Closing Address at the Liberal Party's 47th Federal Council

Well, thank you very much, Tony; to John Anderson, Peter Costello, Shane Stone, my other fellow Liberals, ladies and gentlemen.

I want, at the beginning of my speech, to again express, as I did last night, my admiration and affection for Tony Staley for the work that he's done as Federal President and the leadership that he's given to the Party organisation over six very important years which oversaw our transition from the desolation of Opposition to a second term in government.

I also want, on your behalf and on my own personal behalf, to welcome and congratulate Shane Stone as the new Federal President of the Party. Shane and I have had a very long association. I respect him. I like him a lot. I think it's very good that the Party will have a national President from Darwin. I think it emphasises the breadth of the representation of this Party, that we are, indeed, a Party for all Australians and all parts of Australia and I think that sends a very strong signal and I know he'll be a very effective and a very strong President.

To you, John, I'm delighted that it's been possible for you to come here this morning and to say a few words as the man who on the 20th of July will become the Deputy Prime Minister of Australia. I remember that night very well. They were pretty despairing days. I think Ralph and I retired to the comfort of his Glenlivet after that discussion that we'd had. But you and I have had a very close association, first in Opposition and more recently in government. I admire your strength of character, your decency, your identification of the mainstream values of the Australian community and the tenacity of your concern for the people who live in the bush of Australia. And you will be a very worthy and successful successor to a man who I grew very fond of, Tim Fischer, in the years that we served together. I've said before and I say it again this morning that you could have no better mate in a political trench than Tim Fischer. And he was a stoic supporter of the Coalition through good times and bad. And I say to a Liberal gathering such as this that when you have a Coalition of two parties where one has an overwhelming preponderance of numbers it's always a bit tough when you're the leader or the deputy leader of the smaller partner in that coalition. On the one hand you've got to achieve the common good, on the other hand you've got to remember that you lead a separate political organisation. And Tim and John were able to combine those two needs to the national good in a remarkably successful way. And I'm absolutely certain that John and Mark Vaile will be able to continue that good work because we all know from our experience of the last 20 years that division between coalition parties leads to desolation and defeat and despair, whereas unity produces success and years in government.

And that has been our long experience since 1949 and it is our experience today. And the fact that we were re-elected in 1998 was in no small measure due to the fact that we had a strong coalition between the Liberal and the National parties of Australia.

My friends, we meet at this Federal Council Meeting at the end of a remarkable two-week period in Australian politics. It is a period in which we have achieved many of our policy objectives. It is a period in which we have done things and achieved goals and won gains for the people of Australia that many people doubted that we would do. But we meet this morning not in any sense of triumphalism or smugness of complacency, we meet rather with a quiet sense of pride and achievement that we have achieved a lot but also recognising that soberly and realistically we have much more to achieve because the responsibility of government is an ongoing one. You never reach the top of the hill in politics. There is always another mountain to scale. There is always another goal or another objective to achieve. And so it is, as we meet here at this Federal Council Meeting and reflect just for a moment on what's been achieved in the three and a bit years of government and particularly since the re-election in 1998, it is appropriate after reflecting just for a moment on that to move on to what is ahead, to have a look at the new peaks that we need to scale and the new achievements that we need to embrace.

And in doing that we should always remember the character of the Liberal Party of Australia. Unique almost amongst  centre-right parties in the democratic world, the Liberal Party of Australia is the trustee of two great traditions within Australian politics and Australian public life and debate. It is the trustee of both the conservative tradition and the Liberal tradition. It is not exclusively a conservative party nor is it exclusively a liberal party in the classical sense of the word. It is the party of Edmund Burke as much as it is the party of John Stuart Mill. And our capacity to blend and respect and to nurture and to promote those two great traditions in the Australian political experiences is the fundamental ingredient of our success. And in recent times I have sought to define the philosophical framework of the Government I lead by speaking of our commitment to economic liberalisation and what I describe in social policy as a modern conservatism. It is a party that values and respects the wisdom of dispersed power in a large country through a federation of states. It is a party that continues to value and support the family unit as the enduring and most cohesive section and institution of our society. But it is also the party that has searched the fundamental liberty of the individual through espousal of support of such things as recently voluntary student unionism. A commitment that nourishes our long-held belief that men and women in a free society should have the right to choose or whether or not to join an organisation.

