CIVIC REGiEPTION. AL3AN," v. A. 11TH OCTOBER, -196+
S~ ehb h Prime Ministero the nt. Hon. Sir Robert Menzies
Mr. Mayor, Your Excellency, Parliamentary Colleagues and
Ladies and Gentlemen You have just been reminded that this afternoon
in another place I have to make a speech about the Memorial,
so I won't make it now. I will only hope to make it then
properly. But I do want to thank you, Sir. This is, T
think, the second occasion on which I have given tongue in
this hall. The first tirrn3 I was on a political errand
you are quite right, in 1948. 1 must have had a very rich
supporter or two in i'lest Australia at that time because he
chartered a plane and this was a humble means of getting me
to make about ten times as many speeches as I otherwise would
have made, and one of them was hiere, and I always remember
that as we flew in, we seemed to just dodge over the hump
of the hill and core down on the lunway. It looked frightfully
close, and my Press Secretary at that time said, holding a
piece of paper out to me, " Any famous last words that I can
throw out?" ( Laughter) No doubt, a lot has happened since
then and I am still here.
Sir, the one tViing T would like to say in your
Town Hail and in the presence of yourself as ' Mayor is that I
always get a certain amount of " kick", in the homely phrase,
outiofs tin a enre of municipal government. I'm rnot
just saying that. I say this for the most, I think, profoundly
important reasons. In Australia we are accustomed to local go-vernment7
to voluntary associations of various kinds. to
State Parliaments and Governments to a Coimonwealth Parliament
and Government, and this distribution of the activities of
government is really one of the reasons whiy we have never run
any serious risk in Australia of comding under the grip of a
dictatorship. Government has grown properly from the grass
roots and this, I think, is tremendously important.
I have thought it more and more important in
recent years when I have observed, as you have, how many new
countries have been brought into existence masses of them
in Africa, a number of them in Asia new countries with
newly-won independence and too many people in the western
world have been under Zhe impression that all you have to do
is to give them a constitution, give them the means of electing
a parliament and then kiss them goodbye and say, " Now, you
are a democracy." This, of course, is all nonsense,
Democracy can't be built from the top down.
Democracy has to be built from the bottom up, and the reason
why so many of these now countries have become, in reality,
dictatorships with no parliamentary oppositions with no
opponents worth talking about to the powers-that-be the reason
is that these countries started at the wrong end. If they had
begun by having local councils just as the Parliament in Great
Britain began with the hundreds, the moots, under the spreading
oak tree and gradually developed into some form of national
representational body, so in Australia we have had, with all
the benefit of history behind it, the same kind of experience. / 2
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We are trying to do this with countries for which we
are responsible, i am interested to see my valued colleague,
Mr. Hasluck here today, because for many years he was the
Minister for Territories, and he seeing this with his usual
clarity, decided that the place to start in was the village,
to establish what you might call a sort of shire or local council,
in which the indigenous people could take a hand, and in which
they could learn some of the arts of government. Therefore,
I come back to where I began by saying that I like to be, every
now and then, associated with a municipal body because I know
that this is, foundationally, the beginning of the structure of
self-government and therefore a very precious heritage that
we have. I suppose I ought to think like this because the
first time I ever heard about politics was in a little village
in the bush in Victoria where my father happened to be a shire
councillor, and the shire councillor from the North Riding used
to come down twenty miles and then my father would hop into a
buggy with him and go another twenty miles to attend the meeting
of the Council of the Shire of Dimboola. I must confess that
in those early days I rather thought that a Riding was something
that people had to ride to. It seemed like it in those days
before motor cars.
And so i began to hear about self-government and
then about state government because I was in there myself, and
now about CommonwJ-ealth Government. Every bit of this experience
accumulates, do you see. It accunulates so that we can finally
look around our o~-n country and say we have a solid s+ ructure
and no crazy fool can destroy it. This is fiimly based on
representative government all the way through. This issomething
to be thankful for? something to be proud of. My only regret
is that so many of the new countries will have to learn by
painful experience what we have been able to acquire by long
practice and by some inherited talent for this kind of thing.
No. r, Sir, I know there is a little matter of food and
drink, I know then I am whisked off like my wife who, like me,
is delighted to be here because it is her first visit. I have
t-en interested in a variety of things. She has been looking
at wildflowers all the time. Anybody who has a view to put on
any of these wildflowers, please come up and give her the
right drill, and after that we will go up on to the hill where
I have been solemnly warned the wind is so strong that it rill
be a physical impossibility to unveil anything. ( Laughter) But
we will do our best. Thank you very much.
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