Address - 18/3/2008

Brendan Nelson's National Press Club Address

The Hon Dr Brendan Nelson MP
Leader of the Opposition

Well thank you very much Ken and thank you again for the invitation, in this case an open-ended one. One day I will come to the Press Club and you will have a glass of water and I will have a glass of wine.

I firstly recognise and welcome here today my great Deputy Leader Julie Bishop and my parliamentary colleagues that are here. I’d also recognise the support of the National Australia Bank for the National Press Club and this important sponsorship. I recognise the Ngunnawal traditional Aboriginal people who were here in Canberra and the ACT long before we non-Indigenous Australians, and no Australian and no young Australian in particular should ever forget that they made involuntary sacrifices to make possible the economic and social development of our country as we know it today, along with the pioneering efforts of our non-Indigenous ancestors.

Today I want to speak to you about values, of belief and Australia’s future and how Liberal values in particular will over the next three years – or less than that now – inform the choice that Australians will face in choosing the future that they will want at the next federal election. My path to Liberalism and to the Liberal Party is unorthodox to say the least, as many people in the Australian media are fond of reminding me. I am informed by many things: my family, my background and my experiences. But there are some things that you never forget; there are some things that never leave your memory. I do not forget when I was 13, living and growing up in Launceston in northern Tasmania, my father taking me for a walk down the street in which we lived and inviting me to look at the houses in the street – which seemed like an odd thing but I’d had the facts of life a couple of months earlier in a boat fishing on the Tamar River, so you never know what you’re going to get. And my father said to me, ‘son, your mother and I don’t have any money, we don’t know people of influence’, he said ‘the only way in which you will ever live in an even better place than this is if you work as hard as you possibly can at school’. And I didn’t realise it then that several months later they would move their family from that modest home to Adelaide in South Australia so they might live in a city where there was a university.

I was the beneficiary of a Menzian dream and a Menzian envision and I didn’t appreciate it in my young life but I do now. I don’t forget as a young medical graduate doing my post graduate training in public hospitals. You don’t forget delivering your first baby and you don’t forget your first cot death. You don’t forget your first suicide and you don’t forget your first successful resuscitation of someone who’s had a cardiorespiratory arrest. And I don’t forget desperately trying to intubate and resuscitate an eight year old boy whilst his mother, screaming, is being restrained by nursing staff and orderlies. And at the same time a political environment in which the then Labor Government of the day chose to denigrate the medical profession on the basis of so called motives of greed and self interest. I don’t forget in 1987 going along to the bank and getting a second mortgage on my house so that I might establish a medical practice, which ultimately, along with the second one, would employ a more than two dozen people.

I don’t forget those women getting out of their cars, generally Holden station wagons with three children on the backseat, being dropped off by their husbands to work in the practice that we had established as receptionists and administrative staff, knowing that their jobs and feeding and clothing and housing their children relied on our sacrifices and risks that we had taken, and at the same time having increases in government regulation, government taxes and the unwelcome and uninvited intrusion of unions into our workplace.

Today, as I said is about values, belief and Australia’s future, and in introducing that I particularly want to publicly recognise and pay tribute to some individuals that I have met in the three and a half months I’ve had the privilege to be the leader of the alternative government of Australia. The first is Ashley and Pat Norman in Mackay. Ashley is 73 and he is dying. His wife of 52 years, Pat, is his full time carer. I also recognise the Salvation Army, Captain Paul Moulds, and those desperate young men and women to whom they provide hope and practical care through Oasis in Sydney’s Kings Cross, Paddington and other suburbs. And I particularly say to you Elliot, I will not give up on you.

The third is the Bonnie Babes – this organisation that some of you have heard me saying something about. I say to those women, those courageous and determined women who are providing counselling and support to the one in four Australian women who will lose their baby through miscarriage or the one in 200 who will suffer a stillbirth, I say to you I will not give up on seeking to persuade Mr Rudd to provide the $800,000 to you so you can run a free call service across Australia so that low income women with struggling families and mortgages and car loans and debt can actually make long distance phone calls to Melbourne to get the support they so desperately need.

And I say to Mr Rudd’s staff, who I know are watching this, if you want the $800,000 – your bureaucrats having told these women that there is no discretionary money in the health budget – you can take the $800,000 from the pay freeze that’s being taken by the Liberal and National Party MPs.

