Speech - 15th September 2007
Thank you for that very warm Penrith welcome. I’ve come to Penrith today because it’s here, and in places like it, that Australia’s working families will decide our nation’s future direction in just a few weeks’ time.
As Australians decide on what sort of leadership they want for the future, they will be making a decision on the kind of Australia we’ll be living in. Not just in 2010 but in the decade beyond as well.
What the nation now needs is certainty of purpose. Certainty of direction and certainty for our future. What the nation cannot afford is a government that has become complacent. A government confused in its direction; A government that has just lost its way.
The day I became leader of the Australian Labor Party, I said that as a nation, we are now at a fork in the road. Today, the choice between those two roads is clearer than ever before.
- A government bogged down in the past or new leadership focused on the future.
- A government that has lost touch with working families or new leadership that understands the needs of working families.
- A government that after 11 years in office has now lost its way or new leadership with a clear cut plan for Australia’s future. These are the choices Australia faces.
My purpose today is this. Not to offer a fistful of dollars on the eve of an election. But to outline the plans we have put forward step-by-step, chapter by chapter, policy by policy throughout the course of this year. Because let me tell you, our team’s been hard at work. And we’re proud of the work we’ve done.
This is a great country. We are privileged to live in a time unique in our history and extraordinary in its opportunity. The challenge for government is simple: to seize this opportunity; not to squander it.
My charge is this: the current Government of Australia no longer has the ambition, the ideas, or the energy to seize the great opportunity of today.
Come here to Sydney’s western suburbs and you can see a nation transformed by the changes of the past quarter century. But these changes have not come without a price. Business has had to transform itself to succeed in a ruthlessly competitive global business environment. Business has had to do some heavy lifting.
But most of all, the heavy lifting has been done by working families across the suburbs and towns of this great nation of ours.
They have had to cope with a world of dramatic change. They have had to face changing jobs. They have had to face the need to learn entirely different skills to the ones with which they began their working lives.
Increasingly they have had to look after themselves - their health care, their kids’ education, their financial security and their future. Rarely has the nation acknowledged the role of Australia’s working families in building the prosperity and success of the nation.
Increasingly, the cost of change has been forced downwards - on to local communities, on to families and on to individuals. Labor Governments – whatever their faults – have always believed in extending a helping hand to those bearing the brunt of change.
Why have we done that? Why do we do that? Why do we continue to do that? Because that’s our core business; it’s our DNA; that’s what we believe in.
But when it comes to our political opponents, working families are left to fend for themselves - even though those families are now under mounting financial pressures. That’s the difference between us – between our way and Mr Howard’s way.
Let’s look at a couple of examples. For all of the prosperity of recent times, it’s never been harder for young families to buy their own home. Back in 1996, an average Australian home cost four times the average annual wage. Ten years later, it costs seven times the average annual wage.
But Mr Howard says that working families have never been better off.
Look at WorkChoices and its impact on working families. These laws have allowed penalty rates, overtime and shift allowances to be stripped away from working Australians. WorkChoices has also made it easier to retrench employees. Employees can now be sacked for ‘operational reasons’. But it doesn’t stop there.
Under AWAs, your rights to redundancy pay can be taken away without a single cent of compensation. But Mr Howard’s comforting words are that working families have never been better off.
Look at health care. Consider a working family with an ageing relative now in need of care. It’s hard for them to find an aged care bed without extensive delays. So an ageing mum is stuck in a hospital bed. A hospital isn’t a home. Nor is it the right place for an older person who needs a place in a nursing home.
But under the Howard Government’s aged care policy, nursing home beds are not available in the right places at the right time. And so frail, older Australians are left to languish in hospital beds – bad for them, and bad for those who need those hospital beds and who are now on long hospital waiting lists.
Consider a lady in her late 60s who’s been waiting month after month after month for elective survey for a hip replacement, hobbling painfully up the street. The surgery keeps being postponed because there’s simply no spare beds.
This is the real world. This is the real world in suburban Australia. This is the real world in regional Australia. This is the real world in rural Australia. This is the real world:
- where working families shoulder the financial pressures of mortgages and rents;
- where working families have to cope with spiralling petrol and grocery prices;
- where working families live with the insecurity brought about by Mr Howard’s and Mr Costello’s WorkChoices laws;
- where working families have to cope with ballooning health care costs;
- where parents scrimp and save for childcare and for their kids’ education.
