Well thank you very much Giam, to John Azarias and to everybody, to Michael and Shanny Crouch, many of my parliamentary colleagues and lots of friends and lots of very philanthropic people, as I look around this room, from every table I see very generous, beaming, familiar faces.
I just wanted to make a few brief remarks about the coalition. I don't mean the Liberal Party and the National Party. I mean the social coalition which is a theme which I think is very much in evidence tonight.
It is something that I have talked about in the 10 years that I have been Prime Minister and this is this idea that if you want something done, what you should try and do is mobilise, first of all the coalface experts, the people who understand the problem and know how to solve it and have the experienced, on-the-ground capacity to do so; that is the first part of the coalition.
The second part of the coalition is to persuade the Government to provide its meagre resources to assist. The third part of the coalition is to get people who may not necessarily be experts on the ground, but have a great deal of public spirited commitment to helping people who are less fortunate than themselves, or in need of something. The final thing of course is that you mobilise the support of the business community to provide the sinews of war, financial support and so on.
I think it is a notion that has gathered a great deal of additional support over recent years and one of the pieces of conventional wisdom that I always see challenged at gatherings like this is the notion that, yes we live in a very prosperous period and we are by world standards a very successful, wealthy, high living standard country and I am very happy for people to say that and because it is true, but the corollary so often is from the cynics that yes we have become wealthier but we've become meaner, we've become less sensitive to good causes. Actually the field evidence is completely the contrary. Hand in hand with the burgeoning wealth and prosperity of Australia over the last decade or more has been a growth in corporate philanthropy and it is evident here tonight.
But of course what we are supporting tonight is a unique Australian institution. You wouldn't get anything else like the Royal Flying Doctor Service anywhere else in the world. You wouldn't get anything like the School of the Air. They are two things that are in the minds of all of us who grew up in Australia and obviously others who've come to our country to make such a fantastic contribution. They are things that are so quintessentially Australian and as a child I thought of the Royal Flying Doctor Service, I read the stories of the Reverend John Flynn, and Janet McDonald reminded me of his wonderful expression, 'the mantle of safety' that he wanted to put across the sparse areas of Australia and the notion as we look back on it now, it seems so simple, and so compelling, and so predictable, but of course in the days in which he put it together, it was the early days of aviation in Australia.
It was a pioneering concept and I think the idea that brought it all about was a suggestion that was made to him from an Australian soldier at the front in World War I who wrote to him with the suggestion and it all came together and it has received some wonderful support over the years from absolutely fantastic people and that is really what we are here tonight to further and to promote.
The other thing that it tells us is another story about ourselves and that is the incredible capacity to improvise and the incredible capacity of Australians to find a pragmatic, resourceful solution to a problem.
We pride ourselves on certain national characteristics and one of them of course is that we are very creative because we were forced through circumstance through the distance and the physical isolation to think of ways of tackling problems that other countries simply didn't have to because everybody, particularly in Europe, lived cheek by jowl, and one of the reasons why the records suggest that we had an incredibly large number of inventions in the 19th century for our size is precisely because were thrown back on our resources in an isolated community.
So when you support the Royal Flying Doctor Service you are not only supporting a wonderful cause that cares for the medical emergencies of people in the remote parts of our country on a 24 hour-a-day, seven day-a-week, 365 days-of-the-year basis. You are also supporting something that is an Australian icon. I know that expression is used far too much and most of the occasions when it is used it inappropriate, but it is appropriate to call the Royal Flying Doctor Service an Australian icon and I want to congratulate Deloitte for the generosity, of supporting this out of its foundation, it is a wonderful example of corporate philanthropy.
Can I congratulate a very good and longstanding friend of mine in Michael Crouch. Michael and I have known each other for many, many years and he's a person who has made an extraordinary contribution to this city. He has run and expanded a wonderful manufacturing business and in the changing economic environment of this country, with less tariff protection and a greater reliance on exports to continue to succeed in small to medium size manufacturing, it would be no easy task and most of the manufacturers, or many manufacturers, I won't say most, that I speak to over the years have sort of lamented the chance in circumstances for manufacturing because of different attitudes to things like protection. Michael has seen so much of this as being a challenge. He has always found time to help good causes in so many ways and your Chairmanship of the Friends is a great example of that.
The Federal Government, if I can be forgiven, just a very, very brief gentle commercial, the Federal Government does, of course provide $21 million a year in ongoing recurrent funding. My Treasury-inspired minute - the Treasury sort of always reminds you of these things when they give you briefing, these and the implication being, 'well that is quite a lot Prime Minister, I hope you are not proposing to make it any higher are you?' But you know, God bless them, you have got to have somebody who bells the cat on profligate ministers otherwise we wouldn't have that very, very handsome surplus that we have, which of course means that we can run a better managed and better balanced monetary policy. Now I won't get into that detail, but I just thought that I would throw that in along the way.
But that really is all that I wanted to say, it is a terrific cause, the Royal Flying Doctor Service, it does an invaluable service, it also is a very rewarding satisfying totally Australian cause. You can't think of it in the context of any other country. You think of that wonderful man, John Flynn whose service to the people of outback Australia is etched not only in the experience of the Presbyterian Church, but also in the wonderful work that he did for so many people and I have visited on a couple of occasions a memorial to him in parts of central Australia and it really is a wonderful and inspiring story and the Royal Flying Doctor Service is a wonderful monument to his energy and his vision and it's a cause well worth even more support, thank you.
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