I've spoken recently of I guess the way in which political debate has evolved over the last decade or two of how we went through a period all around the world of believing that every problem could be solved by massive government intervention. The Americans tried it through Lyndon Johnson's 'great society', Labor tried it through Gough Whitlam's disastrous three years as Prime Minister of Australia. And then we moved perhaps in reaction to a period in our history of where some believed that the market solved every single thing. Now I remain of the view that in economic matters the market solution is the preferred solution but sometimes other solutions are needed as well. And I think we have developed in this country what I can best described as the Australian way of addressing of many of our social and economic issues. It is a way that seeks to marshal the combined efforts of the Government, of the individual, of the business community and those great volunteer organisations within our society that know so much about human suffering and human need within our community.

I've spoken often of the social coalition that I seek to build between those four great expressions of Australian decency and Australian society. And that social coalition is providing new ways and new opportunities in areas such as the fight against drug abuse, the fight against homelessness amongst young people within our community and the fight to obtain modern contemporary solutions to other social challenges. And I think we are finding an Australian way, we are finding a way that draws upon the talents and the contributions that those different sections of Australian society can make.

As you all know, and it does bear repeating of course, at a gathering such as this, the economic fundamentals of Australia now are stronger than they have been at any time over the last thirty years. It is no idle boast to say that Australia stared down, beyond the expectations of most, the Asian economic downturn. When I became Prime Minister of Australia I felt as though this country was an anxious outsider seeking admission to the rich man's club of Asia, but over the last three-and-a-quarter years that perception has changed.

Australia is seen with new respect, held in new regard and listened to with greater intensity as a result of our economic performance and I particularly want to pay tribute to Peter Costello, the Treasurer and Deputy Leader, for his role in relation to our very successful economic management over the last three-and-a-quarter years.

Our objective at all times has not been to achieve reform for reform's sake. Over the last three-and-a-half years in seeking to reform the Australian economy we have not been engaged on some ideological binge. We have not sought to give us some kind of doctrinaire ideological ticks in particular boxes and to say that is a particular ideological objective that we have achieved.

The sole and unambiguous purpose of our economic reforms has been to make the Australian economy more competitive and as a consequence generate more jobs for Australians particularly young Australians and generate higher living standards for all Australians. And that remains, as we look beyond the goods and services tax, that remains the objective of our economic policies and our economic reforms. And as we look beyond the goods and services tax and as we examined what next must be done to secure that more competitive Australian economy we must remember the sort of world in which we live. We must understand the extent to which it is has been transformed by information technology. We now live essentially in a borderless international economy where seamless capital flows are fast being matched by seamless flows of job opportunities. And the enduring fundamental of that new world in which we live is that if we are not competitive we will fall behind. And it is no good any Australian leader or politician saying 'we are doing better now than we were doing twenty or thirty years ago' unless we can confidently say that we are doing better now than our rivals are doing now. And it is a never-ending race, and if you fall behind you lose market share, you lose competitiveness and you lose jobs.

And so it is as we move on from the goods and services tax and we examine what our responses will be to such things as business taxation reform. We have to have in mind the need at all times to make this country international competitive. We have to ask ourselves whether it is as attractive to invest in Australia as it is in the United States or one of the other strong economies of the world. It is not enough to say well it's more attractive now than it was thirty years ago, that's irrelevant except in terms of political and historical comparison because the world has changed forever. We can never go back to the old cloistered days where you could put a wall around the Australian economy and keep people out and just enjoy a comfortable cloistered living standard within our own borders. That has gone forever. And one of the difficult challenges of modern government is to turn the undoubted advantages of globalisation to the overall good of the community. And it's our responsibility as sensible and sensitive politicians to understand that there are communities in Australia that get left behind by globalisation. We have to understand their anguish, we have to share their concern, we have to identify with their difficulties and we have to provide them with responses to the dilemma that is presented by that globalisation. And there is always the threat of aberrant ideologies and philosophies in a climate such as that. And that lay behind much of the challenge that was so successfully defeated in the bush by John Anderson and Tim Fischer at the last election. But as we look ahead we think particularly as a country on those areas of economic performance that we do best. We must, in the years ahead, build on our natural strengths. We, of course, must continue to support the great performers of the past our mining industry, our farming industries, our innovative manufacturers. We will continue, for decades into the future, to be heavily reliant on export income from the farm sector and from the mining sector. And nothing that the Government I lead will do will ever take away the competitiveness of the Australian mining industry or the Australian agricultural industry because both of them have been bedrock and necessary to our economic success and our economic achievement.

