Federal Director’s Address - Federal Council 2011
27-August-2011
Federal Director’s Address
The Nationals Federal Council 2011
Brad Henderson
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen.
On the 21st August last year, The Nationals secured our best federal election result since 1949, winning more seats and more influence, and having played a central role in taking the Rudd-Gillard Labor Government to the brink of defeat.
Labor was stripped of its majority and reduced to cobbling together a rainbow alliance with the Greens and Independents. It was the first time since 1931 that a government was denied a majority after only its first term.
The result was all the more remarkable considering the heights from which Labor had fallen. For the first two years of its three-year term, published opinion polling had Labor’s primary vote at up to 51 percent and its first Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was recording voter satisfaction ratings of up to 71 percent. Labor was in government federally and in seven of Australia’s eight states and territories.
Now, seven months since its federal near-death experience, Labor has dramatically lost government in both Victoria and New South Wales, faces the prospect of another defeat in Queensland and is currently recording a federal primary vote of 27 percent.
At the same time, The Nationals have defied our critics and the doomsayers in emphatic fashion. We have won more seats in Victoria, New South Wales and federally, adding to the increases achieved in Western Australia in 2008.
We have seen off challenges from our opponents, defended our turf, and taken seats off both Labor and the Independents.
We have fought for workers, families, pensioners, Indigenous Australians, young Australians and small business and they have entrusted us with their vote.
We have made dramatic inroads into areas that haven’t historically supported us.
And in the process we have been injecting a new generation of Nationals into Parliament.
But it didn’t just happen.
Central to this success was a belief in ourselves and a belief we could win.
Central to this success was The Nationals’ unswerving determination to stand up for what this party believes in – principles like lower taxes, smaller government and, most importantly, a fair go for people who live, work and run businesses in regional Australia.
And central to this success was a commitment to rally together in a united and tight-knit fighting team.
On no occasion was this better demonstrated than when the federal Nationals fought and ultimately succeeded in defeating Labor’s emissions trading scheme not just once, but twice.
Just as important was the party’s willingness to heed the message that the people sent us in 2007. We have a proud 91-year history of delivering for the people we represent. But as a mature organisation, we needed to make changes to sharpen our fulfilment of our role as the only party that puts regional Australia first.
There have been many changes and they continue. They must.
This weekend, in a first for any political party in this country, we have invited the Australian public to participate in our deliberations through our live online broadcast at www.nationals.org.au and I welcome you to our meeting.
This online broadcast is a further demonstration of the party’s inclusiveness and innovation.
Compare this to the stage management of Labor conferences, or worse, the duplicity of the Greens who claim to be crusaders for transparency but who lock themselves away behind closed doors for their conferences.
Our online broadcast follows the party’s successful initiation last year of a community preselection to select its candidate for the state seat of Tamworth – another first for an Australian political party.
The Nationals is a genuinely democratic party; a “grassroots” organisation in which party members drive our policy development, select our candidates and run the party.
We are delighted to open our Federal Council to the people and we relish the opportunity to talk directly with Australians.
We have also developed a new policy platform; built on the principles our party has long stood for, but tailored to capitalising on the opportunities facing regional Australia and the nation today while also tackling the very real challenges that still exist.
Voters embraced this Plan for Regional Australia which sets out our agenda for government, not just for the next term, but for the next decade and beyond. This is a living plan and we will take an even more comprehensive version to the next election, encapsulating the feedback from our continuing engagement with industry, representative organisations and the public.
Regional Australians – and others – also embraced our election campaign, which celebrated the contribution that regional Australia makes to the nation while encouraging regional Australians to make their voice heard by uniting behind The Nationals. Ours was a positive campaign, because we are positive people with a positive plan for the future. We have shown that by speaking with one voice, regional Australians can effect change despite Parliament’s numbers being dominated by city-based MPs and Senators.
On the other hand, Labor’s squibbing on what its then Prime Minister had referred to as the “greatest moral challenge of our time” provided stark illustration that today’s Labor stands for nothing but its own self interest. Add to that the litany of broken promises, mismanagement, over-promising and under-delivering that regularly punctuated Labor’s first term and, finally, the political assassination of Kevin Rudd by the current Prime Minister and the faceless men of the Labor Party.
