Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

No, we'll name the date for the debate. Did everyone hear that?

Honourable members interjecting—

So we are going to be debating debt and deficit at the National Press Club. I thank the Leader of the Opposition for responding so positively to my challenge to debate policy options for Australia's future economy.

Then you look at the remarkable strengths of the Australian people themselves. You know, you travel around the world and you see that in Australia we have remarkable social solidarity. We are a multicultural miracle to the rest of the world and as a result of which there is a huge dynamism in this country brought to our shores by successive waves of migrants over multiple decades. We are proud inheritors of that. So we have a rational basis to be optimistic about our future.

We have excellent relations with our neighbours. Our diplomatic relations with our neighbours in South-East Asia, East Asia and the rest of our wider region are in first-class working order. We have every basis for optimism for the future.

But, on top of that, I would say to the Leader of the Opposition and to those opposite that Australians, by instinct, are a positive people. We have always been that way. We have a can-do approach. If we see a problem, we get up, we fix it and we move on. The whole culture of our country is as a positive entrepreneurial country, and it is that sentiment which we on this side of the House intend to harness as we take the country forward.

In my experience in public life, Australians disdain a culture of negativity. They disdain the negativity which, regrettably, has become characteristic of this place. What I have said earlier in question time today is that the easiest thing you can do in Australian national politics is to use negative invective. The hardest thing you can do is to sit down, look at the facts, get briefed on the facts, look at the policy options—look at evidence based policy—make a decision, then implement it and then make sure that what you have implemented is actually working, and if it is not then reform it and change it.

That is the way you do public policy. Doing that properly in a positive way takes time and mental effort. Engaging in the politics of invective and negativity, frankly, takes about a nanosecond of time. This is another reflection I would leave to he who would put himself forward as the alternative Prime Minister of Australia.

The other thing that I would say about our people—the Australian people right across this vast land of ours—is how much we as a nation relish our unity as a people and how we instinctively resile from those who seek to divide us into one camp or another. I would say again to the Leader of the Opposition that this Australian people wants to see all sides of the political debate work together for the nation's future. So, if you have a genuine contribution to what we do differently on the economy, on asylum seekers policy, on national security, on education, on health, on what we do with housing or on what we do in Indigenous policy, we would like to hear about it!

That is why I said on the question of asylum seekers policy earlier today that, if the Leader of the Opposition would simply avail himself of the opportunity, we in the government would happily accommodate having him fully briefed by the national security agencies on every aspect of the circumstances which our brave men and women in uniform—the Australian Navy—confront on the high seas every day. That is the responsible approach. Then, once he has been briefed on the facts—one of them, of course, is public: the attitude of the government of Indonesia—he can then come and talk to us about what he thinks we should be doing differently, other than what we are. Because, other than that, it is just pure old politics.

Mr Dutton interjecting—

For those opposite who have trumpeted the 'Howard solution' as it was back in those days, I would say one thing: it was a staging post at Nauru, and 70 per cent of them all ended up back in good old Australia—an uncomfortable fact but a fact nonetheless. And do you know something? Facts tend to make our political opponents uncomfortable, because facts should form the basis of policy.

So Australians would like us to be positive in this place. They have a disdain for the politics of negativity and they also have a disdain for the politics of division and disunity. There is one other thing that I would say to the Leader of the Opposition, and I would ask the Leader of the Opposition actually to reflect on this: those in the nation who observe the deliberations of the parliament would like us to show some basic civility to each other as well—some basic civility, and I have not seen a lot of that in evidence in recent times in this place. These, I believe, are the sentiments and the attitudes which the Australian people bring to their expectations of how we as a parliament and how we as a national government and how you as an alternative government behave in this place.

In the Australian Labor Party, our view of political life is about building the house up. We believe in building the house up. It takes time: brick by brick, laying the foundations, setting the walls and constructing the roof. That is how we see the task of nation building; that is how we see our mission in politics.

There is an alternative approach to politics which, unfortunately, I have seen too much of from the Leader of the Opposition, and it is: how do you tear the house down? We build up the house; it seems, regrettably, that those opposite are more interested in tearing the place down. I could say to those opposite: by instinct, I and my colleagues are nation builders. We believe that the business of the nation and the business of the nation's government is to build roads, to build rail, not to walk away from building rail, and to build a first-class, world-class National Broadband Network, and not simply to engage in the very cheap politics of scorn and derision—which is what we hear from those opposite. Can I say on top of that that, when it comes to the foundations of the house, we on this side of the House have laid strong economic foundations for Australia's future. We have strong economic growth—2.5 per cent over the year to March, almost the highest across a troubled OECD—and low unemployment, 5.5 per cent. But here is the killer. Those opposite talk about mismanagement on the part of the government. We have added one million jobs, almost, to the national workforce.

Mr Robert interjecting—

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