This is the real world for working families. But in Mr Howard’s and Mr Costello’s world, they say that working families have never been better off.
There is one difference between Mr Howard and Mr Costello. Mr Howard has lost touch with working families. Mr Costello has never been in touch. And given the chance, whatever he may now say, Mr Costello would take WorkChoices even further.
It’s not hard to understand why Australians are asking themselves this core question: if the economy Mr Howard and Mr Costello keep boasting about is doing so well, then why are we finding it so tough?
These working families have become the forgotten people in Mr Howard’s and Mr Costello’s Australia. These forgotten people are now looking to the future - increasingly uncertain about what Mr Howard’s and Mr Costello’s Australia holds for them.
The message I get from working families around the nation is that they are looking for leadership that’s in touch with the realities they face in their day to day lives. They are looking for leadership that doesn’t preach statistics. They are looking for leadership that doesn’t just lecture them that they’ve never been better off.
Australians are looking for leadership that understands the challenges they face. Australians are looking for leadership that doesn’t promise the earth – nor promises to solve every problem known to man.
What Australians are looking for is new leadership – new leadership that extends a helping hand wherever possible to working families in dealing with the problems of today. And new leadership, with the foresight, focus and energy to plan for the challenges of tomorrow.
Above all, Australians want new leadership that brings fresh thinking to the challenges of the future. Now - more than ever before - Australia needs this new leadership.
We live in a remarkable country. There is, I believe, no better place on earth to live than this country Australia. Yet something is holding us back. We are falling short of what we could become. And at the same time, there is something essential about Australia that is being lost. Too many Australians are not sharing in the great prosperity. Too many Australians are not getting the opportunities they deserve. Too many Australian children are being failed by our education system.
Too many of our best and brightest leave for better institutions and brighter prospects in other parts of the world.
Imagine - instead - an Australia where our goal is to become the best educated country in the world. Imagine a country whose children received not the 20th or 30th best education in the world, but the best education in the world. Where we have the best universities in the world. Where we have the best tech colleges in the world. Where we value a trade certificate as much as a university degree.
And where we have a national school curriculum which is also the world’s best – so that wherever you live in Australia, or wherever your job takes you, your children were assured of the same high quality education in English, maths, science, history and geography.
Imagine also a confident, outward-looking Australia where we are not afraid to invest in learning the languages of our trading partners. Just Imagine for a moment how prosperous this nation of ours would become.
That’s why I’m determined to lead a government that embraces an education revolution. An education revolution that underpins a strong economy and gives every young Australian the best possible start in life. Imagine also an Australia where our hospitals and health services are of uniform high quality.
Where the billions of dollars now wasted on duplication and overlap between Canberra and the States are spent instead on making sure that there are no chronic shortage of aged care beds, or hospital beds, or accident and emergency beds.
Where money could be invested instead to ensure that pensioners can get their teeth fixed on time.
Imagine a health and hospital system fundamentally reformed - on a cooperative basis between Canberra and the States where Australians no longer have to watch politicians’ buck-passing to other politicians on the failures in the system.
Where instead the nation had a leader prepared to put his hand up and say, “the buck stops with me”. And let us imagine this: an Australia with an industrial relations system that gets the balance right. A system that provides all the flexibility that business can reasonably expect. A system that protects the fair and reasonable wages and conditions for all in the workplace.
In other words, let us imagine an Australian society and economy that unapologetically rewards individual hard work, achievement and success, but doesn’t throw the fair go out the back door.
Friends, let us also imagine a nation whose best days are yet to come.
But I ask you, as we come to that fork in the road, is Mr Howard able to provide the new leadership Australia needs to achieve our nation’s potential?
Five years into a global mining boom, which has given us such a launching pad for the future, does anyone seriously believe that our national government has invested the proceeds from the boom in the future productive capacity of the nation? In skills? In infrastructure? In our families?
Does anyone believe that the leadership Australia is now crying out for can be delivered by a government that no longer has confidence in its leader - yet lacks the courage to replace that leader?
Does anyone believe that a government can provide the new leadership Australia needs when it lacks the courage to install the Prime Minister’s replacement before the election - in time for him to face the people in his own right?
And does anyone really believe that this Government can now magically regain any real sense of direction - just because after 11 years Mr Howard and Mr Costello have declared, yet again, that they intend to put up with one another and from now on will call themselves a ‘team’?
It didn’t take this week’s events to tell you that the answer to all these questions is: No.
