Loading Not one of these path-breaking structural changes was delivered by the Liberal Party. The only reform delivered by the Liberal Party – the Howard government’s goods and services tax – did not change individual or corporate behaviour, as the above-mentioned structural reforms so dramatically did. Almost 30 years of strong compound economic growth has produced what you would expect it to produce – a massive increase in national wealth. And that wealth has seen a 70 per cent increase in real wages since the reforms of the late 1980s and early to mid-1990s. Yet we have a Prime Minister stumping the country with the fallacious claim that Labor can’t manage the economy. To paraphrase him, Labor can’t manage its own creation – a dubious proposition even for him. It may gall the Liberal Party that the country had to wait for the Labor Party to give Australia a true market economy – open to the rest of the world but with the flexibility to keep on delivering wealth. But the Liberals are even reactive to market forces. Imagine if a Labor government sought to give itself legislative power to force divestment of individual commercial assets of industrial companies – the business organisations would be looking for reds under beds while The Australian Financial Review would be apoplectic about Labor invoking Marxism.

The Liberal Party has completely given up the economic reform agenda. It has embraced economic obscurantism, seeking to employ 19th century technology in energy, failing completely to understand the economic imperative of climate change and the galloping opportunities of the digital age. Let’s examine what the Prime Minister declares he has on offer as an economic strategy for the next three years and beyond. As far as we can see, two things and two things only: a trickle-down economic policy where if the wealthy accumulate more wealth, some of it may trickle down to the workforce; and unfunded tax cuts five years away. Yet on these paltry foundations, with the economy dribbling along at about half its growth potential, with real wages frozen and with no growth strategy, the Prime Minister repeats his bald-faced claim that the Labor Party can’t manage the economy. It is also indecent of the Liberal Party to represent as fiscal irresponsibility Labor’s sure-footed saving of the economy from the black hole of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Every economic body in the world – the IMF, the OECD, even the World Bank – credits Labor with saving Australia from the tragic losses of a recession with mounting unemployment. The fact that Australia negotiated the economic Valley of Death in 2008 with its growth trajectory intact is further testament to Labor’s superior ability to deal with and adapt the economy to rapidly changing external circumstances. Loading

But it is now more than 20 years since the era of the Hawke and Keating governments. While we are proud of the achievements of our governments, the baton of reform is being grasped by the next generation of Labor leaders. Bill Shorten’s Labor Party presents the most comprehensive and well thought through agenda any opposition has provided to the Australian people. And it is an agenda which represents an appropriate modernisation and rejuvenation of the governing principles which informed and underpinned our governments. Just as we stared down vociferous vested interests to modernise the tax system and make it fairer with the introduction of the capital gains and fringe benefits taxes, so Shorten and Chris Bowen have rightly tackled the blatant inequity and unsustainability of several concessions and tax expenditures – and much to their credit. Just as we lifted school retention rates from around 30 per cent to more than 90 per cent and shook up the tertiary education sector with John Dawkins, modern Labor has embraced a massive uplift in investment in human capital from preschool to university. Just as we built on the Whitlam-Hayden template with universal health care under the mantle of Medicare, Shorten Labor has designed the biggest investment in Medicare since its creation, with its much-needed expansions into enhanced support for cancer sufferers as well as support for seniors in their dental care. Just as we turned Australia’s horizons to the Asia-Pacific, Shorten and Labor have embraced the obvious need for a step change in our economic engagement in the region with their FutureAsia policy framework. And just as we modernised the economy in the face of the challenges of the

day, Shorten Labor is the only party of government focused on the need to modernise the economy to deal with the major challenge of our time: human-induced climate change.