E M B A RGO NOT FOR RELEASE BEFORE 9.00 PM on 1 MAY 1972
PRIME MIN.
LIBERAL PARTY DINNER
BENDIGO, VIC. M AY 1972
Speech by the Prime Minister, the Rt. Hon.
William IcMahon, C'E, PiP
Mr Mayor and Mrs Elliott, Ladies and Gentlemen
I am delighted to be back in Dendigo for one
vitally important reason. I am here to help and to make absolutely
certain that John Bourchier will take his place as the next Member
for Bendigo in the National Parliament.
I share your enthusiasm Fand confidence that
when the numbers go up he is going to be sitting in Canberra with
me on the Government benches. You can count on that.
To achieve this, we are going to need your help;
we are going to need your energies; we are going to need your
donations. But most of all, we are going to need what I call the
influence of key Liberals in this community and in every electorate
throughout this nation those men and women in every community,
large or small, whose opinions are worth having, and whose judgments
are respected and sought by others.
They are people like you. People who understand
the fundamental qualities of the Australian way of life. They
understand, just as we in the Parliamentary Liberal Party understand,
that today we are at a crossroads of our national life.
For many years, the Liberal and Country Party
coalition has governed this country steadily and effectively. It
has served the people well. Today there are elements in our
community who want not just change, not just an alternative, but a
complete upheaval of our whole pattern of living.
Until recently, it looked as thotghthis viewpoint
may have been gaining unthinking adherents. But now there are signs
that these elements are beginning to take a harder look at the changes
that might confront them under the regime of the Labor Party. / 2
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There are signs that many Australians are gdng
to think much more carefully before they throw away a whole and
wholesome way of life and before they vote to downgrade individual
freedom, and replace the rewards of individual initiative with a
stereotyped society. It is up to us as Liberals to get out into the
community in the coming months and make our opinions. felt. We have
had the support of the majority in. this State for many years. The
basic reasons for that.. support are simple and clear.
There was the appeal of our own policies and
people in creating the climate for the unprecedented growth and
development of this nation, and there-was the disunity-of the Labor
Party, especially in Victoria.
Mr Chairman, we all know that very little has
changed. There-are plenty of brave words and idle visions put before
you but-nothing has come of them. Remember the great reforms
that were going to take place in the Victorian Labor Party. All
Australians now know what a sham they were. That was shown the other
day in the cynical and coldblooded support of the North Vietnamese
invasion. Need I say more? In Victoria, our opponents condemn
themselves. I think it is also appropriate, here in Bendigo,
to say something about our educatbn policy and achievements. In that
context, I question the attitude of the Victorian Labor Party to
education policy an attitude that was exoressed so stridently in
recent weeks by the Labor Member for Bendigo. That is, until the
Leader of the Opposition had a talk to him. This was an episode
which I believe could justifiably be called a story of pride and
prejudice. We inthe Government are proud of the record of
the Commonwealth in education over the last ten years. Particularly,
we are proud of our unsha'eable commitment to freedom of choice, of
schools for individuals and groups within the community. I will
give you an outline of what we have done in education, and of our
guidelines for the future, in a moment. But before that, I want to
turn to the other side of the story.....
I am not sure whether or not the Member for
Bendigo regards himself as the Oppositbn's spokesman on education
matters. They have three or four people who seem to claim the
title. But at any rate, the Member for Bendigo is the one who
goes along with the Victorian Labor Party in its opposition to the
principle of aid to independent schools. This was shown by his
recent most intemperate and prejudiced statemeatson the subject of
aid to independent schools and the Governments actions in accordance
with that policy. I will give you a sample to indicate the feeling
of the honourable member on the subject. These are quotations
from his newspaper interviews: / 3
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He says the Government has " become crazed with
the madness of a mindless State aid system." That we were
" Drunk with the mania of State aid", and that a grant we made to a
school in Canberra was, and I quote " The last word in the insanity
of Liberal State aid". Here ends the quote.
