ADDRESS TO THE

CHINESE AUSTRALIAN FORUM ANNUAL DINNER

MARIGOLD RESTAURANT,

SYDNEY

26 JULY 1999

8.30PM

Thank you so much Dr Ang for talking about my greatest achievements. I find that even though I’m a Director of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and Treasurer of Australia, holding the number one ticket of a football club is considered much more important in this country. And if you want your first lesson in politics, the members of the Chinese Australia Forum, you ought to learn this. In this country sport is much more important than politics.

Can I say to our distinguished guests that are here, Jim Samios, Henry Tsang, Helen Sham ho and Robert, to my good friend Kathryn Greiner and her team. Kathryn asked me to mention to you, only one week to go before enrolments finish in the Sydney City Council, but she didn’t tell me who she wanted me to urge you to vote for.

Can I say, I’ve got a lot on my plate at the moment. We’re trying to introduce a new indirect tax system, new income tax system, a new family assistance package. We’ve got a Business Review of Taxation going, which is about to report on Friday, at the end of this week; we’ve got a Telstra float; we’ve got a Prime Ministerial Birthday. And when I said to my staff tonight, I’m really looking forward to going and seeing the Australian Chinese Forum. They said, Treasurer you’ve got so much on. And I said, yes, we have got so much on. They said, do you really have time to go and make a speech at the Chinese Australian Forum? And I said, well, I think I do. They said, could you get someone else and send someone else to deliver the speech? Is there something you have to say tonight that is so important than no one else could possibly deliver it? And I said to my staff, I’m not going to make a speech tonight, I said, I’m going to get a good feed. And it’s lived up to my expectations.

I want to say to you, when I first went to University about 25 years ago and I first made contact with the Chinese student associations, how important it was to me to make contact with the Chinese community. It’s been for me 25 years of a great pleasure and a great delight. And I know as we welcome members of the Australian-Chinese community into our home and into our hearts, how enriching it was for us and I believe how enriching it has been for our country. And I want to say that many of the values and the attitudes that I have seen amongst the Chinese here in Australia are so like our Party’s attitudes and so like my own individual attitudes. The attitude of self-reliance and small business and hard work and self-improvement. All of those attitudes which were very much part of the Australian immigrant story. And I know in my own family, part of our own family story of coming to a new country and working hard and engaging in self improvement. And I like to think that the attitudes of the Australian-Chinese community are very much Liberal attitudes. The first Chinese that came to Australia came to be miners. They were part of the mining industry and since then they’ve been part of small business. I don’t think there were many Chinese that came to Australia to become trade union leaders. I may be wrong. Maybe that will happen in the next generation. But they came to be part of that story of business and saving and frugality and self-improvement and all of the entrepreneurial values that we care for so much.

And as was said in the introduction by Dr Ang, I know there would have been many in this community at the time of the last election back in October of last year who would have seriously wondered to themselves, has that contribution to Australia been recognised? There would have been many people that would’ve felt that in some serious respects all of those questions were up for grabs again. And I was of the view then, as I am fortified now, in believing that the challenge that came from One Nation in the last election harboured and gave comfort to a lot of extremists in our community who don’t share the values of tolerance and respect and mutual recognition. And I think there was a serious challenge given political leadership in the last election. I’m not saying everybody that was part of it was an extremist, but there were extremists that most certainly were given comfort. And I’m so pleased and so glad that in the October election that challenge was significantly defeated. I think it was great for our country that we were able to re-underline in the October election the importance, on both sides of politics, that amongst the community itself that these are Australian values and Australian values that we care about – of respect and tolerance and mutual recognition. And to underline that and to say, that we want them to be etched in the consciousness and the culture and the political discourse of our country and our country will be so much the better for it.

Can I say, that when we’re looking at our country and its institutions and its values, these challenges will come and come again. They will come again, particularly from those that feel left behind somehow by economic development or marginalised perhaps, by some of the changes that are taking place in our society. And I think it’s very important that we understand that in the modernisation of our economy, a modernisation of which we have little choice, for if we are to be part of the growth economy, and if we are to be part of the rising living standards, and we are to be part of the growth and jobs and development of the future, we need to make sure that our country has an open economy and attracts investors. We must also make sure that we explain the benefits to those that perhaps are outside the capital cities or experiencing economic change and that we take them with us. In the modern world you can’t stop change. The critical question is going to be, in economic terms, how we adapt to it, how we harness it and how we make it work for us? For many of those people in country or rural areas that might feel left behind by modernisation and economic developments, I think the important thing is to turn the argument around and make economic developments work for them. Technology and communications can work so much more for those in rural and regional Australia, those that have trading opportunities to the world on an Internet, those that can market their products. I had lunch today with the recently retired Deputy Prime Minister, Tim Fischer, and he told the story in his inimitable way about a Northern Territory whip manufacturer who’s now selling to the world, stockwhips, because the Internet has given that manufacturer clients and access that they couldn’t have believed of in the past. How technology and modernisation and economic development can work for them and not necessarily against them. How we can use economic developments to empower our citizens and our country as we adapt to change and make change work for us.

