Australia truly is a great country.  What a mighty future we have, if we have the right sort of Government.  A Government which puts its emphasis on people.  A Government working as a team not just concerned with  the image of one man.  A Government with depth - with strong, capable and responsible Ministers.  A Government you elect not tied to outside powerful forces, not subject to big union direction, not answerable to a non-parliamentary executive in its policy processes, not wavering towards the Socialist Left in ideological commitment.  A Government consulting with and working for all Australians and their families.  As we launch our campaign today, I could promise you the world: tell you that if you vote for the National Party you will live happily ever after.  That's not the case - you know it, and I know it.  What I can do is give you the commitment that the  National Party will work to make Australia a better  place to live, to work, and to play.  We know that small government is the best government;  and that government intervention in the lives of men and women reduces their initiative and lessens the ability of individuals to choose in their work and leisure, in education, health care, investment and spending.  Halfway through a normal Parliamentary term, Labor is taking us to the polls.  Before this inordinately long campaign began, Labor tried to head off criticism by conditioning Australians to accept an early poll.  Saying it would happen does not make it right. In Government, the Nationals will press for the Coalition Government to go its full three-year term.  When we were in Government last we made some mistakes.  But we've learnt from those mistakes.  But in only 18 months, Labor too has made mistakes.  It bas put the nation in reverse.  The family standards and social values on which Australia's heritage and traditions were built have been forgotten.  The integrity of the High Court, the final Court of Appeal in the land, is threatened by the indifference of Labor to the findings of the Senate Inquiry into Mr Justice Murphy.  The investigator, and not the accused, is being made the butt of Labor criticism in comments about the report of Mr Frank Costigan, QC, into the Painters and Dockers’ Union.  Hard drugs and crimes associated with their distribution and addiction must not be ignored.  Labor's uniform Aboriginal Land Rights legislation threatens to divide white and black communities. Mineral rights must remain with the Crown.  There will be no uniform legislation with the Nationals  _-_ and the Northern Territory legislation will be amended.  Yesterday in the United States, the conservative leadership  of President Ronald Reagan was swept back into office.  Americans can stand tall again - so could Australians.  Americans have confidence in their conservative Government's emphasis on individual initiative and enterprise and fax cuts.  So should we.  In the UK, lasting economic recovery is under way under the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher.  So too, lasting economic growth and recovery in the private sector will take place under the conservatives in Australia.  Like the Democrats in the United States, so Mr Mondale's ideological running-mates, the Australian Labor Party, should be swept from office, to give Australians a go.  What holds many Australians back is the high level of Personal taxation, funding the biggest-spending, biggest-taxing, biggest deficit government in Australian history.  Under Labor, our national debt has increased dramatically.  Under Labor, the interest bill exceeds the education vote, nearly equals the defence vote, and worse lies ahead.  Big spending means more taxes.  Big spending and a renegotiated Prices and Incomes Accord, dictated by the ACTU, mean more taxes for all Australians.  Labor's first fax on capital - on lump sum superannuation is already operating.  We'll abolish it.  We all know the union emphasis on capital taxes and wealth taxes - as well as death duties, which of course includes the family home too.  The Nationals will not have a bar of any of them.  They are on Labor's fax agenda.  They will never be on ours.  Our tax reform starts with those who need the help the most - the families where one partner works and the other stays home to look after the children.  For fax purposes, we will give families with children the option of splitting the breadwinners' pay, up to a determined limit.  Under this reform we would expect a one-income family on the average income of about $350 a week to save about $8 a week in tax.  That means a holiday away, new clothes, a new lounge suite, help with a deposit on a new home, or a chance to save.  Our second family tax cut option is for families with children where both parents work, and for one-parent families.  Where both parents work, we will give them a tax rebate on the cost of child care.  For one-parent families, the sole parent rebate and the new child care rebate will be adjusted to give the same level of help.  The saving will be comparable with that available under income splitting.  If you save, it means banks have more money to lend to others.  If you spend more, it means business picks up.  Either way, it means more jobs.  Most of those jobs will be with small businesses:  not just with big corporations or with big government.  