One, to create and to share opportunity.
Two, to protect people in the most difficult of times.
This has always been Labor’s driving purpose, the driving purpose of Labor Governments over the ages. And the driving purpose of the Labor Government I am very proud to lead.
When we reflect on what the Government has done so far, we have held true to that vision of creating opportunity and sharing opportunity.
No better definition of that than creating more than 800,000 jobs during the worst of economic times around the globe.
Everything we have done to give kids a better start in life.
To improve schools.
To increase apprenticeships.
To bring a historic shift in our universities.
To create 190,000 more places.
And for the first time, to be able to say truly in our nation a kid from a poorer household can get a chance and a start and a university place. And we see this in our communities already working and transforming lives.
So we have held true to that purpose of creating opportunity.
But we’ve got more to do for our nation to be able to say that no matter what the circumstances of your birth, you will always be in our great nation able to seize an opportunity, to see the benefits of your hard work, and to have the place in our nation that lets you get ahead.
The Government has started doing that work. It’s work very much based on the future of our economy because we can’t create and share opportunities if we don’t have a strong economy.
And we live in a time of tremendous change. We’re seeing the out-workings of the global financial crisis.
The world economy is never going to be the same as it was in the days before the global financial crisis.
We are in a period of profound transformation in the global economy, and in our economy.
It shows in a variety of ways.
People are saving more, and that’s a good thing, but it has changed the way in which they live.
People are anxious about their job security. They’re seeing the consequences of the high Australian dollar press on many industries and many regions around the nation.
They know that we live on the doorstop of a lot of future growth in Asia, and that this can give us opportunities but we need to reach out and get them.
They know that what is happening with information technology is changing our world and changing our future.
And they know that climate change is real and there’s no point denying the consequences of a changing climate. We are living through climate change. We know it and we can see it.
So the Government has been making prudent preparations so that we in the future can still be a land of creating opportunity and shared opportunity.
That has meant that we’ve needed to take tough decisions like putting a price on carbon so we do seize the clean energy sources of the future, and I’m very proud that we’ve got that done.
It does mean that we’ve needed to focus on modernising our infrastructure.
We inherited from the former Government a nation with a huge infrastructure deficit, and piece by piece we have been working to improve our infrastructure.
Traditional infrastructure: roads, rail, ports to make travel times for working people; to ensure that we can get our goods to market.
But also the infrastructure of the future: the National Broadband Network. Because we cannot be a competitive economy in the long-term, we cannot roll out the services that we want to for working Australians unless we have the National Broadband Network around our country, and we are working to get that done.
We’ve also worked hard to boost productivity by looking at the regulations in our nation.
We do need clear laws and clear rules about how we do business. But they need to be efficient laws and efficient rules, and we’ve worked hard to do that.
And we’ve played out a very clear strategy to make sure that we can seize the growth that is happening around us in the region in which we live.
I mean, what a change in our world.
When I grew up people used to think of Asia as a place of poverty and their eyes would look across Asia to Europe or America.
What the smart young things wanted to do when I was growing up, they wanted to go and spend some time in London, see Europe. They wanted to go to the west coast of America.
Now young people still legitimately want to do those things but increasingly we know the wealth of our age and our era will be Asia’s wealth.
Asia’s rise will transform the opportunity for us as that middle class grows and wants the things that we have and have to sell in abundance. Whether it’s agriculture, whether it’s wine, education services, legal services, manufactured goods, the list goes on.
So to be a nation of opportunity for the future which can be shared, we have to tap into that growth and we’ve laid out the strategy to do so.
Nothing is more important to opportunity in the future than what is happening in our schools today.
We’ve already brought a transformation in Australian schools, and I’m very proud of it. I’m proud of the national curriculum. I’m proud of MySchool.
I’m proud that I can walk into disadvantaged schools today who through our national partnerships can get out the information – the cold hard data – and show me that they are giving kids a better life and a better start than they were able to do before we started our education reforms; practical changes.
Children who used to struggle to learn to read and write, now being able to do so. And if they learn to read and write and do maths in primary school, they can succeed in high school, they can get an apprenticeship, they can get a job. They can get one of our new university places.
But if your life goes off the rails when you’re five or six or seven or eight, and you never learn to read or write, you never learn to deal with numbers, to deal with maths, then we know that sets people up for a lifetime of disadvantage.
We have been changing that, but we’ve got more to do so that we can say that every child in every school has the resources available at his or her disposal to get a great education.
That it doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about an indigenous girl in the Northern Territory, a boy in the western suburbs of Melbourne where I’m from, or people in your communities.
Where ever in the nation most children are getting educated, they are getting a great education.
This is the work of governing, and this is the work of 2013.
And we will do it as we deliver our response to the funding review undertaken by David Gonski, and as we outline our national plan for school improvement.
Creating opportunity, sharing opportunity. A Labor purpose, a Labor mission.
But we also know that life brings with it human risks. Anybody could have a child with cerebral palsy born into their family.
Anybody could be diagnosed in middle age with one of the worst degenerative diseases, Parkinson’s disease.
Anybody could the family member of someone who – perhaps a young person, an incautious moment, dives off that jetty and the water is too shallow. Drives a little bit recklessly and has an accident.
These are the things of real life, and these are the things that can give people a disability.
We have worked hard to protect people from risk. Whether it’s the risk of ill-health and their need for a great healthcare service, we’ve been building that as a Labor Party over many years now through Medibank and Medicare and free public hospitals.
And this Government has done its share to improve our health services for the future. To make them sustainable, to put them on a strong footing, to bring reform and change which means that there are more doctors, more nurses, more local control.
To change our aged care system so that older Australians have more options, more choices, more dignity, more respect than we have afforded them in the past.
So we have worked hard on life’s risks.
But we’ve got more to do to make sure that the risk of disability isn’t something that keeps families up at night worrying.
That if a disability strikes, it doesn’t break families and their finances, potentially for generations.
But that they know that their community through their Government is there with them to help out and to give people a fair go and a fair chance.
That’s the work of governing, and that’s the work of 2013 as we roll out the National Disability Insurance Scheme.
We’ve got a lot to do in this period of time. To make sure in this era of change we are securing Australian jobs, continuing to add to our proud track record of more than 800,000.
Securing new opportunities for our nation to make its way in the world, and to profit as it makes its way in the world.
Securing a new future for our kids through world-class schooling.
And better protecting our families through the National Disability Insurance Scheme.
I’m looking out on the front line of taking these arguments, these debates, these values to communities around the nation.
I’m looking to you to be out there in your communities explaining to them that this is the work of governing and we are not done yet.
That for us to keep increasing opportunity, to keep protecting people from risk not only requires us to work hard between now and the election day in September.
But it requires us in the Labor Government that lies beyond that election to keep working with their interests always at our forefront with our Labor purpose always driving us on.
That’s why we’re here today and I’m very proud to be able to have the opportunity to spend the time with you.
Thank you very much.
[ENDS]