There was a change of government last year and there were three principle reasons for it; there are many others. The longevity of the Government itself and John Howard whom I regard as Australia’s greatest Prime Minister. Eleven and a half years in the modern era is an eternity. The second reason there was a change of government is because in 2006 when in government we made a mistake and we did something that was wrong. We changed for the right reasons workplace relations laws because we knew it was important to Australia’s future – to make sure that young people, mine included as the father of two apprentices, had a greater prospect of getting jobs, particularly in the future. But in hindsight we should have kept the no-disadvantage test and we recognise that, and that’s one of the reasons there was a change of government and we’ve moved to change that. The third was our approach, particularly in 2006 when in government, to climate change and the things which were of most concern to Australians as they saw dams emptying and rivers drying up and they weren’t able to water their gardens and their laws.

Some have described what we’ve done over the last three and a half months in pejorative terms, as back flips and that sort of thing. It’s absolute nonsense. I lead a party and I lead an alternative government which respects what Australians think and what they say; we listen to it and we have learned. However, I’d also like to say that we are immensely proud of what was achieved over almost 12 years. Australia is quite a different country today from what it was when the government last changed in 1996. From the economic and social reconstruction of the country; paying off that $96 billion of debt that was inherited by Peter Costello, which now gives Mr Rudd and Mr Swan more than $8 billion a year to spend on programs that are so essential to Australians in our daily lives. National gun control. The courage shown by the previous Government in waterfront reform which makes sure that our goods and services are more affordable than they were in the past. The changes to taxation – to give the states of this nation a broad based consumption tax. The supporting, in foreign policy, amongst many things, the independence of the nation of East Timor. To bring choice to education so that Australian families can choose to send their child either to a government school or a Catholic or an independent school. Choice in health; and on one of those 12 occasions when I was here, as President of the AMA, I argued constantly that the pensioners and the low income families of this country should get government support in choosing to buy private health insurance. They are now able to do so and Mr Rudd should fully commit to maintaining that support.

We also brought changes in terms of welfare-to-work because having spent much of my medical life working in areas with families who’ve never known a person in their family to have job, the single biggest lifetime cause of poverty is unemployment, and those children who grow up in jobless, single parent households are three times more likely to continue that. For that and many other things – the protection and security of Australia’s borders; making Australia a more prosperous, a more confident nation, confident in ourselves, the way that we relate to one another, and our place in the world – we are enormously proud of what was achieved for our country over 11 and a half years. And under my leadership there will be no radical deviation to the left or to the far right. In fact Mr Rudd himself was so impressed with what was achieved over almost 12 years that, with some notable exceptions, he embraced the platform. And it’s absolutely essential to us that we reassure Australians that in presenting an alternative for Australia that they understand that our fundamentals are sound economic management, of small business, of families, the defence and security of our nation. And where Mr Rudd and his Government does the right thing they will receive the strong support of me as the leader of the alternative government.

In facing the future and the things that are important to us I say to my own colleagues and I say to our Liberal family and those who support us and believe in us around the country, that knowing what you are against is not in itself self-sufficient to convince Australians that they should change the government. It’s far more important that we know what we are for. As Sir Robert Menzies said on numerous occasions in giving advice to his successors in Liberal leadership: he said in part that we are pragmatic, but we are not dogmatic. When Sir Robert brought the organisations here to Canberra in October 1944 to found what would become the Liberal Party of Australia, he said in part that what we must look for is a revival of true liberal thought, one, he said, that will work for social justice and security. True liberals, he said, have great and imperative obligations to the weak, the sick and the unfortunate. And to every good citizen, in the Menzian vision, the state would owe not only a chance in life, but a self-respecting life.

Those things will be deeply embedded in the choices that we now develop for Australia’s future. And that is that life is about idealism. I am accused of being an idealist by my numerous critics. All I can say is thank you, because those who abandon their idealism do so to court irrelevancy. Everything that we do, everything we say, has to be about creating a better future, even better than the one given to me by my parents and their generation. It’s also about rewards for hard work and self sacrifice in everyday life; about the importance of individuals, the individual freedom, the freedoms to make sure that governments are not unnecessarily intrusive into our day to day lives.

The second in terms of social justice and security. Every Australian, irrespective of their circumstances, wherever they live, needs to know, hear, feel and see, and understand, that in me and those whom I lead, that we relate very much to their circumstances, their concerns, their ideas, and their aspirations for Australia’s future.