Today I am asking you to imagine something different. New leadership for the nation. New leadership for the nation’s future. This is the leadership that I will offer Australia as the people deliberate on their choice in the weeks ahead.
During the course of this year Labor has been setting out, step by step, a plan for the nation’s future. Our plan starts with responsible economic management. I’m not ashamed to be known as an economic conservative. It’s what I believe in.
I’m committed to budget surpluses. I’m committed to the absolute independence of the Reserve Bank. Just as I am committed to maintaining the Bank’s inflation targeting regime. Beyond maintaining the foundations of sound economic management, the next step that is critical for our nation’s future is an education revolution. There are gaping holes in Australia’s education and training system.
We are facing an estimated shortage of skilled workers of 240,000 within the next ten years.
To put this in perspective, that is two and half times the number who came to this nation from 30 other countries in the 1940s to built the Snowy Hydro Electric Scheme.
And we find State government officials bumping into each other in towns across northern England, as they scour the streets for nurses and doctors to bring back to Australia because of our training shortages.
That’s why we will invest $450 million to give all four year olds an entitlement to 15 hours of pre-school or early learning per week for 40 weeks per year, delivered by a qualified teacher. That’s why we will invest $2.5 billion in a plan to build state of the art trades training centres in all of Australia’s 2,650 secondary schools.
That’s why we will strengthen the knowledge base of our economy, by halving HECS fees for new maths and science students, and halving their HECS again if they take up work in a relevant maths or science occupation, particularly teaching.
That’s why our education revolution also extends to a national school curriculum, boosting the study of Asian languages, and a Job Ready Certificate for students engaged in trades and vocational education.
Second, hospitals. We have a plan to bring the Federation into the 21st century and end the blame game between the Commonwealth and State governments. This starts with a $2 billion National Health and Hospitals Reform plan to fix our hospitals and improve our health system – to end the buck-passing in the system nation wide.
Within 100 days of forming government, we would through COAG establish a National Health and Hospital Reform Commission with an 18 month brief to eliminate duplication and overlap within the nation’s health system.
If we cannot get agreement with the States and Territories on this plan by mid-2009, we would then seek a further mandate from the Australian people for the Commonwealth to assume full funding responsibility for Australia’s 750 public hospitals
If that occurred the Commonwealth would reduce its overall payments to the States by an amount equivalent to the States’ and Territories’ hospital outlays so there would be no windfall gain to the States.
We will build GP Super Clinics in local communities, to improve Australians’ access to doctors, nurses, specialists and allied health professionals, taking the pressure off hospitals and tackling the challenge of chronic diseases.
We will create 2,000 more transitional aged care beds for older Australians. Thereby freeing up 2000 acute hospital beds for those on hospital waiting lists. Our health plan also involves major steps forward in addressing preventative health care and tackling chronic disease such as Type II diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Third, climate change.
In the earliest days of a Federal Labor Government, we will act to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. We will then join international efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, instead of hindering them. We will become part of the greenhouse gas solution; not just part of the greenhouse gas problem.
We will establish a national carbon target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 60 per cent by 2050 against 2000 levels. We will establish a national emissions trading scheme, set up a national standard for carbon offsets, and invest $500 million in a national clean coal initiative.
We will substantially increase Australia’s Mandatory Renewable Energy Target. We plan to lift the automotive industry’s investment in low emission vehicle production by $2 billion, led by a half billion dollar Commonwealth investment in the Green Car Innovation Fund.
Our plan also includes further measures on solar, green energy and water renovations for Australian households. The next generation of Australians deserve a clean, green future from this generation of Australians.
Fourth, industrial relations. Our plan for a fair and flexible industrial relations system will get the balance right in Australian workplaces. We will repeal WorkChoices. We will abolish AWAs. We will ensure that employees cannot be sacked unfairly.
We will bring new family-friendly arrangements into the workplace, including allowing parents to share an entitlement of up to two years’ unpaid leave on the birth of a child. And we will provide upwards flexibility through awards, collective enterprise agreements and common law agreements.
Fifth, housing affordability. Australia is facing a housing affordability crisis. In recent months Labor convened a national housing affordability summit. It’s remarkable that given the realities here in western Sydney and elsewhere in the nation, the Government has failed to act. In fact, the Government is in denial.
For the record, Mr Howard and Mr Costello have said that there is no housing affordability crisis. Labor, by contrast, is developing a national housing affordability strategy.