You know, I spend most of my time talking about economic policy, thinking about our economic position here in Australia and in the world. And sometimes people say to me, well Treasurer, you’re only interested in the economic side of life. And that’s not the case at all. But I like to quote the President of the World Bank who made the observation recently, that good economic policy and good social policy go hand in hand, it’s like breathing in and breathing out. In a strong economy with growing living standards the opportunity for social cohesion is so much stronger. In a growing economy with job opportunities for our young, giving them a place and a stake in our society, we have the opportunity to enfranchise them in our future. Giving people a stake in the great institutions of Australia, the Telstra privatisation now has the opportunity to do, to give them a saving in one of the great industrial enterprises of the country. And to make this a country which is prosperous and can offer opportunity to people throughout the world that still want to come here because Australia is still a land of great opportunity and a land of great hope.

For me the dominant economic issue over the last two years was not necessarily the tax debate. Although the tax debate, I can assure you occupied me night and day. The great economic issue that weighed heaviest on my mind in the last two years was our place and our performance in a region which had gone through the greatest financial and economic turmoil in 50 years. In the last two years Malaysia went into recession, Thailand went into recession, Hong Kong went into recession, Singapore went into recession, Korea went into recession, New Zealand went into recession, Indonesia went into recession. Many of those countries experienced the kind of social dislocation that goes with economic downturn. just on our north in Indonesia, the kind of social dislocation that economic pressures can bring. The Australian economy withstood regional recession and it grew and it outperformed the world. And it was a tribute to our exporters; and it was a tribute to the entrepreneurial skills of our people; it was a tribute to the strength of our institutions, our legal institutions, our financial prudential institutions; it was a tribute to monetary policy, low interest rates and stable interest rates, a Budget which was in balance, debt reduction and job creation – 470,000 new jobs in Australia in the last three years. And just as the institutions were so important to our country in the midst of the financial and economic fury whistling out of Asia, so too it’s our institutions and our shared values that are going to be important as we experience these social challenges from time to time.

But I know this, I know this, a decent growing economy with rising living standards provides a social base. And then we can go on and develop the kind of tolerance and mutual respect and recognition and the quality of life that we want to do. But it comes from that kind of economic base without which you’re always chasing around the dislocation in peoples lives. And as I look at our country today, I think we can see some opportunities in front of us that can make a country, which I think is now well respected in this region, one of the great leaders of the region. And we should aim at nothing less. We should aim at nothing less, but in the next decade to build that economy and to strengthen our institutions and to resume our leadership role and to become one of the countries in this particular region which gives leadership. We have a strong economy, we have people skills, we have good institutions, we have a talented workforce. And we’re now finding that all of the people that came to Australia as part of the waves of migration can now lead the waves of investment and export back through the region to strengthen our country. And I said in the Budget speech, which I brought down in May of this year, the next decade could be a special one for Australia. You know in many respects, in the last decade, we felt as if we were dragging the chain in economic terms. It looked as if the region was overtaking us and bypassing us and we were falling behind. Can I tell you, today we are leading the region. We are a strong economy in a faltering region. Much more so than the faltering economy of the strong region. Besides all of those economic strengths that we have, we now have the opportunity, I think, to develop a great social environment which can take people from all over the world and give them opportunity, give them the chance at a job, prove that there are countries where the values of respect and tolerance don’t tear people apart but bring them together and strengthen them together. And that would be a great achievement for our country.

Now I’m not saying for a moment there aren’t things that still need to be changed. I think we’ve got some great challenges in front of us. We have the challenge of implementing a new tax system. We have the challenge of a new business tax system. We have the challenge of constitutional renewal. And even in constitutional renewal if we can engage in a mature debate, thinking about the arrangements which will take us through the next century just as our current arrangements have brought us safely through the last century. As we look towards the future and we think about the arrangements which will make sure that we have stability and a workable system of lively democracy into the future. A country that can handle that debate in a mature way, again would be a leader within this region. There aren’t that many countries in this region that engage in mature constitutional debate. There aren’t that many countries in this region that have open, ferocious democracy. And you ought to see some open, ferocious democracy tonight, we’ve got opposing candidates. And they’ll be coming around and they’ll be shaking your hand and count your fingers after. You know I’m not on the hustings, I can make these jokes. I was at a friend’s sons Bar Mitzvah in Melbourne last night and we were doing a dance. You know, you put your arms around each other and you go round and round in a circle. And a fellow dancer who was next to me, around whose shoulders I had my arm, looked at me and said, make sure you don’t put it in my pocket. I said, it’s been there for years. But the purpose of tax reform, you see, is to lighten it.

You’re going to see some ferocious democracy here tonight. But it’s a sign of a mature society and I hope in a constitutional vote it can be a mature debate as well. Not a debate that turns on sloganism. But a debate that asks this question. What will be our best constitutional arrangements for the next century? Where we want to be in a hundred years time? Can we bring it home for our country as a mature functioning democracy? As we come up to the turn of the century, in many respects I’d like us to enter it much as we entered this century. We entered this century as a country, a young country, with some of the highest living standards in the world, with a stable and mature political democracy, offering opportunity and hope to migrants throughout the world. And I have one other objective, we entered this century debt free. Now, one of the great things about a surplus Budget and a Telstra privatisation, the privatisation of Telstra could eliminate Commonwealth debt. We could enter the next century debt free. What a fabulous opportunity. What wonderful opportunities lie in front of a country that works on its economic base, strengthens its social base, engages in mature reflection on its constitutional arrangements and becomes a leader in its region. To those of you that have become part of the political process here at the Chinese Australian Forum, to those of you that have become part of our functioning economy, and to those of you that will build the opportunity for us in the future, I salute you all and thank you for your time.