The third is to ensure that we do everything we can for a self-respecting life. In terms of jobs, if you want to talk about housing stress, if you want to talk about stress on working families, try and talk about someone losing their job. 600,000 jobs have been created in this country since the changes to workplace relations in 2006. That’s now a matter of history and we have a record low of unemployment, as we know, of four per cent, which relates in part to things that were happening in the Christmas/early New Year period. And that is a good thing. But it’s also extremely important for us that we make sure that no Australian as a result of government policy, and deliberate government policy, faces the prospect of losing his or her job.

There are in my view five key challenges for Australia’s future which will be the basis upon which we will and have already commenced the process of building policy.

The first is prosperity. We must give our children and those who come after them a standard of living of which we can be proud to have given them, and in which they can have confidence. Mr Rudd and Mr Swan at the moment are making a great thing about inflationary pressures in the Australian economy, and there are. And they emerged late last year. You only have to look at the comments of the Governor of the Reserve Bank back in June last year in terms of inflationary pressures then easing, as he saw it, and the Mid-year Economic and Fiscal Outlook released in October, forecasting 2.75 for the rest of this financial year and 2.5 for next financial year. That of course is a matter of record once we got the December quarter figures on inflation. But the responsibility that needs to be taken by Mr Rudd and Mr Swan – and the latter in particular, I hope is up to the job of being the nation’s Treasurer. It is the previous Government that saw down the flight of capital out of South East Asia in the late `90s. We successfully managed the Australian economy through the US recession in 2001. So too the tech wreck, SARS, terrorism, high oil prices, and the worst drought in100 years. The Government’s job is to take responsibility for the Australian economy. It is not the job of the Australian Government, and the Treasurer in particular, to actually undermine confidence in our economy by talking up, as he’s done constantly, the inflationary pressures in the Australian economy.

We are very concerned in terms of our prosperity, about job security, and many other things facing everyday families, that at the same time the Reserve is tightening monetary policy – in response I notice in no small way to demand side pressures that are contributing to inflation according to the Governor of the Reserve – that the Australian Government, the new government, is forecasting, it says, significant reductions in government expenditure in the forthcoming Budget. 75 per cent of the Australian Government outlays are in welfare – in other words social security – in health, education, and defence. Three quarters of that just over $250 billion is spent in those big ticket areas. So far we’ve heard Mr Rudd and Mr Swan say that they will cut expenditure by $5.6 billion – that’s what we’ve identified at least – over the forward estimates period. That’s about half of one per cent of the Government’s budget per annum.

We should be very concerned that as the Reserve tightens in the context of a global liquidity crisis that is gaining momentum it would seem on a day-to-day basis that Mr Rudd and his inexperienced and hesitant Treasurer are in the process of making decisions that will unfairly and disproportionately affect the economies in the southern states. South Australia, in particular, I am quite concerned about and the impact of the federal Budget, as also Victoria, New South Wales, and Tasmania.

In terms of that future, the things that we will be focused on, to which we will bring policy for the forthcoming election, will be tax. We believe that no Australian should pay a dollar more in tax than is necessary for sound macroeconomic management of the country, and in particular for the provision of health, education, transport, defence, security and the other fundamental responsibilities of the Australian Government. We also will be working very hard to see that there is a rationalisation of the myriad of taxes and laws which govern any business trying to do business across Australia. Whilst in one sense Mr Rudd would have Australians believe that having wall to wall governments of the same political persuasion is more likely to deliver an outcome which is good for Australia, I remain to be convinced that wall to wall Labor governments isn’t in fact a recipe for concealing underperformance. And already the early signs are that that is precisely what we are likely to see.

We will also have new policy for research and development. In terms of competing with the rest of the world it is absolutely essential that Australia be smarter than some countries with whom we are not able to compete in other areas. Education will also be a significant area for policy development. Apart from parents, who love their children so much, the single most important influence in the life of a child is his or her teacher. We cannot face a prosperous future, let alone a confident future, when we have people going into the education faculties of Australian universities – which in most cases are little more than quasi-sociology departments – with tertiary entrance ranks in the order of 50, and expect them to come out the other end, four years later, as well trained, confident, competent people to teach our children how to read, write, count and communicate. There will be significant reform and policy developed by us which I will announce in the not too distant future in relation to teacher training.

