Future challenges for the Australian Nation: the changing Australian society

The key to ensuring that this does not happen is choice – the greater choice of individuals in respect to their working conditions, the ability to leave the workforce but re-enter it later on, the means for a parent to remain at home caring for children themselves if that is their wish, and in areas such as the provision of more sophisticated and flexible childcare arrangements.

The return of more than $2 billion a year to in family tax benefits to more than 2 million families and $12 billion a year in income tax cuts to them and others in the general community has been a great step forward.

As importantly, we’ll continue to pursue an industrial relations model that entrenches an individual’s right to negotiate for conditions that suit his or her own circumstances and needs while ensuring proper standards are protected.

In this area also, a crucial start has been made. Hundreds of thousands of individual workplace agreements and certified agreements have been negotiated. Agreements that Labor has vowed to tear up should they come to office, forcing these workers back to either unregistered common law contracts, collective agreements negotiated by union bosses or more lowly-paid awards.

It’s estimated that three quarters of all workplace agreements and certified agreements contain at least one family-friendly provision. Provisions that include flexible start and finish times to coincide with school hours, purchasing additional leave to spend more time with children, carers’ and paternity leave, job share arrangements, the ability to work from home, community service leave and structured career breaks.

It is glaringly obvious that centralised wage structures are simply too slow to respond to modern workplace needs – both from the employer and employees’ perspective. By relying on precedent, they’re invariably suited to the needs of the majority and by entrenching standardisation, they diminish individual choice.

A future Coalition government will remain committed to pursuing greater flexibility in the workplace. Offering choices to workers does not have to compromise the productivity of Australian business. In fact, balanced lives will contribute best to Australia’s industries in the 21^st century.

Expanding childcare choice has been a high priority of the government, with more than 150,000 funded childcare places created since we won office. Initiatives within the Stronger Families and Communities package have targeted those who traditionally had difficulty accessing childcare such as shift-workers, families with sick children and Australians in regional areas. Last financial year, this government allocated close to $1.4 billion to supporting the childcare system and the latest CPI figures show that cost of childcare has dropped by nearly nine per cent since last July.

In short, supporting the needs of working families and ensuring a balance between their responsibilities will require a whole of government response. In a third term, we can make great progress in promoting choice and opportunity within the workplace while strengthening families and the communities in which they live.

Sustainability

Balance and quality are not just goals for our society, for our working and family lives but also vitally important to our environment. Australia’s current and future success is the combination of its people’s talent and the land’s health and capacity to sustain a prosperous population – both must be nurtured.

Environmental issues should never be dealt with as separate from the profitability and sustainability of our industries and the quality of life we enjoy and hope to pass on to our children. The reality is that sustainability is an expression that increasingly denotes the inter-related health and wellbeing of both the environment and the economy.

A whole-of-government response is vital – the success to date and ongoing potential of both the Natural Heritage Trust, renewed in the budget by a further $1 billion commitment, and the Action Plan on Salinity have convinced me of that. I’ve found that there is great cause for optimism – both in regard to the ability of new technologies to solve once intractable problems and the willingness of communities and impassioned individuals to become involved.