We always read about big business, and of course, it plays an important role in the development of the nation.  We hear little, however, about the thousands of Australians who have decided to have a go and set up on their own in business, in trade, or a profession.  Some 60 percent of our workforce is in small business.  Small business is big business.  We want to see it get bigger, to provide permanent jobs to help our young people and those now unemployed because of changing economic circumstances.  Labor's attack on unemployment has been directed to employing more public servants in Canberra: a 4.3 percent increase in the last 12 months, compared with only two percent over the whole seven years of the previous Coalition Government.  But who will pay for Government if we are all employed by it?  We need less government, not more government.  Labor has maintained the Coalition's Community Employment Program - and we will continue this scheme.  But Australians need permanent jobs.  Certainly we need education and skill in our workforce, and training for the unemployed, but we need to help the private employer so that he can provide jobs.  The Nationals will work to reduce the size of government, to eliminate unnecessary red tape which so wears down initiative and individual enterprise.  We will reduce the tax rate too on private company income to help fund small business growth.  Among our most efficient small business men and women are Australian farmers.  Labor is making it harder and harder for them and their family business to survive.  Family farms are facing huge problems.  Overseas markets have contracted, with hardly a  protest from Labor. We will pursue them.  Costs have risen alarmingly. We will attack them.  We will initiate a major new trade drive in association with agriculture commodity groups in markets in Japan, Korea, South East Asia, the Middle East, America and Europe.  We will give more than just a sympathetic car to the difficulties in Australia's great beef, wool, wheat, grains, fat lamb, poultry and horticultural industries.  We'll push ahead with the brucellosis and tuberculosis eradication campaign, and bring it to a successful conclusion.  Charges for export inspection, where necessary to gain access to overseas markets, will be eliminated.  We recognise the worries of fat lamb producers and other farmers about the level of imports from New Zealand.  We will enter immediate discussions with industry organisations and under the CER, with the New Zealand Government.  For the sugar industry there are enormous difficulties.  Labor says, "Buy Australia's sugar overseas."  The Nationals say, "We will support the sugar industry as it has supported Australia by ils export earnings for  so long."  Me will ensure unemployment benefits are available to cane growers, subject to their preparedness to accept work and their income being below a determined level.  We will allow them to remain on their farms pending job availability.  In conjunction particularly with the Queensland Government, adequate funds will be provided under Rural Reconstruction for carry-on loans and debt reconstruction.  Our cane growers and millers and those whole communities dependent on sugar, with Government's, can then determine permanent solutions to the industry's problems without premature and heartbreaking bankruptcies and financial collapse.  Immediately after the election, we will begin talks with all sections of the industry and the Queensland Government on the progress of the Sugar Industry Review and the prospects for a new International Sugar Agreement.  We will initiate consultations between the industry and customer countries who are parties to bilateral sugar agreements with Australia.  A few years ago crude oil prices increased sharply.  Today they have eased.  Fuel prices for agriculture and fishing must come down.  Heavy tariffs are adding to the already high prices for imported headers and big agricultural farm machinery.  These will be replaced by bounties.  Recurring drought is a worry; although 1 suspect few today in Tamworth, or in some other parts of Australia, would realise that was so!  The Nationals will introduce a new drought policy.  Where necessary, financial assistance will be provided on a continuing basis and not terminated where drought continues at the end of each financial year.  We will introduce too a bicentennial water resources program.  $10 million will be allocated at a dollar for dollar basis with the States for an on-farm water and soil conservation and  tree regeneration.  A worthwhile Income Equalisation Deposit scheme will be reintroduced.  Tax averaging will be maintained,  For those who have been plagued with uncertainty through  Labor's action in seeking to locate army range and  exercise areas on productive agricultural land, there  will be the recognition of landholders' rights to private ownership.  Crown land will be sought first.  No measures will be taken without consultation with people affected.  Productive land will not be used for these purposes.  Australia's great mining industries, so important for regional development and in generating export earnings, face slack world markets and low prices.  Increasing costs threaten their competitiveness.  