I also say to Mr Rudd, and I encourage the Government in this regard, notwithstanding the significant resistance that he will find from his own backbench and vested interest in the higher education sector. There has been significant reform in higher education under the previous Government, not only major education reform in universities, but also an $8 billion investment backing Australia’s ability in research and innovation. But I say to Mr Rudd you will enjoy my support and that of the alternative government in supporting an agenda for further deregulation of Australia’s universities. The reforms undertaken by John Dawkins, whilst groundbreaking, in hindsight actually diminished the quality in the longer term of Australian higher education.

The second principle challenge upon which we will build policy is that of the federation. Australia is living in quite a different world from that of Henry Parkes when he gave the Tenterfield Oration which would lead to the federation in 1901. On any day of the week, in any part of Australia, you open any newspaper, turn on any television and its obvious that the federation is in need of reform. Whilst I wish Mr Rudd and the Federal Government well in relation to working with the states, I believe the architecture needs greater reform that that.

Kevin Andrews, the Menzies Research Centre and other key individuals inside and outside our party have been put together to develop a reform agenda for Australia’s federation. It’s a question of re-ordering the responsibilities of each of the three tiers of government and the money needs to be put on the table. Why is it that we live in a country where a woman has a miscarriage and the indignity of that in the toilet of a major teaching hospital in metropolitan Sydney, at a time when the State Government, incompetence as it is, is taking money out of that hospital when Mr Rudd and Mr Swan are likely, without lifting a finger, to see a $20 billion surplus in the forthcoming Budget. The average Australian knows that this is in need of reform and we are determined to drive that, albeit from opposition as the alternative government.

The third challenge for us as human beings, as much as Australians, is for us to start living on environmental interests instead of capital. It isn’t just about water security and making sure that our nation is able to secure its water for agricultural and domestic and other uses. The challenge of climate change is, apart from the usual things to which we are accustom influencing global markets, likely to be the most significant, economic, political and moral challenge that will face our generation.

It is essential for Australians to understand that whilst almost all Australians understand and support the need for a genuinely global solution – and Mr Rudd has capitalised on the fact that that is what most of us think – but it’s equally important that we understand what it is to which we will sign the next generation up economically, before we go, as we must, to support the agreements that will come out of Copenhagen and then be delivered from 2012.

With India and China alone, representing more than a third of global greenhouse gas emissions by half way through this century – more than the United States, Europe, Australia, Canada and Brazil combined – it is absolutely essential that we have a global solution and we will support whatever the Australian Government can do to provide and support leadership in this area.

Our fourth challenge is of course the security and defence of our nation, not only our borders and our region, and our area of paramount defence interest – the archipelago and its maritime approaches to the north, east and west – but also increasingly throughout the world to use not only military but also diplomatic, economic and legal power and influence that has been built up by Alexander Downer and others over a long period of time in the last decade. To use that to influence the protection not only of our interests, but also our values throughout the world. My children’s generation is facing something that isn’t all that easy to see in day-to-day life, but it is resurgent totalitarianism which in the form, in the main, of Islamic extremism throughout the world and we have to be clear about precisely what we stand for and what we will do with our allies throughout the world.

The fifth challenge is that of a cohesive society and one that is clear about its values. So gambling is a major problem in Australian society. I wrote to Mr Rudd over three weeks ago suggesting that the Productivity Commission needs to clearly examine the facts in relation to gambling and poker machines before we embark on policy reform, as we must. Much has changed since the last study in 1999.

Drug addiction, alcohol abuse and whilst none of us – and Ken’s heard me here at the Press Club before in a different life speaking about this – none of us is anyway opposed to doing everything we can to reduce the abuse of alcohol in our society and binge drinking in particular. But I am a little concerned that the way in which the government is approaching the binge drinking issue has the potential to unfairly stereotype young people, yet again, for something that should be owned and is endemic to society itself in a much broader sense. The question I have is, perhaps the problem is not that young people have not learned societies values in relation to alcohol, perhaps it is that they have.

The third thing that we will be focussed on, as you aware, is carers and seniors. And it was very interesting to see the Prime Minister responding to what we on our side were putting up in relation to the concerns of carers and seniors. He looked like a bureaucrat, he sounded like a bureaucrat and I say to the Government, you better watch out because on our side it is not only about facts and figures, it is not only or so much about a strong economy helping the weak and the vulnerable – our balance sheet must always have on it human beings and it took almost a week for Mr Rudd, as the chief bureaucrat of this country, to finally reach the decision he would deliver bonuses to carers and seniors. Then only a few days later we find that a million seniors and retirees will lose part of their pensions with changes to the deeming rate.