But as we go into the next century there are areas of the Australian economy that we can effectively build on and exploit to the long-term, national good. As a community, if we examine our history, we have always been a people who have been particularly inventive. We have always been a nation of great ideas. We have given to the world inventions and ideas and concepts way beyond our population. And therein, I believe, as we look to the next century, lies a great area of opportunity. So often the story of Australia has been we get a great idea but we lose it in the process of commercialisation.

We think of such things as Memtech and many others where an idea has been successfully developed in Australia yet it has been commercialised and, therefore, the economic benefit from it has been derived by others and derived overseas. And it ought to be one of the challenges of economic policy making in this country in the years ahead that we reverse that process. That we not only continue to have great ideas but we also convert them to commercial reality and commercial profit to the benefit of Australia and to the benefit of Australians.

And, therefore, as we examine not only our taxation system but we also examine all the other aspects of economic policy that bear on the competitiveness of this country we ought to seek in the decisions we take not only to have a clever country, not only to have a lucky country - because you can have a clever country but not get the full benefit of it, you can be a lucky country but not get the full benefit of that - but I hope in the years ahead we can also become a 'can do' country. A country that can convert to its national benefit the ideas that our citizens generate, a country that can convert its luck and its cleverness to a long-term, national advantage. Because the history of nations through the 20th Century has been that the greatest success has not gone necessarily to those countries that have had all the inventions and all the ideas but rather it has gone to those countries that have had the capacity to convert those ideas and those inventions to commercial reality and commercial success.

And it's that kind of thinking that will instruct our examination of something such as the capital gains tax as we get the business tax recommendations from John Ralph's committee. It is that consideration which is driving my strong commitment to making Australia a financial centre for the world and not just for our region. It is my belief that with our combination of strong economic performance, good corporate governance, very, very strong and prudentially regulated banks, a very strong legal system, a stable community both socially and politically, that we have an unrivalled capacity to build this nation into a world financial centre.

But as we go down that path we must also remember that not only do you win international competitiveness by such things as taxation reform but you also win international competitiveness by continuing the crusade within Australia for further reform of those institutions and those practises which in the past have contributed to our uncompetitiveness. One of the remarkable elements of the Australian economic success story of the last three-and-a-quarter years has been the way in which we have lifted the productivity of the Australian workforce. Not only are we as Liberals able to say to the workers of Australia, we have cut your monthly interest bill by an average of $320, but we are also able to say to those same workers, we have boosted the level of your real wages. And we have done so against the background against two other great achievements and that is a record of industrial disputation which is the lowest for more than 75 years. So much for Bill Kelty's sonata, let alone the symphony. The reality is that this Government, this Coalition Government has given to the industrial landscape of Australia an unparalleled level of industrial peace. But we have also done it against the background of generating some $400,000 jobs in the three-and-a-quarter years that we have been in government. We've brought unemployment down to a 10-year low. It's a 20-year low so far as teenagers looking for full-time jobs but it is still far too high.

And we have achieved reforms in difficult areas such as the Australian waterfront that many people doubted were possible. And the courage that was displayed by Peter Reith and others in arguing for and prosecuting the case for reform of the Australian waterfront I know is widely respected within the Liberal Party community. But, ladies and gentlemen, more has to be done on that front. It's a never-ending process of turning around what was really an arthritic labour market system into one that can accommodate the demands of an Australian workforce in a borderless economic world. Because we built an industrial relations system behind a tariff wall when most workers were men, most of them were in blue-collar occupations and most of them worked in large aggregations and answered to a boss in a very hierarchical workplace structure. That was the background against which the industrial relations system essentially that we inherited three-and-a-quarter years ago was built.

And when you think about that against the modern world you understand instantaneously how absolutely essential it is that we change and we continue to change.

My friends, there are just two other things that I want to mention. And that is that in all the years that I've been a member of the Liberal Party and all the years that I've been in Parliament a very important part of the sense of being of the Liberal Party has been our capacity as a political movement to articulate the broad national interest in terms of our national security. In many of my early years in the Liberal Party much of our debating time was spent talking about issues of national security. And they, of course, were the days of the Cold War when the divide between Soviet Russia and the west, led by the United States, defined not only international political debate but also much of domestic political debate. And that divide, of course, probably did more than any other single thing to lead to the great division within the Australian Labor Party in the 1950s which was of such enduring importance to the years that followed in Australian politics. Now of course so much of that has changed but it doesn't mean that the demands on the Australian Government to have a sensible and rational approach to national security has changed.

