Speech: Julia Gillard, ' Australia's New Political Landscape ', National Press Club, Canberra
Julia Gillard
posted Tuesday, 31 August 2010
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I come to address you at a time of historic change in our national political life.
For the first time in three generations, no Australian political party has gained the right to govern in its own right.
Neither party convinced Australians that it alone should shape the nation’s course over the next three years.
The consequence is that if we are to have stable and effective government, our political process must now change.
Of course the focus now is on how the six MPs on the cross benches will determine which party to support in the days ahead.
And some of the focus is also on alleged punch ups at airports, a Liberal Senator thinking he is the devil, and a National Party Senator announcing the Nationals are also in a balance of power position.
But looking beyond that colour and movement, the critical question confronting us all is this:
How we can achieve stable and effective government in Australia with no party enjoying majority control of the Lower House.
Australia’s new political landscape requires a government that can find new ways to develop policy and establish consensus around the major issues that come before the next parliament.
Because if the new government doesn’t find new ways to establish consensus and parliamentary support, then we will have gridlock – and we will quickly look more like Washington than Westminster.
Some are saying this situation is all too difficult and we should just return to the polls.
I disagree.
The Australian people have voted for this Parliament – and our job is to make it work.
Of course we’ve just been through a particularly bruising election campaign, so the talk of a consensus-building politics may seem implausible to some.
But the mathematics of the new Parliament speaks for itself:
- Whichever party forms government will only be assured of 72 votes.
- It will need to secure the support of the Opposition, or a sufficient number of the cross-benchers for the passage of legislation.
- And from July next year, it will need the support of either the Greens or the Opposition party in the Senate.
This is a new environment for a federal government.
The new government could simply attempt to horse-trade and arm-twist with each Bill to get to a majority vote.
But that approach alone will not deliver stable and effective government.
If the new government is to be effective and make progress on the big challenges our nation is facing – then I believe we will need to go beyond the politics of 75 votes plus one.
We have a larger challenge, which is also an historic opportunity.
An opportunity to pause, to stand back from the entire political process and truly take stock of how the system is working.
To address those things that undermine public confidence in our democratic system.
To make our system more open and more transparent.
And especially, to strengthen the role of the national parliament in the decisions that affect the everyday lives of Australians.
But first, I want to underscore why stability and continuity are so important right now for Australia.
Since the beginning of the global financial crisis almost exactly two years ago, the world economy has been through its deepest downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
While recovery is underway throughout the world, weakness persists in many parts of the global economy.
In recent days, US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has highlighted the fact that the US economy faces risks and “for much of the world, the task of economic recovery and repair remains far from complete.”
Continued uncertainty in the global economy puts a premium on the stable, experienced and responsible economic management that has been a hallmark of the Labor Government.
Independent agencies like the OECD, the IMF and the Treasury attribute Australia’s success to Labor’s policy of fiscal stimulus that kept our economy growing, so that Australia created more than 500,000 jobs during our first term in government.
As a result in a time of continued uncertainty, Australia is now in a strong position to prepare for the challenges of the future, with a low unemployment rate and with sound government finances.
International confidence in our economy has been strengthened by the Government’s clear economic plan to return to budget surplus, before any of the major advanced economies.
We have implemented tough spending disciplines – holding real growth in government spending to 2 per cent a year once the economy returns to above-trend growth.
And keeping the cap in place until the budget surplus reaches 1 per cent of GDP.
This year we brought down an election-year Budget that stuck to that plan - and in the last six weeks we conducted an election campaign in which every dollar we committed was offset with savings elsewhere, so not one dollar was taken off the overall budget bottom line over the forward estimates.
That’s an unprecedented achievement for the modern political era – breaking just about every rule in the standard political playbook, a playbook that in past election years saw fiscal responsibility thrown to the winds.
All our policies were submitted to Treasury and Finance for independent costing, in compliance with the Charter of Budget Honesty.
Indeed we have offset every cent of new spending since we brought down the Budget in May 2009.
In doing so we’ve had the discipline to find and deliver $84 billion in savings across our three Budgets, to meet the costs of key reforms.
That’s why our commitment to return the budget surplus in 2013, three years from now, can be trusted – because we have shown the discipline to deliver it.
