SPEECH BY THE PRIME MINISTER THE RT. HON. R. G.
MENZIES, AT THE ANNUAL MEETIN4 ROYAL PRINCE ALFRED
HOSPITAL. SYDNEY. ON THE 9TH DACEMBER. 1960.
Sir, and Sir Charles, and ladies and gentlemen:
I'm in a very low state today, having been out of my
bed last night until 4+ o'clock helping to make a mess of
Parliamentary proceedings. And I am therefore liable, I warn
you, at any tick of the clock, to go to sleep, even before you
do. ( Laughter) But at any rate I have been fascinated this
afternoon by a variety of matters. One in particular is that a
mystery has been solved. I knew that my distinguished
colleague, Dr. Cameron, was an old Royal Prince Alfred man he
never ceases to let us undorstand that; it seems to be almost
a point of pride.
I also knew that, like his predecessor in the office
of Minister for Health, he has an almost diabolical faculty for
getting a few more millions out of us evcry year, than in the
year before; and occasionally, as he knows I will take him on
one side in a fatherly way, and rebuku him lor this
extravagance. , Today the mystery is solved he was trained under
this chap. ( Laughter)( Applause) I realise now that whenever
Don Cameron is having a civilised and cautious moment, this man
gets hold of him, and addresses him, and throws in a few
humorous and disarming remarks and gets away with the booty.
( Laughter) Well, Sir, I hope you will continue to get away with
the booty. I was very delighted to have the chance of coming
here for two or throe ruasons, with all the details of which I
won't weary you.
But I did observe that this Hospital began as a
University School of Medicine. I put it in a very approximate
way. That has not been the uniform pattern in Australia, not
the normal line of development in Australia.
It does mean that it has had, and continues to have
a close communion with the University in point of ideas, and in
point of space. The; r-,' ore it-stands as a great instrument of
healing and a great ins trument of instruction. I can~ t imagine
a more remarkable and romantic history, than this Hospital has
had. But until I came out here this afternoon I had no
idea that it was far more than what I think of as a hospital
you know, a hospital, a good modern hospital, with superb
accommiodation for the patients, and even more superb acconmmodation
for the nurses, which I think is a splendid idea,
You see these tall buildings standing up into the
sky? This, Sir Herbert describes in a rare flash of modesty,
as a village it struck me as being a city! This enormous
jurisdiction of his is so great that really he should have been
made Lord Mayor ( Laughter) of Royal Prince Alfred. I will
convey that suggestion to my distinguished colleague from the
State Government. But it really is a fantastic thiing. You are used to
it; Itm not. All this car-e to Lie with the charm of novelty
0 2.
that you should have, not only what you can recognise as HQspital
buildings, nurses' homes and so on these are orthodox. and
identifiable._-but you go along the. . streetl
I have been taken up. to. a centre-just-up the street
which I found quite fabulous, in which rehabilitation is going
on, in which people are being given all the psychological
stimulus of being able to work, and produce things and feel that
they are doing something for themselves and doing it side by
side with other people who are handicapped; and being, in the
case of the last building I went into, managed by two people who
are themselves, not without physical handicaps.
This is, I think, a tremendous, exciting sort of
thing. I em sure that if I had time to go around all the
streets in this hospital city I would find not only some tumbledown
looking houses which I haven't failed to observe but I
would find studded here and there, some new manifestation of an
activity of a hospital which I venture to say nobody, when I was
a boy, ever thought of.
That, to me, is the remarkable thing. What was
orthodox, years ago, still remains orthodox in a sense; but it
has had added to it as the imagination of men and women has
laid hold of subjects and problems an almost infinite variety
of activities designed to restore the body, and the mind and
the spirit. Now those things happen in the world; they are among
the great evidences of civilisation in a century which has not
been conspicuous for civilisation. But here you have great
evidences of the essence of humanity.
I have had a good deal of experience in another field,
as you know, and I long since learned that the ancient
philosopher was right when he said: " I seek a man, I seek a man".
There's hardly a problem that I have over had to look at which
was intrinsically difficult of solution by an intellectual
process, but which could not really be solved in practice unless
you could put your hand on the right man to take responsibility
for it, to direct it, to imagine it, to see it through.