Indeed in many ways, particularly in our own region, we live in a less predictable and a more fraught security environment than we did 20 years ago.

When I became Prime Minister in 1996 I felt that our foreign relations were somewhat imbalanced. I felt that we ought to see our engagement with Asia as our top priority but I didn't feel as though it should be our only priority.

And what I have sought to do over the last three-and-a-quarter years is to bring about a sensible rebalancing of our national security stance and our foreign policy, to recognise that our immediate area of responsibility remains, of course, and will always be our engagement with the nations of Asia. And we have done that very effectively.

We played a major role in bringing a greater understanding amongst the nations of Europe and North America of the dilemma faced by Indonesia in the wake of the Asian economic downturn. And the moderation of IMF policies in relation to Indonesia was in no small measure due to the urgings of Australia. We are playing a major and constructive role in trying to achieve a stable and peaceful outcome in East Timor. And it took a Coalition government to actually persuade the Government of Indonesia to change its policy on East Timor. It was a Coalition government and a Coalition Prime Minister that wrote to Dr Habibie recommending a change of policy. I don't think, of all the things that the former government did in foreign policy, I don't think an area was more characterised by an obsequious approach to the views of a foreign country than the approach taken by the Labor Party to then Government of Indonesia.

So, ladies and gentlemen, we have sought to rebalance our foreign policy and our national security approach because, as I've frequently said, I believe this country occupies a unique intersection. We are a nation with profound historical roots in Europe. We have had very close links with North America. We share many values in common with the nations of Europe and North America.

But here we are in the Asian Pacific region. Our own population stimulated and nourished by the coming to this nation of hundreds of thousands of people from the nations of Asia, all making a wonderful contribution to our country. We can go to Asia without the baggage of being a former colonial power or of being a major world power. We can achieve things, as a consequence, that some of our friends in Europe and America cannot achieve. And what I've sought to do in that time is to achieve a better balance in relation to the capacity that that intersection gives us. And I've been immensely assisted and encouraged and in many areas led by the contribution that Alexander Downer has made as Foreign Minister of Australia. Alexander's contribution has been very effective. He's won growing respect within the world community. And I know, as a former leader of our Party, I know there are Liberals all around Australia who are extremely happy and personally very pleased at Alexander's success as our Foreign Minister.

I mention some of my colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, not in any sense to separate them or set them apart from others but really to make the point, and this is really the point that I've come to a conclusion on, and that is that our success has really been a team achievement. People are kind enough at gatherings such as this to say nice things about the Prime Minister, to say nice things about what the Prime Minister may have achieved. But I couldn't have done it without an outstanding team. And I want to tell you how tremendously proud I am as Prime Minister of the team that I have behind me.

I've mentioned some of them but I could go on. Robert Hill I don't think is with us today because he's off doing battle over Kakadu. But who will forget Robert's masterly handling of the Kyoto Conference at the end of 1997 where against all predictions and all odds he won an outstanding victory for Australian industry and for a balanced outcome so far as industry and the environment is concerned. And I'm very grateful having emerged from the difficulties of the Senate over the last few weeks for the contribution of Robert as the Leader of the Government in the Senate. But I mention those of my colleagues who I have mentioned to simply make the point that it has been an outstanding team. You can't be successful in government, you can't be successful in politics without team achievement and without team effort. We have every reason, as a political party, to be proud of what we have achieved. We've had the opportunity, over this weekend, to reflect a little bit on our history and it's important we do that. It's important that we reclaim our history because it's a great history. It's important that we remember that most of the great social changes and improvements were achieved under Liberal administration. We were reminded last night of the contribution that John Gorton made as a Liberal Prime Minister of Australia to supporting the arts. We've been reminded of the contribution, of course, of the Menzies Government to those great years of stability, of how the contribution of the Menzies Government to building broad-based participation in tertiary education played such a major role in the development of post-war Australia. We think of the social reforms of the Fraser Government, the environmental reforms of the Fraser Government. And we think more recently of course in the way in which the economic and other leadership of this government has been able to insulate Australia effectively against the worst economic downturn our region has suffered since the end of World War II.