Little wonder that many voters made the decision on 21 August 2010 that Labor just cannot be trusted, while many more have since come to the same conclusion.
Labor will do and say anything to get elected. But they don’t do what they say.
The once proud party of the worker now panders to the extreme Greens and a gaggle of fringe-dwelling Independents.
After explicitly promising not to introduce a carbon tax prior to the last election, the Gillard Government is now doing so. If they’re successful, millions of working families that it claimed to represent in 2007 will now be punished with even higher household bills. Business costs will rise, local industries will close down and Aussie jobs will be exported. Regional Australia will be the first and worst hit.
All this pain for no environmental gain – the government’s own modelling shows that emissions will still increase.
It is clear that there is widespread disappointment with the performance of Julia Gillard since she seized the mantle of Prime Minister. Like her predecessor Mr Rudd, she has consistently over-promised and under-delivered. We don’t know what she stands for, she is not in control of the national agenda, and Australia is drifting under her leadership.
Kevin Rudd could not trust her and her carbon tax lie has shown that Australians cannot trust her either.
What is also clear is that the Independent experiment has failed. By backing Julia Gillard into office last year or sitting on the fence, the Independents have proved that they do not have the national interest at heart.
Collectively, the Independents have given Australia the worst government since Whitlam – history may say the worst ever.
A Labor party, at war within itself over what and who it stands for, is captive to the extremism of the Greens whose stated desire is “about recreating Australia for the new century street by street, community by community, city by city”. Between them, to the obtuse applause of the Independents, they are plunging our nation deeper into debt, mortgaging the future of our children and exporting the opportunity that exists within our great regions offshore.
The choice at the next election is very clear.
Labor, the Greens and the Independents represent an enormous threat to regional Australia and the nation.
A vote for any of them is a vote for more disasters, more costs, regulation and job losses, more social engineering and more destruction of our economy.
A vote for The Nationals and Liberal Coalition will restore good government, put regional Australia and the nation back on track, and unlock the enormous opportunities that Australia still has in what is a rapidly changing world.
I am proud to be part of that team and I am proud of what we have achieved so far. But we are only as good as our next fight and we have much more to do. The nation’s future, and the future of eight million regional Australians, depends on us restoring good government to Australia.
I thank our hardworking federal parliamentary team led by Warren Truss. It is a privilege to work with such a close-knit and genuine group of people who are so passionate about regional Australia. Equally, their staff, led by David Whitrow, deserve thanks for all their efforts and support.
I am very grateful to party president John Tanner and executive members Larry Anthony, John Sharp and Pam Stallman for all their support; Peter Langhorne for his work on the campaign and our policy platform; our Federal Management Committee, State Presidents and my State Director colleagues who do a terrific job.
I also thank the members of our Nationals campaign team at CHQ and all those party members and campaign volunteers whose support is so critical to our success.
I thank my Liberal colleague Brian Loughnane and his team. This election we again shared a joint campaign headquarters and again, it worked exceptionally well.
I want to thank our donors and supporters big and small. The Nationals are largely funded by donations from people who support the role our party plays in Parliament and the work we do to advance the interests of all regional Australians. Without that support, The Nationals would not be able to operate, let alone compete against the combined campaign resources of Labor, the unions and the Greens.
I want to thank my creative team for the acclaimed campaign that they developed with us; Paul Swain, Alan Johnston, Stephen Forth and more recently Alan Engert and their respective teams. I also want to thank Mike Sexton for his counsel.
Our wonderful little team at Federal Secretariat are a delight to work with, they love our party and they put in 110% day in, day out – and I thank Sue Mitchell, Tory Mencshelyi and Erin Adams, our casual staff Cate McMullan and Meg Keating, and Rina Benedictos for her stint on the team.
I want to thank my wife Tracy and two boys Billy and Curtis for their support and for the many sacrifices they make to allow me to do this job. In so doing, I extend that thanks to the partners of our parliamentary and organisational team which is another critical ingredient to our success.
Finally, I want to humbly thank all those regional Australians who placed their trust in us at the last election.
With your continuing support, The Nationals will fix this government’s mess and deliver a fair share for regional Australia and a fair go for all Australians.