Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Robertson for her question. It is not that long ago, a few decades but not that long ago, that we in this country used to talk about the tyranny of distance and our economic debate was dominated by the fact that we felt remote from the markets that we most wanted to trade with. In response to that we lived behind high tariff walls with all the implications that had for real wages. It reduced the real wages available to working people over time with all the implications that had for suppressing innovation in our economy. Our economy changed as we moved away from such a tyranny of distance model and we opened our economy up to the world. We commenced the economic reforms that were necessary to change a closed insular economy into a great trading economy. Australians can be rightly proud of the economy that we have built together, a great trading economy and an economy that has come out of the global financial crisis strong, not having gone into recession and not having seen the sharply rising unemployment we have seen in other countries around the world, where millions and millions of people have lost their jobs.

What was that tyranny of distance is now an opportunity for us, a huge opportunity. We are in the region of the world that is continuing to grow strongly and we are prospering from that growth. Three-quarters of Australia's goods exports go to Asia—a quarter of them to China alone. These are important statistics. We continue to have a prosperous future trading with the economies of our region, which are continuing to grow.

As we are in the right region of the world, we bring to this task the right economic fundamentals. We have low unemployment. We have strong prospects for growth, with $430 billion of projects in the pipeline in the resources sector alone. We have strong public finances. We have a strong banking system. This is important and is a standout in comparison to the positions of nations overseas that are coming to the economic challenges of today with high unemployment, high debt and institutional weakness.

Consequently, we are here with a huge opportunity, a huge opportunity that we can seize by keeping our economy strong today and by engaging today in the reforms that our economy will need to keep it modern and strong tomorrow—that is, we have to bring the same national character and characteristics to today's reform challenges as past generations brought to the reform challenges that confronted them. That is why, to manage today's economy, we are determined to invest in skills, to invest in infrastructure, to better tax our mineral wealth and to spread those benefits through the cutting of company tax, through the growth of our pool of national savings and through special breaks for small business. Over the medium to longer term we are determined to keep investing in our productive capacity and to grow our productivity by investing in education, by investing in skills, by rolling out the NBN, by seizing the opportunities that come from a clean energy future and by bringing our reform tools to health and education.

We stand in a country with strong economic fundamentals and a huge opportunity for the future. It is an economy we have built together, and we should be proud of it.

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