SPEECH BY THE PRIME MINISTER, THE RT. HON.
R. G. MENZIES AT DINNER IN HONOUR OF THE
DELE GATES TO THE COIM'MONWEPL TH PARLIAMENTARY
ASSOCIATION CONFERENCE CANBERRA, 2ND
NOVEMBER, 1359
Sir, we have all this rather neatly worked out; I begin
by saying Mr Chairman, Your Grace, My Lords, Your Excellencies,
and Ladies and Gentlemen a form of address which I find
rather tedious because it always reminds me of the fact that in
London when this happens the announcement is made by a gentleman
in a red coat, and one gentleman in a red coat, a very highly
priced one because he was always employed, came across to me one
night when I had made an almost intolerable number of speeches
under these rather melancholy circumstances, and at the last
moment before dinner, saying " My Lords," 1 right down to " Justices
of the Peace" you know what I mean. He said to me, in a fine
Scots voice, which had not been obvious up to that time, " Excuse
me, Sir, but will I announce yer as ' Menzies', or by your proper
name?". In consequence, I was introduced as " lMingies" which,
mark you, is quite right and I don't care who denies it.
Sir, this is my third innings. I had the opportunity
of a very brief and not adequately alcoholic contact with Learie
Constantine before dinner; he is a great cricketer and I am a
great fan is that the word? But in that game you don't get a
third innings except in the newspapers, and I am not going to
assert myself peace to our American friends for getting into
the baseball game; and therefore here I am, third time up.
What I find very hard about this matter is that it is very
difficult. VWhat can one say?
The first thing I want to say to you, of course, is
in spite of evidence to the contrary that we are all the
same; that I think, is the most interesting thing about us.
4~ e are all the same. 1We are all men and women of Parliament
and if'I may forget the stronger sex for the moment, we are all
Parliament men here tonight. This is a great bond of unity and
yett of course, Sir, at the same time we are all different.
That, I think, is something that we have to learn to live with
we are different. 4Je are all different races, we are all of
different religions, we all have different histories and different
backgrounds and yes, if you wanted to dwell on
differences you could find a whole universe of difference between
us who sit down here together as friends tonight. In
point of fact, every one of us here tonight is different. I
find that there are not too many people who have come to understand
that every man lives in a different world. That is rather
an interesting reflection, I think.
I was born in the bush, not long before a drought
year, and I nwer hear rain falling on the roof particularly
on a tin roof without feeling a surge of joy through me that
no man born in a city could ever understand. Somebody else born
a week later in another place is born into another world. This
is so profoundly true that it ought to restrain us from being
dogmatic. Every one of us is born into a different 4iorld, has
different early memories and has a different setting in the
community. I find that a wonderful and an exhilarating thing.
So here we are tonight, all the same as people of
Parliament, all different, every one of us, by reason of our
birth and our upbringing and our early experiences and all the
things that have impacted on us in the course of our life. And
that after all, Sir, is the great thing about this magnificent
Association. Here we are, what 200 of us? all different;
not one of us can put himself or herself inside the experience
of another all different people, all with our own memories
and our own hopes, our own despairs, our own vanities, our own
a, 2,
follies and our own frail-.., all different and yet we meet
here as one group of people united by a common bond because we
are all people of Parliament, and Parliament though the word
has a sort of dubious Norman-French derivation is one of the
great words in modern history.
Sirthere is another thing that I would like to say:
many years ago so many that I read the book as a student
Lord Bryce wrote a book on the Amnerican Commonwealth many of
you will recall it and he said a profoundly true thing about
all systems of federation, 4e have a federal system in
Australia; there are others in the world. The Commonwealth
Parliamentary Association does not call itself a federation,
but those are in common with it, arc! Bryce writing about the
American Federation, about one of trio grcat things that must
always be remembered, 3aid that in every federal system there
are two forces of opposite kinds always operating one,
centrifugal, one centripotal and therefore in a federation
power will tend to aggregate itself at the centre or it will
tend to disperse itself to the perimeter,
This is a great problem, and I think that anybody who
observes federation in the modern world would agree with me that
the centrifugal force has been the greater, that more and more
and more as time has gone on there has been an aggregation of
power at the centre, And the same kind of conflict, the same
kind of issue exists in the international i'orld, and it is in
the international world that we are tonight most vitally concerned.
It is a romarkable thing that, internationally, two
things have been going on one centrifugal, one centripetal
and perhaps we have not observed them as much as we might have
done. Let me say, as I understand it, what they are.
Since this last war in particular there has been a
tremendous resurgence of national feeling the struggle for
independence, the assertion; the very proper assertion of
national prestige and right and self-government. That has gone
on and somebody looking at it may very well say how odd it is
that after a war which was, in a sunse, fought to produce some
kind of international and co-ordinated order, we have had
country after country after country asserting and claiming and
achieving its national independence. There are scores of
people here tonight who represent such countries and are proud
to represent such countries; think of them! You have only to
go back for ten years to see country after country after
country asserting and obtaining its independence, and some
onlooker may very well say " Well, that is a dispersing effort";
this is something that is centrifugal. Ie are going to have a
world in which there are scores of countries each one with no
connection with the country next door, each one living its own
life, living separately its own existence; and yet at the same
time and this is the glory of it the other forces have been
at work and the glorious paradox of the last ten years is that
the more countries who were once mombers of the British anpire
who are today independent, poworful, self-respecting countries
conducting their own affairs the more of those we have had
the more they have come together for comnon purposes. This,
Sir, is at one and the same time the expansion, the separateism,
the fragmentation if you like of an old world and the regrouping
of an old world with honour and self-respect for
common purposes a groat paradox, if you like, and a glorious
paradox as I believe.
Every now and then some clever young man will sit down
and write a book that happens, I am told. And every clover
young man who sits down to write a book discovers that silly old
fools like me were always wrong. That is all right, because the
great comfort is that twenty years afterwards another clover
young man will sit down to write a book to prove that the first
was wrong and that I was rather a great fellow. Therefore it
works itself out. Every time I am tempted in my own heart or
in my own mind to engage in theories about the Commonwealth,
I was going to say our Commonwealth, I find that theories don't
matter, that the fact is that we may argue till Kingdom come.
Ide may disagree about all sorts of things but we all come within
the same tradition whether the tradition is in one country or
another the same tradition of honest self-government, Cf
Parliament, of the rule of law, and all these things that mean
so much to every one of us, and bccause we do come out of that
background then I am quite prepared and you are all quite
prupared to sit down one with the other and remember that
underneath all this extraordinary diversity what the outsider
may regard as separate-ism we are in reality one people because
we think just the same way about all the matters that come
in the world of froe men and of free women. And therefore I
pronounce the paradox it is a paradox. I rejoice in the
paradox, and because I know that you rejoice in it, I have the
greatest pleasure in the world in proposing the health for such
of my Australian customers as are here tonight, in asking them
to stand up with me, which they will with great goodwill after
I have called on Dr. Evatt, of course to drink the health of
our distinguished visitors.
Now, having said that, I am going to sit down. Dr.
Evatt is having a very, very bad weekend; this will be the
second time this weekend that he has had to agree with me but
if I may anticipate what he is going to say, I think he will
agree with me now, as thcr in the most warm-hearted and wholehearted
fashion. I hn' 6Itc1rA1