We will also be focussed on Aboriginal issues. We strongly support the intervention that was undertaken by the previous Government in the Northern Territory and I am very concerned that the Prime Minister already is going soft on the transfer of pornography across the Northern Territory and weakening some of that legislation, not only in relation to pornography, but also land permits.

The 90,000 Aboriginal Australians who live in remote parts of the country are in many cases living in what I saw in the Melbourne Age described as failing states. And I couldn’t think of a better description. And without again documenting the things that I said in relation to the apology to the former generations of Aboriginal children, without again documenting the existential despair which is day-to-day life in Aboriginal Australia – one of the changes that has to be considered in relation to the baby bonus is the way in which that money is delivered like a human tornado into remote Aboriginal communities with all of the devastation that it has. And I don’t care what criticism I get for that. I don’t care if I’m accused of being patronising. When you have four or five thousand dollars turn up into a impoverished community, which is dysfunctional in every way, shape and form, it has a devastating impact and I argue that most of that baby bonus should be invested instead in a trust for that Aboriginal child to support his or her education when they reach school age.

Julie Bishop, my deputy, and Warren Truss the Leader of the National Party, who is here also today, have already commenced on the process of policy development and reform, and I expect to have some broad directions settled by the end of this year. I will also over the next month be spending quite a bit of time on a listening tour – for what a better description – and I’ll be in supermarkets, and servos, and all things, the things that I’ve done much of my life.

But I also say that in my view the difference between management and leadership is vision. And the vision for our country which I set out, and everything that we do will be informed by this, is that we should be a nation that values the health and integrity of human life as much as achieving our economic objectives. The reason we see barriers to the creation of wealth and the things that frustrate it as being so important is because it is at the heart of delivering equitable and fair social policy for people that have neither power or to influence.

We should live in a country that nurtures the idealism of young people and whilst elements of the media don’t like it, yes the leader of the Liberal Party should be sitting in a gutter with a young man at three o’clock in the morning in Kings Cross. And if people don’t like that you better get use to it. We should live in a country where every Australian knows they will be cared for. But in return we expect them to make a contribution to the society from which they derive a benefit. We should ultimately see ourselves as outward looking, competitive, intensely compassionate human beings, reconciled with our indigenous history and imbued with Liberal values of idealism and rewards for hard work and self sacrifice.

It is said by some people, including elements of the media here, the question is put to me, well what does the Liberal Party believe in? What does the Liberal Party stand for? Well I’ll tell you what we stand for. We believe in standing up for the individual – whether it’s Don Gynther with his Northside Frames and Trusses in Brisbane, started with nothing, just a bank overdraft and absolutely nothing and now he employees 100 people. Whether it’s Ashley Norman and his wife Pat up in Mackay. Yes, I did a home visit. Yes, I visited them and, yes, I gave voice to them because what we stand for is giving a voice to people who feel they don’t have one. We also believe in giving people encouragement to get out of bed and work dammed hard and take risks and be rewarded for doing so. We believe in choice. We don’t believe in centralised politburos. We believe that people should be able to choose to go to a public or a private hospital or go to a Christian school, an Anglican school or a local government school. We believe, also, in relation to people, that families are the foundation of Australian society. I make no apology for saying that a man and a woman is a marriage and that forms a family. I don’t support gay marriage, I don’t support gay adoption and I don’t support gay IVF. But I sure as hell believe very strongly that no Australian should pay a dollar more in tax or receive a dollar less in social security by virtue of his or her sexuality and I will do everything I possibly can from opposition to see that those and other things are delivered.

We believe fundamentally in a strong economy, not as an end on its own but because we should be and must be a group of men and women committed to building a better society. We believe in defence and we believe in security of our country and our values. And finally in relation to that one of the important things that I will also be focussed on is what it means to be an Australian. Under the last Labor Government we went into a period of cultural relativism. It is absolutely essential that we are Australians first and we are Australians last. We are who we are, not only by virtue of universal human values but our institutions, our history, our language, our literature, our triumphs as a nation and our failures.

The Sydney and the things that we commemorate as of yesterday, again, define us as Australians. To not understand the importance of that and what it means to us is yet to be fully Australian. That and other things in refusing, as Arthur Schlesinger said, refusing to abandon historic purpose. Those and other things will define the way ahead for us and I thank you very much for having me again and I look forward to questions – sort of. Thank you.