Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

As HL Mencken once noted:

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

One only has to pick up any newspaper today, listen to the TV or listen to members of the opposition to hear a seemingly endless stream of bad news from the doomsayers. You hear that our dams will never fill again, that we are running out of resources, that our pollution is out of control, that the air is bad and that the water is worse. There is a climate crisis, we are told. The seas will rise and boil, the population growth is out of control, our rainforests are being destroyed, famine and disease are rampant and things are only going to get worse—that is what we are told. These headlines are accompanied by suggestions that we must contract, cut back, make do with less. 'Degrowth', 'decarbonisation' and 'sustainability' are the buzzwords of today. This comes with the implied threat that we must submit to big government and we must have a more powerful bureaucracy that controls our lives if we are to have any chance to survive.

But the good news is that the doomsayers of today, just like doomsayers have been throughout history, are wrong. If we go back to 1789, Malthus predicted an unending misery for humankind. Back in 1968, we had the environmentalist Paul Ehrlich, with his bestseller, The Population Bomb, that led with the lines:

The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date, nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.

They have all been wrong, wrong, wrong.

It is true that here in Australia we have been through a dark period of stagnation in the last six years under the previous Labor government, with failed policies, with unprecedented reckless and wasteful expenditure and with our unemployment queue 200,000 people longer. That is enough people to fill the MCG twice. Under the six years of Labor government, we saw the real net wealth per person in Australia decline. The good news is that the decline under the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd and Greens government was an aberration in the long-term trend of increased prosperity for all Australians.

I will look at the 11½ years of the previous coalition government. During that period we saw a net creation of 2.4 million new jobs. We witnessed under the previous coalition government a reduction in the number of unemployed by 260,000. That is 260,000 people who went off the unemployment line into paid employment under the previous coalition government's policies. During the previous coalition government, we saw a 20 per cent increase in real wages and a doubling—a 100 per cent increase—in the real, net wealth of the average Australian.

My concern is that many people today simply do not realize how truly fortunate they are to live in this great country at this amazing time in world history, how things have continued to improve over the last two centuries and what a bright and prosperous future Australia has ahead of us. If you look at the facts, rather than the headlines, all indicators show that the almost every quality of human life that we can measure is getting better—the complete opposite of what the doomsayers preach. Today, more than at any time in human history, we are not plagued by the war, genocide, starvation, arbitrary arrest, imprisonment without trial, slavery or disease that our forefathers had to put up with. As we look to the future, although we cannot be so naive as to think that there will not be some bumps along the way, there is every prospect that these positive trends of improvement will continue.

Let us quickly go through the evidence in the time allowed. Firstly, I will look at life expectancy. For thousands of years, the average human being living on this planet could expect to live just 25 to 30 years. Life was nasty, brutish and short. Here in Australia back in the year 1900, at birth, the average Australian male had a life expectancy of just 55 years of age. After a century of progress, someone born in Australia today has a life expectancy of close to 85 years of age. I believe that the most treasured gift we have is life, and our generation has been gifted an extra quarter of a century of life by our forefathers. So we, here, and almost everyone listening to this broadcast today, especially younger people, need to realise that we have 25 more years of life, on average, granted to us, than our forefathers had who were born at the turn of the 1900s.

Let us now look at the decrease in infant mortality. No-one can think of anything worse than a child dying at birth. A century ago, 70 out of every 1,000 children in Australia died at birth. But, thanks to progress, today the ratio is down to four per 1,000. I put these numbers in perspective at a recent presentation I made at a high school in my electorate. At that school 730 students were enrolled. If our society had not made such a reduction in the rate of infant mortality over the last century, six of the 730 at the school would not have been at the presentation; instead, they would have died at birth.

The worst disaster that has ever occurred in this world is the Spanish flu, which struck after the First World War. This pandemic killed between 10 million and 20 million people. More people were killed by Spanish flu than were killed in the entire First World War. The news today is often filled with stories about the dangers of extreme weather, but the fact is that there has been a 98 per cent decline in weather-related deaths since the 1920s. On average, our grandparents were 50 times more likely to die from extreme weather—storms, floods or heat waves—than we are today. Our wealth and our progress have protected us.

