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5:50 AM Tue 4 Nov 2008 GMT
 | | 'Murdoch is passionate about manufacturers and business maintaining its competitive advantage in the world.'
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Rupert Murdoch fears Australia has become the land of the bludger, losing its pioneer sense of innovation and competitive spirit.
The chairman and chief executive officer of News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch delivered the first Boyer Lecture in the series 'A Golden Age of Freedom' at the Opera House last week.
His message? Australian manufacturers and businesses need to revive our spirit of innovation and become more competitive on a global scale.
Here's an extract from his motivational and highly insightful speech.
'We need to revive the sense of Australia as a frontier country, and to cultivate Australia as a great centre of excellence. Unlike our parents and grandparents, this new frontier has little to do with the bush or the outback. Today the frontier that needs sorting is the wider world. Complacency is our chief enemy.
Internationalisation means both opportunity and competition. It also means being clearer about the nature of Australia's identity, its qualities and its collective character. A few months back I spent some time in India and China. These two countries account for more than a third of the world's population. For most of my lifetime the people of these great countries were incarcerated by communism or caste.In sheer numbers the emergence of India and China as economic powers and the wealth that they are creating is accompanied by a rise of a new middle class.
Over the next 30 years or so two or three billion people will join this new global middle class. The world has never seen this kind of advance before. These are people who are intent on developing their skills, improving their lives and showing the world what they can do. And they live right in Australia's neighbourhood.
The alarmists will tell you Australia cannot compete with these nations. That is rubbish. In this new world Australia has many advantages. These advantages include being an open, democratic and multi-racial society, built on the rule of law. We have great resources as a civil society with a tradition of generosity and support.
To compete well and use our human capital to the best, we will have to draw on these advantages and make our country stronger. That means being less dependent on government, less complacent about our national institutions, more willing to accept radical reform, and more trusting in our creativity and our competence .
[We] need to reduce dependency on government . to reform our education system . to reconcile with Australia's Aboriginal population and to maintain a liberal immigration system. At a time when the world's most competitive nations are moving their people off government subsidy, Australians seem to be headed in the wrong direction.
In a recent paper [the director of the Institute for Private Enterprise] Des Moore pointed out that while real incomes had increased since the end of the 1980s, about 20 per cent of the working aged population today received income support, compared with 15 per cent two decades ago. While a safety net is warranted for those in genuine need, we must avoid institutionalising idleness. The bludger should not be our national icon.'
Podcasts, mp3 files, audio and transcripts are available at abc.net.au/rn/boyerlectures
by Jeni Bone
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