I joined the Labor Party in May 1974, during the double dissolution election. I was 20 years old. I spent a good deal of my student life in bars and the Breakfast Creek Hotel, located across the road from Queensland Labor headquarters, was pretty special. I learned as much there as I did in most of my lectures.

Nobody joined the Labor Party in 1974 because they thought they were going to spend time governing. Queensland Labor had been out of office since the split of 1957. Federally, Gough had just ended 23 years of conservative rule. You did not join to govern. You joined to fight. You joined for Medibank, for education. For high principles like one vote, one value and for basic things we now take for granted, like sewering the suburbs.

I want to say something to the younger people in this room, because we live in an age that tells you to curate yourself. To build a profile, a personal brand. Be prepared for the political rollercoaster ride that party membership can be. Most of the time it will be uplifting but sometimes it's difficult and frustrating. Just never lose sight of the pride in being a part of one of the greatest institutions in the world.

Today we all hear the bells of danger ringing in many parts of the globe. Australia's people are going to need the protection of a Labor Government and Labor values more than ever. A political life is better than a brand or a profile. It is bigger and rougher than that. It is a purposeful life. And political purpose can change a country. I learned that from Kev O'Leary, one of my local Lilley branchies. Eighty-six years a party member, whose ashes are buried under the Tree of Knowledge at Barcaldine. Kev backed in Curtin, Chifley, Whitlam, Hawke, Keating, Rudd and Gillard. He never held office. He changed the country all the same.

Back in '74, none of us at the Breakfast Creek Hotel imagined what was coming. We did not imagine we could knock off Joh Bjielke Petersen. And nobody looking at the wreckage of 1975 imagined that federal Labor would go on to hold the treasury benches for close to half the years since Gough's election. Until then, we'd held office just a small fraction of the preceding 70 years.

And I can tell you that no 20-year-old in the public bar of the Breakfast Creek imagined he would one day ride out the biggest financial crisis since the Depression from the Treasurer's office. Since 1972, our party and our movement has seen a profound step change. We became a serious party of government, capable of shaping the nation and its fortunes.

And it is worth asking honestly what we got right, because we are going to need it again. What we got right is this. Labor earns a hearing on everything else by championing economic justice first. Real wages. Medicare. The social safety net. An unswerving focus on the living standards of working men and women. Delivering that means stoking the engines of economic growth and productivity to deliver
opportunity for all. This is a preoccupation of Labor treasurers. Do this and the country will listen to you.

Labor has always defined itself by what it stands for. Our opponents have only ever defined themselves by what they oppose. It always falls to us to shape the big building blocks of economic and social reform. It always falls to them to represent the vested interests trying to hold that reform back. Which brings me to the establishment's favourite trick.

They like to set our governments against one another. One Labor government was acceptable, they tell us. The rest were aberrations. There was one reform age, and everything after it has been decline.

We reject that. Out of hand. Because it obscures the only story that matters, which is that our governments build on one another. Whitlam gave us Medibank and they called it Whitlamite spending. Hawke and Keating rebuilt it as Medicare, added universal super and renovated the economy. Rudd and Gillard defended and built on both again, and added the NDIS. Albanese and Chalmers have further secured these foundations and ushered in the great rebalancing of intergenerational equity. Labor delivering real change. This is one line. It has been one line for 50 years. I know, because I have lived it.

When the global financial crisis came, during the government I was proud to serve, we took the hard decisions and did what Curtin told us to do: "What a government can do by way of economic change in war, it should be able to do in peace."

We used the power of the Commonwealth. We were told we were reckless. We were told to take both hands off the wheel and wait for the cleansing power of a recession. We ignored them. And we were right to ignore them, because we ignore the distributional outcomes of economic policy at our peril.

Scrub our years of power - our years of governing with social purpose - from the last 50 and you do not get a fairer, world leading economy. You get the United States. Forty years of wage suppression, a hollowed-out middle, and a politics that runs on scapegoating your neighbour. We will not go down the American road.

So why does the establishment always need to rewrite history? It's because of what they have always believed, and believe still. I was 21 when the Whitlam government was sacked. Eighteen months in the party.

Everyone remembers Kerr. But Kerr was the instrument. He was not the author. The instinct was already in the room, and it was a great deal older than him. It had been there since the squatters put the shearers in gaol, and it has never left.

Their instinct is this. A Labor government is an aberration. Not a government they disagree with. A government that was not supposed to happen. Bob Hawke softened it for a while, because he was too popular to deny. But softened is not gone. I have tested it in every job this party has given me. Across the table as a state secretary. On the backbench under Keating. At the cabinet table through the crisis. And in this office, as your president.