Let us talk about air pollution. Almost every indicator in my home city of Sydney shows that air quality has been improving steadily for the last 20 years. I can remember, when I first started to drive, going over some of the high points in the Sutherland Shire and looking out across Western Sydney and there being a brown pollution haze across all of Western Sydney. Today it is not there, because there have been improvements: unleaded petrol and better engine technology and design. The modern truck engine emits just one-sixteenth of the pollution that a truck engine did a decade ago.

Then there is the success we have had in eradicating killer diseases such as typhoid, cholera, typhus, plague, smallpox, polio and diphtheria—all of which afflicted our forefathers and all of which are almost unheard of today. In my home city of Sydney the water quality at every single beach has substantially improved over the last few decades, and the water continues to get cleaner despite the large increase in Sydney's population. This improvement has come about because we have been wealthy enough to afford to invest in upgrading our stormwater programs and sewage treatment plants.

Today even the least well-off Australians have access to a telephone, television, running water, air conditioning, gas, electricity and a flush toilet. A hundred years ago these were luxuries that even the wealthiest could not imagine having. Deputy Speaker Broadbent, you may be old enough, as I am, to remember the song Red-back on the Toilet Seat. Many of us can remember the days when our bathrooms were outhouses and the worry about going off into the dark and finding a red-back on the toilet seat. But today even the most modest project home has a bathroom of a luxury which would have been unimaginable just 50 years ago.

Another indication of our increasing wealth and opportunity is our ability to travel. Over a century ago it was generally only royalty and the aristocracy—and those being sent off to war—who could afford international travel. In fact, back in 1960, when we had a population of 10 million people, only 77,761 Australians made overseas trips. But last year, with a population a little bit more than doubled to 23 million, the number had increased to the extent that 8.7 million Australians made overseas trips. On a per capita basis, today we are travelling overseas 50 times more than we did back in the 1960s.

Perhaps the best example of our increasing wealth is the iPhone which almost everyone today has in their pocket. When I was a student the only person with a mobile phone was Maxwell Smart, Agent 86, who had his shoe-phone. The idea that there would be a mobile phone was so far-fetched that it was depicted in a comic series. When I first started to work, mobile phones cost the equivalent of $10,000 and weighed the same as two house bricks; you would have needed a large suitcase to carry one. But look at what is in everyone's pocket today. It is not just a mobile phone; it is a high-quality camera which also shoots videos, and it can be used to listen to music and to send messages and as a street directory, a library, a GPS and more. When I was a student each of these technologies would have cost separately over $1 million. Today, for less than $100, I can have all of them in my pocket.

There is more good news: the dire predictions of global warming in the early IPCC reports are simply not coming true. Despite all the claims that the science is settled and that the time for debate is over and the fact that anyone who even dared to question the accuracy of the IPCC's prophecies was labelled a 'denier', for the last 17 years there has been no global warming. We hear the pessimists talking about the limits to growth, but the fact is that we are not running out of resources. Every time someone has predicted we are running out of a resource they have been proven wrong. The reason is that the single greatest resource we have is the creativity of mankind—and that is a resource which has no limits. The doomsayers forget that our history has shown that the biggest counter to any perceived scarcity is not to try to slice the pie into smaller pieces, as those in the opposition do, but to use our human ingenuity to innovate, experiment and take risks to figure out how to make more pies.

While there are so many positives, there are some negative trends. We have seen the breakdown of families and an increase of suicide rates. Today every Australian should be rightfully optimistic about the bright future that we have, though there are some risks. I suggest the main risk to our prosperous future is the failure to understand the drivers of our prosperity over the last two centuries. Those drivers have been our democratic institutions which have provided the economic and political freedoms. It has been our Christian heritage. It has been the constant and real reduction in costs of energy. It has been the increase in international trade. It has been the increase of home ownership. It has been the development of an entrepreneurial culture with incentive for individuals to innovate, experiment and take risks. Combining those things has tapped the creativity of our nation and they have delivered an upward spiral of prosperity. One thing we do know is that the greatest tragedy of the past has been too much government, not too little. We need to learn that central planning fails and concentration of political or economic power has always been inherently bad.

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