We have begun building a strong foundation for our future prosperity – investing in 21st century infrastructure like the National Broadband Network, which opens up new worlds of productivity gains and can overcome the disadvantage of distance in regional communities.
We’re investing in the skills of the Australian people – our most precious asset – because we believe those investments are critical to Australia’s future prosperity and to the opportunity we want for every Australian.
To build a strong economy and a fair society we must continue the investments we’ve begun – in infrastructure, in our schools, in our health system, and also tackling the challenges of sustainability like climate change, water shortage and population growth.
We have a big agenda for the future, and we have much that is already underway - like the National Broadband Network, major reform of how we fund and run the health system, and introducing a new era of transparency and quality into our schools and universities.
This is not a time to be uprooting these outstanding programs and making savage cuts just when they are starting to make a real difference.
What is needed more than anything now is continuity.
Continuity, certainty and delivery.
I believe I can provide that stability, continuity and certainty.
I have heard and absorbed the message from the Australian people delivered in this election.
We were elected with a wide-ranging program in 2007, and in government, we added to that breadth.
We made ambitious commitments because of a determination to address the neglect or the shortfalls we had witnessed in many crucial areas of policy under the previous government.
But between the fast-moving pace of the global recession, the scale of the response required to keep Australia from recession and the diversity of the challenges we were acting on – our process of explaining our priorities and what we were doing simply broke down.
Some parts of the program delivery did not go to plan.
And the magnitude of some challenges proved too hard to conquer within one term.
The lesson I take from this is that leadership requires boldness, patience and methodical work.
That means opening up our national debates to more Australians, to build stronger understanding of and consensus for policy initiatives.
I believe Australians want greater scrutiny of their government and greater accountability to parliament.
That means focusing on policy detail and substance.
It means examining fiscal decisions and costings with care and rigour.
It means paying detailed attention to parliamentary debates and legislative development.
It means working thoroughly and systematically through the concerns and issues of stakeholders.
It also means making changes to how we conduct our parliament and our democratic processes – and these are the issues we are now discussing with the Independents.
It is clear that if we are going to deliver more successfully on the program of investment and reform that we have begun, then we will also have to renew and rebuild that wider system of governance that holds the executive accountable and creates the legitimacy we need to meet those big challenges.
This is the great opportunity we now have in Australia’s new political landscape.
I know in some quarters there’s disbelief about the prospect of genuine parliamentary and democratic reform, but the fact is that in the past three years we have already delivered important reforms to our political process:
- the register of lobbyists;
- the Ministerial Code of Conduct;
- stronger Freedom of Information laws;
- progress towards whistleblower legislation;
- the two Green Papers on electoral reform on strengthening our democracy and tightening rules around donations, funding and expenditure – which led to the Political Donations Bill, and
- reforms to parliamentary entitlements, like the restrictions on retiring members using Commonwealth resources for party political purposes.
These weren’t reforms we were under any compulsion to implement.
Indeed you might say they worked against our own political interests.
But Labor undertook them because we believe the system is in need of reform.
Of course some measures were blocked in the Senate, like the restrictions on political donations, and other measures are still in progress.
But I believe we’ve already embarked upon more political and electoral reform than at any time since the Hawke government’s parliamentary and public sector reforms a quarter of a century ago.
The current situation allows us to extend and conclude the reforms we have already begun, and add some new ones as well.
That is why for Labor a commitment to parliamentary and democratic reform is not one of opportunism.
It actually allows us to go further down a road of reform to which we have already committed and where we have demonstrated real progress.
In our first term, our priorities were focused on governance, reform of the executive and electoral reform more than on the Parliament itself.
While we made improvements to parliamentary procedures when we came to office, I freely accept that reform of the House of Representatives was not a major priority of our first term, and it clearly needs to be a priority now.
So I welcome the opportunity we have now to enact substantial and lasting reforms.
And I welcome the opportunity to build on the kind of constructive work that did occur in the last Parliament.
Just take the example of the Fair Work Act.
Here was a highly complicated piece of legislation that dealt with one of the most contentious political issues of our generation.