We are so much disposed, ourselves to attend to our
own affairs in life that we occasionally fail to identify the
true leaders of community effort. But every now and then you
will come across one. You have one, today, in the chair.
( Applause) I can't imagine that what has gone on in this great
Hospital could have gone on as far or as fast if it were not for
this cheerful, dynamic, driving personality of Sir Herbert
Schlink. Therefore, we ought to praise famous men and I would
like, on your behalf, to praise him today. Bcauso this is a
grea life work.
There is another thing that I would like to say just a
word or two about. Reference was made both by Sir Herbert and
Sir Charles about the teaching hospitals, which of course,
brings us at once to the broad, educational field.
I, of course, discard this rather hilarious
epigrammatic remark made by the Chairman, that he would sooner
be healthy than educated. He can afford to say that because
he is both. ( Laughter) Therefore I twit him with having made
the most purely academic observation this afternoon, that I ever
heard him make.
The truth of the matter is and this is how I have
approached this problem myself that thG teaching hospitals in
their teaching aspects are part of the educational structure,
and ought to be looked at as part of the university structure
of the country. You can't just detach them and say that one has
no relation to the other.
That is why, when the now Universities Cormission was
appointed, it took early steps to establish a committee of
advice on this very matter, I having stated to them that I
thought that this was properly to be considered as part of the
overall university problem of the country.
I see here this aftornoon representatives of the
residential colleges. There again is an evidence that you
can't look at the problem of university education, except in the
most comprehensive fashion; you can't cut it down to a few
narrow ideas. It is ten years now since I was told by one or two
members of the first Committee which I established on this
problem that residential colleges in universities were luxuries
and that they really ought to look after themselves.
I reject that idea. I reject it because I am a great
believer in education, a great believer, if I may make so
unpopular a remark, in scholarship, and, if you like, in pure
scholarship at that.
Because here is one of the great humanising things,
the great civilising things in the mind of can. To set a
university up, and say, " Well residential colleges arc a luxury,
they are to get nothing; the rest of it is to get something
teaching universities, they are nothing to do with the
university; they are something that hospitals attend to,
therefore they are out of the picture", is a false division.
I know that whenever I talk like this, and set up a
Cozmittee, or a Commission, I have to conceal myself for some
time thereafter from the stony glances of my colleagues and
friends in the Treasury. Mr. Shehan is nt the only man who
prays every morning to have strongth to deal with the
Treasury. ( Laughter)
But Treasuries are not so uncivilisod as people
suppos. I think when we began as a Commonwealth Goverrnment to
deal with the university problem as such, and to rake Grants
back in 1950, the Grants were of modest proportion. I haven't
the figures by me, but they would probably fall short of a
million pounds in the year. But it was a beginning.
It was a beginning in a field in which the Commonwealth
itself did not have a direct or primary responsibility. It was
a beginning in what is, broadly, a State field.
But in the State field the burden of education, year
by year, has grown. I think myself that there has been an
enormously enterprising approach to it on the part of State
Governments. In the State of New South Wales the growth in
expenditure on education affairs has, I think been remarkable.
And the sane goes for other States that I could refer to.
But the Universities teaching at that level, living
education at that level, were in a financial condition in which
the choice would very soon have been between positively
bankrupting State Budgets, or bankrupting universities or
forcing them into charging such fees that the universities,
instead of being, as they are now, the most democratic of all
comr. unities, right have become what an old political opponent of
mine once described as the ' bare gardens of the idle rich'.
Therefore we had to go on the Murray Cor. mission,
the present Cormmission.
Just so that you will see that Governments are not
unaware of this problem let me tell you that in the three years
covered by the Murray Committee's Report, which positively
rocked us, financially, with its magnitude, the Comonwealth
Government provided something of the order of œ 20 to œ 21
million. And, under the first Report of the new Universities
Commission, which contains increased provisions for
universities increased provisions -for residential colleges, and
so on, the œ 20O to œ 21 million rises to œ 39 to 40 million. Now
these, for anybody except Sir Herbert Schlink, are big sums of
money. ( Laughter) That is not the end of it. But there is one word of
warning I would like to utter on this matter. It isn't really
everybody who can benefit by university training. I know there
is a great theory that everybody can and will.