The Nationals will work to reduce the red tape of unnecessary bureaucratic regulations which stifle the development of new mines.  We will work to make Australia more competitive in  processing our raw materials.  Uranium exports will be permitted subject to strict safeguards - and not just from ore produced in South Australia.  The major source of jobs is in the manufacturing sector.  Rapid technological development, wage and labour on-costs out of line with our competitors, have reduced seriously our industrial capacity.  Manufacturing must be allowed to be internationally competitive.  Our tax and wage policies will help.  We will introduce measures to allow manufacturing to become more export minded.  We will pursue tariff reduction and work to free world trade.  Research and development are vital to our industrial development.  The CSIRO will be funded to ensure the maintenance of its programmes and in all industry sectors.  We will ensure it is able to maintain research in the many primary industry fields where the benefits of its work has been so invaluable and unique among world-wide research establishments.  We will help the CSIRO diversify into other areas of high tec. and industrial research.  We recognise the importance, too, of basic research in tertiary institutions, through the NHMRC and in private industry.  Incentives will be introduced to ensure Australia maintains its place in the technological race.  Research and development within the Defence vote will be concentrated, wherever possible, in private industry to encourage Australian procurement and the development of new industrial capability with both defence and civil applications.  The election of a Labor Government in New Zealand with policies identical to those of many within Australia's Labor Party, threatens the survival of ANZUS.  We will enter into immediate negotiations with New Zealand on the future of ANZUS, and failing their successful conclusion, pursue the negotiation of a bilateral defence agreement with the United States.  Our relations with Indonesia over Timor and with ASEAN countries in general over Labor's initiatives with Vietnam have deteriorated under Labor.  That cannot continue.  We will restore responsibility to Australia's foreign relationships. We will play a continuing positive role within the western alliance and with our regional and oceanic neighbours.  At the same time as Labor has sought a more independent and non-aligned role, isolated from our friends and allies, it has allowed Australia's defence capability to slide.  Remember the HMS Invincible non-dry docking fiasco and the effect not only on our relationships with the United Kingdom but with the USA?  In Service numbers and in training opportunities, the last 18 months has seen a serious defence decline.  Conditions of service too were affected by tax decisions affecting lump sum defence superannuation and by taxing half Reservists' pay. Even for the use of recreational facilities built by servicemen and women in their own time, Labor has threatened to charge.  These will be reversed.  In our first budget we will provide an extra $80 million for defence, over and above the considerable increased spending committed under the Five Year Defence Plan.  In defence, our first priority will be to correct the identifiable deficiencies in the Australian Defence Force.  Particular emphasis will be placed on northern defence.  Our initiative to build a RAAF base for a new FA/18 squadron at Tindal near Katherine in the Northern Territory will proceed.  New procurement necessary for modernisation will be funded.  Modernisation of the arms and equipment of the Operational Deployment Force at Laverack Barracks in Townsville will be given priority.  Training and exercising will be maintained to ensure operational standards.  The Reserves will be given an identifiable peactime role. Establishment levels and training days will be set at levels adequate to sustain required levels of efficiency.  Events of the past few weeks highlight the threat of terrorism and the fragility of peace in so many areas of the world.  No party has a priority on abhorrence at the possibility of war - nuclear or conventional.  Me will maintain our defence relationships.  The joint facilities with the United States in Australia are a positive contribution to ensuring war will never occur.  These we will maintain.  Australians have a great future with the right Government.  Our Government will not attack the elderly.  And we will abolish Labor's assets test.  Have you seen the forms?  The worry they bring, the "Pay As You Die" scheme,  the attack on those who have saved hard all their lives - we condemn this test.  Our aged pensioners, our returned Servicemen and Servicewomen have lived through two World Wars, depressions and recessions, and they deserve better from Government.  We will ensure people are not disadvantaged where they endeavour to protect themselves for their retirement.  Nothing gives Australians more pride than the international successes of our sporting men and women.  Remember the feeling that swept Australia when Australia II won the America's Cup?  Or the pride when Dean Lukin lifted that great weight  to win the Olympic gold medal at Los Angeles?  In Government, the Coalition developed the Institute of Sport. It will be expanded.  