Your Excellency, Consul General, Parliamentary and Council colleagues, ladies and gentlemen. What a marvellous day, what marvellous speeches we’ve heard. I am delighted to be here to officially open this 32nd Greek Festival of Sydney and to pay tribute, not just to the hundreds of thousands of people who have come from Greece to Australia, proud of their heritage and proud of being Australian, but to pay tribute to this country of ours which is almost unimaginable without the life, the times, the passion and the love of the people who have come here from all four corners of the earth and made this country what it is today.
I’m particularly pleased to be here and I’m particularly pleased to acknowledge some of my own colleagues Nick Varvaris – the Member for Barton, Arthur Sinodinos – the Assistant Treasurer. I’m very pleased also to acknowledge today representing His Grace The Archbishop, but my former deputy mayor Jack Passaris once of Marrickville Council; a man who helped me greatly when I was a humble citizen campaigning to get my street upgraded and uplifted. Thank you so much for that, Jack. But isn’t it so typical of the people who’ve come to this country from Greece and around the world that they have mucked in and made the most of their life in this country. They have joined the team, you have joined the team and that’s what makes Australia the country that it is.
While there’s a few hundred thousand of us who have Greek blood in our veins, every single Australia is the inheritor of the glory of Greece. The Consul General reminded us that western civilisation was unimaginable without the great cities of Athens, Rome and Jerusalem and I should add the great names Plato, Aristotle and St Paul – a Hellenised Greek who did so much to spread the values upon which western civilisation is based throughout the world. It was in Athens that the torch of democracy was first held high and that light still illuminates the world. So Australia and every democratic country owes a tremendous debt to the Greek people, the Greek spirit, the Greek ethos. Greek people have been coming to this country for 180 odd years. Australians have been part of the Greek story Thessalonica, at Lemnos; wounded soldiers from Gallipoli were on Lemnos. Then of course the men of the 2nd AIF fought across the mountains of Greece and the mountains of Crete and there’s been successive waves of Greek people coming to this country since that time.
We shouldn’t think that it’s all in the past. Every day we are reminded of the good that decent people do for each other. I was particularly touched, Vic Alhadeff, by your marvellous story which shows that the bonds of love and friendship between people extend all around the world, shows how an act of kindness and magnanimity can reverberate through the ages and bear fruit in the unlikeliest of places.
So ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for the honour and privilege of being here today. I may be the first Prime Minister to have been at the Greek Festival of Sydney in 32 years – I’m sure I won’t be the last.
[ends]