We will establish a National Housing Affordability Fund to invest up to $500 million to help reduce the cost of developing new infrastructure, to help reduce the cost and delays for families to get into a new home.
Our plan will also help create 50,000 new affordable rental properties across Australia, with a $603 million investment over five years offering tax incentives and financial support to investors providing rental housing to low and middle incomes. I believe governments must do everything within their power to make sure that working families can own their own home.
These therefore represent the core elements of my plan for Australia’s future:
- My plan for an education revolution.
- My plan to reform our nation’s health and hospitals system.
- My plan for decisive action on climate change and water.
- My plan to get the balance right in Australian workplaces.
- My plan to tackle the housing affordability crisis.
- My plan to help keep the economy strong - building our economic infrastructure, and making sure the economy also delivers for working families.
- My plan to safeguard our national security.
This is my plan for Australia. On the eve of this election, and after 11 years in office, I challenged Mr Howard last week in Parliament to detail his plan for Australia’s future – and there was none. And there was silence. And there was no response. The alternative is clear – a party with a plan for the future and a party with none.
Today I want
to announce another part of my plan for our country’s future – the next stage
in our education revolution. Skilled workers
are the lifeblood of a productive, competitive economy. The Australian
economy is already experiencing skills shortages – and in the future the demand
for suitably trained workers will continue to grow.
According to the Government’s own estimates, Australia faces a shortage of more than 200,000 skilled workers over the next five years. By 2016, the shortage is anticipated to swell to 240,000 workers.
A recent survey of more than 760 businesses by the Australian Industry Group found that one in two firms were experiencing difficulties in obtaining skilled labour.
The report carries a conspicuous title – ‘ Australia’s Skills Gap: Costly, Wasteful and Widespread’. Last year, former Reserve Bank Governor Ian Macfarlane said that as a matter of urgency more needed to be done to address the skill shortages in our economy. These shortages were constraining growth and putting upward pressure on inflation.
The Reserve Bank has been warning about skills shortages since 1999 – yet today, not only has the skills shortage worsened, we are confronted with the staggering statistic that today 540,000 young Australians are in neither full time work or study.
Mr Howard and Mr Costello have failed to act on the skills crisis. Just as they have failed to act on the deficiencies in our national economic infrastructure. Labor has already committed to the establishment of Infrastructure Australia, the Building Australia Fund, a Major Cities program and our $4.7 billion National Broadband plan to deal with the nation’s critical infrastructure needs.
Today I commit to the establishment of a new national institution - Skills Australia – to deal with the nation’s critical skills needs. Too many businesses across our nation are being held back by the skills crisis – and the time has come for national leadership.
Skills Australia will be an independent, statutory body responsible for advising government on the future skills needs of the nation. It will play a central role in locking in a full-employment economy and developing a highly skilled and innovative workforce for the future.
Skills Australia will, for the first time, bring together information sourced from commissioned research and from industry to inform Australia’s workforce development needs.
Skills Australia will be made up of seven board members, drawn from a range of backgrounds including economics, business, academia and training providers. Skills Australia will provide government with recommendations about the future skill needs of the country. It will identify:
1. Future skills shortages, so they can be addressed before they impede economic activity;
2. Persistent skills shortages, so that current capacity blockages can be overcome;
3. Barriers that prevent skill formation in areas where persistent skills shortages exist; and
4. Identify industries where retraining and up-skilling of workers may be required to prevent unemployment, under-employment and skills obsolescence.
The information gathered by Skills Australia will be widely distributed so that the entrepreneurs, businesses and workers of tomorrow can best prepare themselves for their future training and employment decisions.
Most critically, the recommendations made by Skills Australia will help shape Government decisions across the long-term, resourcing of the schools sector, the vocational education and training sector and the universities sector.
Australia can no longer afford to fly blind when it comes to our nation’s future workforce needs. Australia must plan for its future workforce needs. In a few weeks’ time, the Australian people will make a decision about Australia’s future. Today I’ve outlined the core elements of my plan for Australia’s future.
After 11 years in office, and on the eve of an election, Mr Howard has not done the same. On past performances, Mr Howard will now engage in a pre-election spending spree.
I have no intention of matching dollar-for-dollar his election spending commitments. That would be irresponsible. What the nation needs instead is a responsible, long term plan for the future. Not a plan for the next election but a plan for the next decade. And a plan for the decade beyond.
To deliver this plan, Australia needs new leadership. And friends it is this new leadership that I intend to deliver.