which your representatives like Pat Farmer and Louise Markus and Marise Payne and Connie and Alan Cadman are so very, very proud. And they have every reason to be proud because you've seen the unemployment rates fall dramatically over the last 10 years. You've seen the growth of businesses. You've seen the growth of regional sporting pride. You've seen the great growth of population. You've seen the population, the demographic centre of Sydney shift ever more westward. And you have won for yourself a particular socioeconomic place on the map of Australia. And there's nothing that people want in this part of the world that they can't achieve and they can't have for themselves.
So my friends, my fellow Australians can I say to all of you thank you very much for the welcome that you have given me tonight, I'm very touched by the warmth, the spontaneity and the genuine character of the welcome.
I want to pay a great tribute to Pat Farmer. Pat is a remarkable bloke. He's unusual, he's a bit of a one-off. I don't mean that unkindly, I mean that generously actually - he really is. He appeals to people in all different sections of society. And the reason that he does that is that he's very genuine. He belongs to my team, he's one of mine, he's a Liberal bloke and you know he's proud of that and so he should be, it's a very good brand. But sometimes you hear in politics when people get elected they say, well you know I've been elected to govern for the people who voted for me as well as the people who voted against me. And you in the case of some people when they say that you don't sort of quite believe it, you think somehow or other they're only going to look after the people who voted for them. But Pat is the genuine article. He looks after people irrespective of whether they vote for him and that is what a Member of Parliament should do. And there are a lot of very genuine Members of Parliament on both sides who do that and Pat is a wonderful example of that.
And he took on a pretty tough fight when he ran for us in 2001, but he touched a community in a very special way. And it was a combination of his personality, his wonderful sporting background, his genuine sense of community service, that he'd come from Catherine Field, that he was in every sense a local bloke, and on top of that I think he's the genuine nature of his character, communicated itself to all of you and touched you in a very special way. So Pat, I'm very proud of the way in which you argue for the people of western Sydney. Where you say to me in the Party Room and you say to your colleagues in the Party Room, anything that's good enough for another part of Australia has got to be good enough for the people of western Sydney. And you're not going to take a backward step, you're not going to put up with a situation where the people in this part of the world don't get a fair crack of the whip and don't get their fair share of what is being done and what is being handed around.
My friends I simply conclude by saying, as I always do, at what is essentially a wonderful community gathering. There are many privileges that come my way as Prime Minister of Australia. It's the greatest privilege that anybody could possibly have to be Prime Minister of this country and I feel that sense of privilege every day of my life, every morning I wake up. And there is no greater part of that privilege than the opportunity, as I get so frequently and I have again tonight, to meet people, to meet a different group of people, to briefly share their experiences and to share the common joy all of us have in that even greater privilege of being Australians and living in the greatest country of the world.
Thank you very much.
[ends]