OPENING OF TI-E SCOTTISH AMICABLE LIIE ASSURANCE CO.
MELBOURN'E 29TH NOVEMBER
Speech by the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Menzies/$ O
WB~ ERflA
Sir and Gentlemen: LIW
I was very interested to be reminded thw
your directors, Lord Dilsiand and the Earl of Elgin arñ ht
of the Thistle. I think they were both present when I was
somewhat incautiously installed in that Order.
I remember another thing about that event and
that was that the previous evening att Holyrood, The Queen said
to me, " How am I to pronounce your name, tomorrow, because I
summon you up Menzies or Mingles?" And I said, "' Ma'am, in
this place, Mingles." 1 ( Laughter) And so I was duly installed
as Robert Gordon Mingles and if anybody takes exception to that,
I cantt help it because they will persist, Sir, in Australia
in calling me Menzies. I was trying to remember this morning whether I hnd
given any of you my reminiscences on that point. There was a
vast patriotic dinner in London, one of those things at which
800 people are present and speeches are made, frequently very
tedious speeches, and naturally in that category, I was one of
the speakers, and they always have a red-conted gentleman in
dharge who, though I suspect very strongly that he comes from
East London somewhere, speaks with the most polished accents of
the Home Counties. " Pray silence for " and then running on
right through your description, you see. He came up to me one
evening, having annoiinced me a few times before and said in a
hoarse voice, very Scottish voice, " Excuse me, Sir, but am I to
announce ye as Menzies or by your pr-r-roper name. ( Laughter)
Now, Sir, I am of course delighted to a-ssist in any
way at a Scottish invasion of Australia, because I know that it
is all to the good. In fact, Hugh and I were in other company
on Saturday night and were told that 150,000 people of Scottish
birth are in Australia not enough you may say but quality
counts more than quantity, except at election time. ( Laughter)
But my embarrassment doesn't arise from having to
say something good about the Scots, about the Scottish Amicable;
it arises from the fact that inadvertently, time after time, I
have been persuaded to open an office in this city for an
insurance or assurance society. This is becoming most
embarrassing. They are all in competition one with the other.
They are all able to ask their field staff, to authorise their
field staff to say,. " Of course, our company has a very special
relationship to the Commonwealth Government. You know, the
Prime Minister opened our building." And that is really why
I decided that I wiould let them all come so that in the end
I could have been completely impartial.
Over on the other side of Collins Street, I made
rude remarks about the building on this side of Collins Street
and then found that I had to open the building. on this side of
Collins Street. I was just recalling this morning that in my
respectable days at the Bar, I remember appearing in a case
involving the valuation of a property in Queen Street and I ma-de
a most powerful case to show that Queen Street was a dead area
anyhow. It could never be a live place because it ran uphill and
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business people didn't like streets that ran uphill. It was
a very powerful argument before the late Mr. Justice Starke.
He dismissed it. And rightly because now this great canyon
of buildings is the very heart of so much of the business and
financial life of a city which remains in so many ways the
financial leader in Australia.
I have made my policy to you; I have shown that
there is a certain embarrassment about this and having done
that, I would just like to offer you my own testimony about
life assurance. When I first became counsel at the Bar, I took
life assurance, usually prodded on by a gimlet-eyed fellow
who called into my chambers and said " Have you got enough
insurance?" AndI took what I thought I could afford to pay
for and like everybody of my generation in this room today,
I have put in a number of years now regretting that I didn' t
take more. It seems so much at the time doesn't it? It
seems so little as you look back on it ana yet if we had all
been wise enough to take more, to go to our limit in what I
have always ca led compulsory saving, then not only would our
individual circumstances be more solid, our families provided
for more adequately, but we would through all these funds,
have made a notable contribution to national development,
because the assurance companies, the assurance societies are
tremendous investors in the development of this nation of
ours. And so I am very much struck, thinking about this
with the idea that I for one have regretted for years that
I didn't take more, and I would like to say to all the young
ones in the ountry, " don't you fall into that error." After
all, you must be better than us in some respects, otherwise
there is no hope in life.
Compulsory saving, Sir, I said, yes, it's more
than that-it's a joint saving for investment capital all
policy-holders being in that sense joint investors in the
investments that have been made by the Society, and this in
a country which is capital hungry, this in a country which
imports capital, and so far as I can judge, will need to go
on importing capital for a considerable time to come, a
country whose immense resources for development are so great,
whose population is so relatively small, whose normal savings,
even though they are not too bad are quite inadequate for the
task of providing capital for investment, capital for
industrial growth, capital for national growth. In a country
like this, the function of the assurance societies is, I
think, beyond praise, a tremendous contribution.
Some of you may say, " Yes that doesn't protect
the assurance societies from occasionally being given orders
by the government." No, that's quite right. " Whom the Lord
loveth he chasteneth...." ( Laughter) But I want there to be
no mistake about my own belief that in our country, placed as
we are now with all the opportunities in the world at our
doorstep, one of the great deficiencies, apart from some
shortage of manpower, apart from pressures of all kinds one
of the great deficiencies is a deficiency in capital. And one
doesn t like to become too dependent on capital from overseas,
valuable as it is.
I wouldn't want to see a state of affairs in
Australia in which, chronically, over decades, the deficiency
on our trading account was made up by capital importation.
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This would not in the long run, be healthy, though that capital
today, and so far ahead as one can see, is of immense importance
and is tremendously welcome in Australia. This makes it all the
more important that these great instruments of mutual saving and
mutual investment should be encouraged, should go on and should
succeed and it is in that sense, Mr. Chairman that I want to
say that I am delighted to be here, delighted to free myself
for the moment of any Scottish bias, delighted to wish you well,
and also to hope as you would hope, that the growing prosperity
of this society will be matched by the growing success of other
societies of the same kind because in the total, this is of immense
national significance. Sir, I have very great pleasure in declaring the
building open.