Help will be given too, not just for the best, but so that all men, women and children will recognise the value of keeping fit.  Fitness is a good investment - healthy people do not need hospitals; healthy people do not need doctors.  A healthy nation will save the taxpayer money.  For those who do need health care, Medicare will be revised.  Gap insurance will be re-introduced.  Agencies for Medicare will be established so that every town and suburb will enjoy access for processing patients’ claims.  The 35-day limit for the chronically ill will be lifted.  You once more will have a choice, your doctor or the hospital's - whichever suits you best.  Australia's high standards of medical and hospital facilities must be maintained.  Private nursing homes will be given appropriate status in the nation's health care system.  The medical profession will not be discriminated against as it is under Labor.  Education is a right for all Australians.  We will give the choice: between the government or the independent school System.  All parents should have the right to choose the education they wish for their children.  All children will have the right to some Government assistance for their education.  Whatever the school they attend, we will ensure they get it.  School cadets with the backing of the Department of Defence, once more will be funded.  $15 million will be allocated as a separate line item in the first Coalition Budget and within the defence vote for this purpose.  Access to post-secondary education, technical and academic, is essential.  TEAS levels cannot be allowed to continue so much below unemployment benefits.  Regional education centres with great institutions like the University of New England, and regional Colleges of Advanced Education, must be funded to allow them to grow and develop alongside their city counterparts.  The impetus given TAFE Colleges by Federal funding under previous  Coalition Governments will be maintained.  Residential colleges in tertiary institutions, under Labor next year, would lose their federal support.  We will implement the recommendations of the Tertiary Education Commission to ensure students forced to live away from home can receive a tertiary education, without being disadvantaged through excessive residential college fees.  Good communications are essential to us all. We will ensure your telephone works and that competition is available in the Systems able to use the telephone network.  The Commonwealth Bicentennial Road Programme was a National Party initiative. It has led to significant highway development in the last two years. It will be maintained. In conjunction with State Governments and Local Government we will ensure the construction and maintenance of Australia's overall road network is funded.  In 18 months of Labor, the directions of Australia subtly, and sometimes blatantly, have been changed.  The breaking of the drought and the surge in national income that resulted have concealed a continued underlying increase in real levels of unemployment.  They have absorbed a malaise of a burgeoning national debt, excessive deficits, too high taxes and overspending.  Unless the 'no' is given to Labor's big spending, interest rates will increase and taxes go up. New capital taxes will be introduced/ and inflation will again spiral.  On December 1, you will vote not just for the House of Representatives, but in each State for half an expanded Senate.  A vote for our Coalition team in New South Wales, and for the National Party team in each other mainland State, will ensure that proper and adequate scrutiny is given to all legislation.  The importance of the Senate is not just in the area of legislative scrutiny, but in the significance of the reports of its Committees.  The Report into animal welfare, now nearing finality, the National Party awaits with interest.  Effective, balanced consideration against the aggressive arguments of vocal minorities, such as ... animal liberationists whose views so often are based on emotion, not common sense, is essential.  That, your National Party Senate candidates will bring.  You will also be called to vote on two referenda.  The first, the so-called Simultaneous Elections question, is itself a misnomer.  The intention is, of course, to make the term of Senators subject to the whim of the Prime Minister in the same manner as the terms of the Members of the House of Representatives.  Were this to pass, it would threaten the independence of the Senate in passing proper judgement on Government legislation.  It would lead to more elections, not less.  It would threaten the very review process which is the strength of Australia's two House Parliamentary system.  The second question on the reference of powers from the States to the Commonwealth, equally we reject.  When Labor is in office in four States, the prospects of a greater concentration of power in Canberra are apparent.  There is a process for Constitutional transfer of powers already available.  It should not be changed.  To this referendum question we also recommend you vote ‘no’.  Above all, we ask you, on December 1, to think of your future and that of your family.  The Nationals will take a stand for you and Australia.  Join us and vote for the Nationals.