I thank Annabel Miller for directing our ceremony here today and Marissa Starr for leading us so beautifully in our National Anthem.
And I begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of this land, the Wiradjuri people, and thank Gloria Rogers for the Welcome to Country.
Friends, it is a delight to join you today in the beautiful city of Bathurst as we open a new centre to advance our understanding of a truly great Australian leader.
It is a real honour to do so in the company of members of the Chifley family.
There are many people behind the story of this house and I'll share one of them briefly today.
It is almost fifty years since in 1962, a skinny 15 year old kid walked into his first Labor Party meeting bearing a piece of paper with two motions scrawled upon it.
One motion was to create a Labor Party newspaper.
The second motion was to preserve Ben Chifley's house as an historic site.
The 15 year old kid was none other than Bob Carr.
Thankfully Bob's totalitarian tendencies were nipped in the bud and Australia was not endowed with a gumnut version of Pravda.
But the more important of those two motions did come to pass a decade later.
Thanks to the foresight of Bathurst Council, Ben Chifley's house was indeed preserved.
Number 10 Busby Street was opened to the public by Gough Whitlam on March 24, 1973 - and it has become a great gift to our nation.
The Chifley house is a window onto another time - a simpler Australia of modest comfort and sturdy frugality.
The house, too, is a window into the life of its owner, Ben Chifley.
Here we can see Chifley's humility represented in physical form.
There is no excess, no extravagance.
His outlet to the world was a wireless set and a Bakelite phone.
His biggest self-indulgence perhaps a meal of his favourite dish: corned beef and potatoes cooked in their jackets.
It is a place every Australian should visit to learn something of our better selves and the things that make us truly great.
For decades, this adjacent building - Number 12 Busby Street - was home to the Chifleys' neighbours.
You can imagine Lizzie lending her neighbour a cup of sugar to make a sponge cake or chatting over the back fence on washing day.
Now the property has been enlisted to enable Ben's story to be better told for those who make the Bathurst pilgrimage.
As with the original preservation of the Chifley Home, Bathurst Regional Council has taken the lead with this project and I thank them for their efforts.
I know everything to do with the Chifley Home is a labour of love for the council and its staff, and the nation is proud that the property has such careful custodians.
The Australian and NSW Governments have also played their part, with grants of $175,000 and $82,000 respectively, along with $282,000 from Council.
Isn't that the way we want government to work in this nation - all levels banding together for the common good.
I'd like to think that level of cooperation reflects something of the new approach we're trying to bring to the nation's affairs in Canberra.
The truth is that as Australians, we all do better when we work together.
Chifley proved that when he sat down with Bill McKell to plan the Snowy Scheme and the Commonwealth-State housing agreement.
In 2010 the times may be different, the job remains the same:
- to build a nation that is strong, decent and fair, and to so in a manner that is less partisan and more productive.
If anyone needs to rediscover the purpose and dignity of politics as our new parliamentary landscape unfolds, they need only come to this house and reflect.
One thing that almost oozes from its walls is Chifley's simple grandeur and his unwavering belief in our nation, its people and its potential.
For Chifley, those possibilities were endless, and the very same faith inspires me as I begin my own prime ministerial journey.
But there is a sadness to this house as well because Chifley didn't get to enjoy it in retirement.
He died in Canberra, aged 66, his body exhausted from eight years in government, managing with John Curtin the nation's gravest crisis, and putting in place the building blocks of post-war reconstruction that would protect the Australian people from the misery of unemployment and want.
Ben Chifley had the zeal of reform but it was tempered by the pragmatic realism of a man who had known defeat, as Labor's early hopes disintegrated in the misunderstandings and divisions of the 1930s.
With hard work and integrity, Curtin and Chifley rebuilt a new tradition of Labor in government - economically responsible, strongly protective of our national security and social reformist in a way that carried the community along.
In many ways, this is the model of a Labor government that still inspires us today.
And, of course, Chifley achieved it all in a profoundly Australian way.
As the historian Ross McMullin has said:
"there has surely never been a more down-to-earth, unpretentious Australian prime minister than Ben Chifley"
- and you can see that from the remarkable modesty of his own home.
It's just about impossible to imagine a Churchill or a Roosevelt inhabiting a place like this.
And certainly not a Menzies.
Though this place is profoundly ordinary - and perhaps because it is - this is the unique home of a unique national leader.
A life such as that must not be forgotten.
And with the preservation of the house and the addition of this fine new facility, it never will be.
In the name of the Australian people, I dedicate this Education Centre to the memory of Joseph Benedict Chifley, and take great pride in declaring it officially open.