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TRANSCRIPT
OF THE PRIME MINISTER ATHENS, GREECE E&OE Thank you very much Mr Ambassador, ladies and gentlemen. Apart from the formal farewell from the Prime Minister later this afternoon, this is the last occasion that I will have for the opportunity of saying a few words publicly to my Greek hosts and I'm particularly delighted that it's an occasion to speak briefly to representatives of the business community in Greece. It's fair to say that the historic, cultural, immigration and people to people ties between Greece and Australia are the ties that most of us think about and there are a thousand stories of people who came to Australia at a very early age from Greece and have made their fortune and their fame in every part of Australian life. I have never forgotten in the year 2000 I attended a function and some of you may know I'm rather fond of sport, like many Australians and I'm sure many Greeks as well, and I attended a function in Sydney organised by the Archdiocese of the Greek Orthodox Church in Sydney and it was to honour Australian sports men and women of Greek heritage and I was impressed by two things. I was impressed by the almost one hundred percent turn-up of every sort of known Greek who'd made a contribution to Australian sport and I was also impressed by the equal number of unknown Greeks, unknown to me, who'd made a huge contribution to Australian sport. And I have to s! ay that apart from one area of sport very, very close to my heart that wasn't terribly well represented and that is cricket, just about every other sport that Australia plays and plays with great energy and that was a metaphor to me of the wonderful contribution that men and women of your nation have made to the building of modern Australia. But it is also important that we keep, not only keep our friendships as countries in good repair, as Dr Johnson said we had to do, but it's also very important that we look for new ways of building links between our two nations. We have what you might call a good economic relationship, but there's a lot more that we could do to make it even better. Many of you here today have investments in Australia, many of you may be contemplating investments in Australia. Let me say to you that the Australian economy is in sparkling form at the present time. We have enjoyed a number of years of growth averaging about four percent. We are predicted to have the fastest economic growth rate of any highly developed country this calendar year. We have very low inflation. We have quite low interest rates. We have paid off an enormous amount of government debt. Our debt, Federal Government debt, the GDP ratio is only 4.6 percent and the OECD average is about 35 percent and that gives us a very strong base for the future. This has come about largely because over a period of twenty years we have embarked on a lot of economic reform and both sides of politics, let me say, have made a contribution to that reform process. We deregulated our financial system and floated our exchange rate back in the early 1980s. We had some major tariff reforms which reduced the barriers, let me say that again, reduced the barriers to entry, as I'm addressing a European audience, reduced the barriers to entry into Australia of goods exported from other countries and since my Government has been in office we have undertaken three very big and important reforms. We have freed our industrial relations system quite a lot. The level of union membership in Australia, in the private sector, is now lower than twenty percent. We have no quarrel let me say with union membership. We do have a quarrel with any laws that provide a monopoly on the supply of labour to individual unions and some of the laws that used to exist in Australia did have that effect. And we've also undertaken a very big change to our taxation system. Our company tax rate was cut to thirty percent two years ago and we've introduced a broad based indirect tax. You call it a value-added tax, we call it a goods and services tax. We had a lot of political agony and a lot of political punch-ups in bringing it in, but it's now bedded down and nobody talks about it any more. It's two years now and it's all in the past and also of course in the last few years we have consolidated our budget position and paid off a lot of debt. So I present to you a picture of a, of really a sparkling Australian economy and one that is as strong as it has been in my lifetime and in many respects it's stronger than at any time because we have got rid of a lot of the artificial elements. We used to be a country that had very high tariff protection, very high tariff walls and apart from a couple of isolated areas such as motor vehicles and they're coming down there as well, and textile, clothing and footwear they are coming down as well. We have virtually no tariffs to speak of and we are vigorous exporters. We would like to be even more vigorous but we find we hit a few walls when we reach the European Union. Now, I've put some views about that rather strongly to your government and I'll be putting those views even more strongly when I go to Brussels in a couple of days time. But there are, I believe, the ingredients for success in expanding the economic relationship and as an expression of the sort of contempor! ary face of that I'm delighted that John Rothwell is here today. He's Chairman of Austral Ships which is a hugely successful shipbuilding company in Western Australia and his company knows quite a bit about ferries and has been very, very successful and I hope even more successful in slicing into markets and opportunities here in Greece and all around Europe. Now I mention that company, not because it's the only one, but just an illustration. I say another metaphor for the fact that we don't come just talking about some of the things you traditionally associate with Australia. You mightn't traditionally associate shipbuilding and fast ferry expertise with Australia but you should now because as well as having this armory of efficiency in so many other areas we've also got it in areas that in the past have been regarded pretty much as the preserve of Europeans and pretty much as the preserve of Americans. So ladies and gentlemen my story to you is a very, is a very direct and a very simple one. We have a wonderful bi-lateral relationship in the human areas and the history and the warmth that Greeks display towards Australians is evident and I can't speak too highly of the warmth with which I have been greeted as I've travelled around your city, your capital and to have met your political leaders, that there is an opportunity to add a dimension to that, a greater economic dimension. It's not easy, we have to work through some differences when, in respect of Greece's membership of the European Union, I understand that and I understand some of the benefits that have accrued to your country from the membership. But in the end the future of our society and the future of yours does lie in a more open trading system because we live in a globalised world and I'm sure all of you understand that. That the world is your market and eventually that reality has to be faced by all of us. We can't expand, Australia can't expand with a population of 19 and a half million people which is about double Greece's. We don't believe that we can go on expanding unless we can keep winning new markets and because we don't have a big enough domestic base with only 19 and a half million people we have to go abroad. Now if that is true of a country with 19 and a half million people it has to be true obviously of a country of 10 million. Now you have achieved a lot of that in the European Union and that is terrific. I hope that the European Union, which is due to be enlarged over the next few years, will more positively see the value of reaching out beyond its borders and I hope that is true also of the United States because if we are to get success in the next World Trading Organisation round of negotiations, then it can only happen if both the European Union and the United States have a resolve together to bring about change and reform and I hope that that message is received in both Washington and in Brussels but can I just finally say that it has been a sheer delight for my wife and I to be here and to be reminded of it by courtesy of coming across Mr Vardos over here who owned arguably one of the most famous coffee shops in the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney in the 1960s and 70s, Georges where I have to say I went there with my wife when she wasn't my wife on several occasions and it's a terrific pleasure to catch up with him and he's a better, he's another, I'm talking, I've found a lo! t of metaphors at this lunch but he is another example. Made his fortune, did well in Australia and has come back here and is doing just as well and remembers with great affection his years in Australia. We remember him with great affection. He ran a terrific establishment. I'm not surprised he now runs a very elegant hotel here in Greece. So ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for coming. I want to thank the Ambassador for giving me the opportunity of talking to all of you but I've had a wonderful time in Greece. We have great affection for your country. You've given a lot to us. You've given wonderful people to us and you've helped give us a culture and a civilisation when it comes to our method of government and we remember that and we hope we can build on it. Thank you.
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5 July
2002