Scratch a conservative and it is still there. Not that we are wrong. It is that we are unnatural. They have spent fifty years trying to drain us of legitimacy. Yet, look what became of their own! They arrived at a place where they could no longer say what they believed or what they were for. That is not my judgement. It is theirs. No plan. No manifesto. No conviction. A party defined by its opponents. They did not lose their legitimacy because we took it from them. They lost it because they walked away from the convictions that earn it. And now, they would rather confer legitimacy on a charlatan who walks into the Senate wearing a burqa for shock value than confer it on us. That tells you everything you need to know.

It explains why our agenda of fairness and opportunity is also the political project that sustains a nation and holds it together. This was elegantly summed up by Mark Carney the Canadian Prime Minister, some time ago when he said: "just as any revolution eats its children, unchecked market fundamentalism can devour the social capital essential for the long-term dynamism of capitalism
itself."

So, as I depart the Presidency of our great Party, here is what I most want to leave with you. Legitimacy is not conferred. It is seized. It is built, with working people, day in and day out delivering reforming tax cuts, paid parental leave and helping first homeowners. Unions are embedded in our governing DNA. They keep us anchored in economic reality, making a positive difference to the lives of working people. Together with our mighty trade union movement we fought Fraser. We fought Howard. We fought Abbott. And now we watch the conservative mantle pass to One Nation, and a new battle
awaits us.

In Queensland we know the shape of this fight. It starts at Barcaldine in 1891, with three thousand shearers who wanted to bargain collectively for decent wages. It runs through the late 80s with Joh, the original Pauline Hanson. We stopped his caravan rolling to Canberra when it looked like it had unstoppable momentum. We stopped it when we crushed Howard's WorkChoices in 2007, and when Anthony Albanese vanquished Scott Morrison's deception and decrepitude in 2022.

And it finds its expression today in the fight against Hanson herself. Let’s not kid ourselves - the stakes are high. As our friends across the globe have found, authoritarians can emerge in a flash.

We had to reform and strengthen our own party before Gough could win and before we could beat Joh. That is worth remembering in this room. There was a time when party conferences were less about policy and more about grudge. My own path was nearly snuffed out in the middle of a huge factional brawl, at a state conference in Townsville in 1984. The first vote of the conference to test the numbers was a credentials ballot on whether I should be a delegate for my local area in Brisbane. Amid a fistfight in the bar and drunkenness on the floor I won the ballot by 101 votes to 100. Fred Daly rang me the next day. He said, "Wayne, don't worry about that. The smaller the margin, the fewer people you've got to thank."

Needless to say, Labor's prospects at the next state election were dismal. Party reform followed and early on I learned the importance of unity and consensus. Shortly after that I became the assistant state secretary and campaign director.

Amid all these highs and lows the one person I really must thank, to whom I owe everything, is my wife, Kim, also a life member of our great Party. We were just a young family when I went on to become state secretary and campaign director in 1988. We have been a political team ever since and she has provided enormous support and wise counsel. Our second child was born in the run up to the
'89 state election, a defining year for us personally, and also politically.

The Goss campaign set a whole new standard. It proved the power of your ideas always has to be backed by dedicated, organised, grassroots activity. Every time. Whether you are fighting an internal ballot or Joh Bjelke-Petersen. Which brings me to the hard part. There are polls now suggesting the tide may be turning on Hanson. I want to be careful here.

The tide has not turned. We are engaged in the battle. That is a different thing. Because the money has not gone anywhere. It has only changed horses.

So here is my ask, and it is the last one I will make of you. In 2022, we had almost 57,000 members. By the middle of 2024 we were down to 51,555. More than five thousand gone in two years, and the members we have are ageing. Our largest membership demographic is still people like me, who joined in the Whitlam era. We hold 94 seats, yet we have a shrinking party.

This national executive's target of 65,000 by 2029 must be realised and we have had encouraging growth in the last 12 months. To do better we must continue to go to the suburbs, regions and workplaces. Wear out the shoe leather, relentlessly make the case.

The most common refrain from people who are supporters but not members is also the most heartbreaking. "No one asked me to join."

It takes gumption, sure. But we all have it. That's why we all signed up in the first place. I started doorknocking a year out from the 1993 election. The very first door I knocked on, I got a mouthful. Here is the lesson I took from it, and I offer it to every one of you. People will tell you the key is whether the voters like you. It isn't. The most important thing is whether they think you like them. I have been a branch member, a state secretary, a campaign director, a member of parliament for 25 years, Deputy PM, Treasurer and your national President. And I have believed one thing for 52 years. I believe it more strongly today than I did walking into that bar at Breakfast Creek. A fairer country is a more prosperous one.

That is the heritage and the heartbeat of the Labor Party. I joined this party at 20 because I wanted to be in the fight. I leave the presidency at 72 and I am still in it. I am handing you an unfinished fight, but with your new President, Kate Ellis, Assistant secretaries Mitch Kingston and Rosie Ryan and, of course, Paul Erickson we have the best campaign team we have ever assembled. And we are going to need it. This is a fight that never really finishes. So, take it from me. And then go and find the 20-year-old who has not joined us yet. Nobody has asked her. Go and ask her.