But when I open the newspapers, and when you open the
newspapers, and see the appalling failure rates in first year,
you begin to say to yourself, " Shouldn't the whole of this
conception be revised a little? Are we necessarily right in
continuing to have universities developed in the future on the
classical 19th century model?" Or, should we try to get more
variation into this some people going to a university in the
sense that we understand it, because they have the talent to
produce brilliant results; and others, perhaps to other types
of technological institutes, or whatever it may be?
This is a broad problem, and the Universities
Commission is going into it right away. And for the very good
reason that so great, and of course so healthy, is the demand
for university training today, that the undergraduate population
will become fantastic before we are 20 years older.
I think I an right in saying that at the end of
years, 25 years, certainly no more, there would be a demand,
provided the thing went as it does now, for 100,000 undergraduates
in Australian universities.
That would mean an expansion which would be equivalent
to establishing, in every period of about five years, a couple
of new universities in Australia.
These are troemendous tasks, and we must all look at
them with a good deal of caution, with a good deal of sympathy,
with a good deal of interest. They are going to provide
problems for my successors, and for your successors. No doubt
they will grapple with them. But they will grapple with then
all the better if the public continually understands that there
is a price to be paid for admiralty, even in the area of the
mind. Now the only other matter that I want to say a word
about is this. I an the least of all God's creatures when it
comes to knowing about hospitals rmy wife is by way of being a
species of expert becauso she had a great deal to do with them
in the city of Melbourne. But I was always impressed, from the
very beginning, with the astonishing work done by auxilliaries,
not merely because of the intrinsic product, but because of the
ihuane spirit that they helped to contribute to the hospital
itsel
a I have been disturbed as many of you have by the
tendency, particularly in recent years, to say, " Well we pay
high taxes let the Government attend to it. It is the
Government's business to run it to pay for it". " I pay my
taxes", says somebody as if that wore an act of virtue instead
of being one of compulsion. ( Laughter) " I pay my taxes, let
the Government look after it".
There was never a truer observation made than the
observation addressed to men, this was, it doesn't need to be
addressed to women that every nan in the course of his life
ought to perform some unpaid duty to his follow men; preferably
he ought to do it at a loss. This is the essence of the spirit
of service. You think of all the nen who have served the conmunity
handsomely, in Church or State, you won't think of too nany who
have done it because there was a profit in it.
This spirit of sacrifice, of contribution is vital to
a healty commnnunity. And I hope that we won't get to a stage
when auxilliaries are a thing of history when voluntary donations
will dry up because " I pay my taxes and there's nothing more to
be done". Because if that were to happen and this applies
also to this phenomenal record of honorary services in the
hospital itself if that were to happen, if we all said
S" Leave it to the Government, I've paid my taxes, I'n going to
the races, or I'm going to do something else", then I believe
that though medicine might be efficient, and hospitals might be
clean, and the food night be admirable, and the nursing skilful,
something would have gone out of the place.
Don't forget this: we've got a lot of Governnent
Departments sone people think too many, though, as a rule,
they come along to ask for nore when some problem arises but
there is no Government Department in Cornmonwealth or State that
provides for the people the milk of human kindness. That is a
D personal perquisite, that is a personal responsibility, that is,
in its ultimate expression, the great proof of the Divine in
man. I hope it never disappears.
I was delighted to hear what Sir Charles Bickerton
Blackburn had to say about honorary staff. As he said it, I
thought " How cynical people become ' Oh, he's an honorary at
the hospitali I wonder what the game is. I , render what
advantage he's aftur. I wonder whether he is making himself
good with so and so, and so and I get so tired of this.
Cynicism can destroy a nation more quickly than any
other thing. But a spirit, a social spirit, a community
spirit will make that nation healthy, whatever may cone or go.
So, Sir, I an delighted to be here and to have the
opportunity of joining with you on a very remarkable occasion.
( Applause)