We've been reminded, as you said, Llywydd, repeatedly of that this term. Later this month, it will be two years since the death of the First Minister who guided the National Assembly through most of that first decade of devolution. It's not that much over a year since the death of our colleague Carl Sargeant, and less than a year since the loss of Steffan Lewis, one of the brightest hopes of this fifth Assembly. There is sadness and there is sorrow in our brief history. And, while I'm sure that it is part of the way that any institution matures, I'm not sure that we saw that coming at us quite that quickly at the start of the devolution journey.

Llywydd, in my fourth area of disappointment, we quite certainly had not expected in 1999 that our financial history would be quite such a game of two halves. In the first Assembly term, the Welsh Government's budget grew by 10 per cent in cash terms in every single year—every single year, 10 per cent more to spend on Welsh public services than we'd had the year before that. In the second Assembly term, our budgets grew by 5 per cent year on year on year in cash terms. Even in the third Assembly term, our budgets grew in real terms over the whole of that period.

Now, since then, the financial skies have darkened dramatically. I met no-one in those earliest days who had any inkling that, by the end of our second decade, we would have experienced the longest and deepest period of public expenditure restraint not for 20 years, but for 200 years. And, as we said earlier in this afternoon's proceedings, in the first decade of devolution, child poverty in Wales fell steadily—not fast enough, not far enough for many of us, but it fell year on year on year. At the end of this Assembly term, 50,000 more children will live in poverty in Wales than in 2010. It's hard, I think, to find a stronger contrast between the first and second decades of this Assembly term.

In 1999, Llywydd, I don't think we'd heard the term 'food bank'. We certainly would have been horrified to have seen people begging on our streets for food, or street homelessness so rapidly on the rise. We could not have anticipated the impact that a decade of austerity would have had on the fabric of our public services and our society, but I think we would have been shocked to think that we would have had to face it before we were 20 years old.

Finally, Llywydd, those of us who campaigned for devolution in those long years after 1979 cannot but be shocked that we moved in just two decades from a position in which 'a stronger voice in Europe' was a slogan that united political parties in Wales to a position where Wales has voted to leave the European Union. I think that if you'd said that to somebody in 1999, they would have thought that that would be a very unlikely eventuality indeed.

So, Llywydd, I wanted to end by looking ahead to thinking of the sorts of challenges that we still face and will face over the next 20 years, some of which I don't think that we could ever have anticipated at the beginning. I hope that, over the next 20 years, we will have done more to embrace the kinder sort of politics that you mentioned in your introduction; that we will have accepted the challenge to demonstrate in this Assembly that it is possible still to treat each other with respect while still tackling the genuine differences that lie between us—the right and proper differences that lie between us in any democracy—about the priorities that we see for Wales.

I hope that, in the next 20 years, we will be able to say that progressive politics will have been preserved here in Wales, that it is still a place where collective solutions are crafted to collective problems, and where systems are changed to reach into the lives of those with the least, not just those with the most, and that we can demonstrate, as we are in this Assembly term, that that progressive trend in Welsh politics is by no means at an end.

Last month, we abolished imprisonment for non-payment of council tax. This month, we have introduced a Bill to remove the defence of reasonable punishment of children into its Stage 1 consideration. Next month, we will introduce a Bill to extend the franchise to 16 and 17-year-olds and make the democratic process more accessible all to Wales.

That sense of a progressive social justice agenda for Wales has been the hallmark of our first 20 years, and I hope it will be there through the next 20 years as well, just as I hope that we will demonstrate that the devolution journey is not yet over, that the things that we have added to the repertoire of our responsibilities in the first 20 years are not the end of devolution. We have the Thomas commission on criminal justice. We have a greater interest in this fifth Assembly than at any other time in thinking about what parts of the benefit system might allow us to do if they were in the hands of this Assembly.

It is right and proper, I think, that devolution will continue to be the journey that it has been into the next 20 years, and, at the same time, that we will use our efforts to tackle an issue that is more urgent today than we ever recognised 20 years ago. Our awareness of the climate emergency, the impact on our environment, that has grown beyond anything we could have imagined 20 years ago, both across the world and here in Wales as well. We have led the way in some ways, through our plastic bag levy, through our recycling rates, but there is so much that we have to do to create environmental justice here in Wales, reversing the decline in biodiversity, exploiting the huge advantages that Wales possesses to deploy the renewable energy technologies of the future.

And, finally, and maybe greatest of all, it seems to me, that the next 20 years will have to face the equality challenge, the challenge that lies there at the heart of the well-being of future generations Act, to make Wales a more equal place in the future. In 1976, Llywydd, the United Kingdom was the most equal society in Europe. Today, we are amongst the most unequal. And with that comes all those corrosive effects that go with inequality on that scale. A more equal society does better economically, enjoys better health, and has a greater sense of community cohesion. That’s the prize that there is in a Wales that is dedicated to equality between and across the generations, and it’s a challenge for the next 20 years even more significantly than it has been in our first history.