Through patient, methodical work we were able to resolve the vast bulk of the concerns of both employer and union stakeholders.
We had an extensive process of parliamentary consideration and stakeholder engagement – including two weeks of going through the draft legislation in October 2008 with state government representatives, labour market experts and employer and union representatives taking part in the Committee on Industrial Legislation.
The outcome was that the legislation went through the Lower House on the voices – to my surprise, the Opposition did not even call for a division – and was then passed by the Senate even though the Government was significantly outnumbered.
My experience with that legislation – and with other reforms like the changes to student income support and the introduction of a national occupational health and safety legislation – convinces me that it’s possible to find common ground on difficult issues if we’re willing to work hard enough at it, and prepared to make reasonable compromises along the way.
And I believe the new parliament has the opportunity to be a forum in which we work together to find common ground on critical issues health, education, transport, infrastructure and Indigenous affairs.
Clearly, the new Parliament will also have a focus on the needs of regional Australia.
Many Australians will have watched what appears to be a scramble for policies for regional Australia in recent days.
Let me assure Australians, there is no scramble on the Labor side.
We don’t have to re-discover regional Australia - because we never lost it.
From well before our election in 2007 we have taken the needs and interests of regional Australia as one of our priorities and this is reflected in our record in Government.
We have improved long-term planning and engagement with local communities through the Regional Development Australia Framework.
During the Global Financial Crisis we established Priority Employment Areas with Local Employment Coordinators, who have delivered action to get regional Australians into work and plan for the future employment needs of their areas – and directly connected more than 12,000 job seekers to work through our local Job Expos.
Of the $37 billion investment we are making in roads, rail and port infrastructure, $22 billion is being invested in regional Australia.
Our long-term investments in our schools, productivity places, apprenticeships, Trade Training Centres, and critical skills investments will help close the skills shortages in many regional areas – while the Coalition’s promise to cut almost $3 billion out of education and training will deepen the critical shortages of skilled workers in many sectors.
We are investing in renewable energy infrastructure, in regional water solutions, and in support for regional cities that want to grow and need help with infrastructure for affordable housing.
And of course our plans for broadband, health and education reform, reforms to benefits all Australians, are also designed to meet the needs of regional communities that have traditionally got less from health, education and telecommunications services.
Labor has the only serious plan to beset our health system – to tackle:
- the long-term funding needs of our public hospitals;
- putting decision making power in the hands of people who best understand the needs of local communities;
- building regional cancer centres to change the terrible inequity in cancer survival rates between regional and metropolitan Australia;
- tackling the shortage of doctors, nurses and health professionals that is especially acute in regional areas.
Our National Broadband Network will connect over 1000 cities and towns across Australia with speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second for 93 per cent of homes and businesses – and provide new health services, like those announced for regional Australia during the election campaign.
The NBN is crucial national infrastructure for all Australians – delivering service reliability and access to all Australians so that no communities miss out on the revolutionary benefits of high-speed broadband.
Friends, I appreciate the Australian people want a resolution to this election.
They want to know who their next government will be.
The Government will continue to work in good faith to reach a resolution.
I believe the election outcome has given us an historic opportunity to reform and strengthen our parliamentary democracy more than any of us might have anticipated.
I believe that, working with our new Parliament, Labor can deliver lasting and durable improvements to our democracy, so that we can work more effectively together on the big challenges that face Australia – harnessing the talents of people on all sides of parliament.
Indeed I believe the nation is demanding that we do just that.
Not only so we deliver stable and effective government, which Labor can and will do.
But so we also renew our century-old political system with new ideas and new approaches that can restore public trust in our democracy and find common ground where previously there’s been none.
Labor has a long and proud track record of reforming and updating the institutions and practices of political life – whether it’s one-vote one-value reforms; introducing public election funding; women’s suffrage or giving young Australians the right to vote from the age of 18.
I want to renovate that Labor tradition, to deliver lasting and durable improvements to our democracy, improvements not just for this parliamentary term, but measures to permanently uplift our system of government as other reforms have done in generations past.
This election is already memorable for its results.
I want to make it memorable for its legacy for future parliaments, and future generations.
I stand ready to form the next government of Australia.
Tags: Gillard, Reform