I think people can be left to mrke their own
judgments about anyone who makes such absurd exaggerations as a
substitute for genuine political debate. Australians in general
and Victorians in particular have never had much time for extremism
and bigotry, the more particularly in this time on questions of
education policy. That has been shown by the results of elections
here for many years. These recent events give me confidence
that Victorians will continue to reject unrepresentative and
extreme views as well as the men who enunciate them.
But before I leave the honourable member
for Bendigo to his melancholy future, I want to complete the story
of his assault on the policy of Commonwealth aid to independent
schools as it operates in Canberra.
My own Minister for Education, Malcolm Fraser,
gave a very good answer in Parliament to his extreme allegations.
A few days later, a leading churchman described the honourable
member's approach as misleading and distasteful. He wanted to
know whether the Leader of he Opposition agreed with those statements.
We have not heard a peep out of the Labor Party since.
The honourable member did, of course, receive
a severe caucus rebuke from a very senior Labor man and is also
reputed to have been carpeted by his leader. In public, the
question has been hushed up.
I invite you to contrast that sorry story with
the record of Commonwealth involvement in education, which I
believe we can justifiably point to with pride. Later this week,
' e will be releasing a booklet which sets out with great clarity
the objectives of the Liberal Party's education policy and the
record of the Government's achievements. I recommend it to you
strongly. It will set straight these recent attempts to mislead
the public about what the Commonwealth is doing in education.
There is one central fact that is very hard for
anyone to ignore. It is this. The Liberal Country Party Government
was the first and only Federal Covernment to act on aid to
independent schools and to give extensive direct Commonwealth
assistance to all schools. We began with a policy of aid to independent
schools in the Australian Capital Territory many years ago.
Successive Liberal and Country Party Governments have carried on
and expanded the Commonwealth's involvement. We are the only
major political Party that has wholeheartedly accepted the challenge
of the plural society to help educate children outside the State
system. At the same time, it is grossly wrong to imply
that we do not have a significant and great concern for Government
schools. This is shown by the fact that our opponents have very
little on which to hang an education campaign.
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Of all the capital assistance going directly
to schools from the Commonwealth, 83.5 per cent goes to the
State schools which educate 78 per cent of the schoolchildren. On
that basis, our support is weighted in favour of the Government
schools. Our teacher training assistance is helping to
produce new teachers at a much faster rate than the growth of new
enrolments. In the past ten years, the Commonwealth's direct
spending on education has gone up more than six times, from
million to $ 357 million. Equally indicative of our growing interest are
the increasing numbers of new areas of education support which we
have moved into. I mention, particularly, programmes which are
helping migrant children with language problems. And the aboriginal
study grants schemes which are training some thousands of aborigines.
Then, of course, there have been our science facilities and our
libraries programmes. In providing this support, we do not arbitrarily
decide that one school shall receive some assistance and another
shall not. We have publicly stated the standards which are to
apply. And as we havc said, many many times, if a school exceeds
these standards, it will not get a cent out of the Commonwealth.
But we do not make these decisions ourselves.
In the case of independent schools, we have Advisory Committees
from outside the Government. And in the case of Government schools,
the States themselves decide their own priorities. So they should.
That is the system we operate for capital grants.
It is lump sums for the establishment of new facilities. In the
case of our help with day to day running costs, we apply a policy
of across-the-board payments without any means test. And this
is where we find the fundamental and vital difference between Labor
and Liberal policies. They want the power to say which school shall
grow and which shall wither, whether it be a Government or a non-
Government school. This is the essence of Labor's Schools
Commission Plan. They want the power to reach into any one or all
of Australia's 10,000 schools and determine each school' policies
by giving or withholding finance. They even want the power to act
from Canberra in the movement of teachers from one school to another.
Turn now to our own policies. From the
beginning of 1970, we provided per capita grants to independent
schools at the rate of $ 35 per primary pupil and $ 50 per secondary
pupil. If we had not done this, significant numbers of independent
schools would have closed down. And the State system would have
been compelled to take over the extra burdens.
From the beginning of this year, we increased
these grants to $ 50 per primary pupil and $ 58 per secondary pupil.
But the Labor Party moved a motion in the Senate which, if
successful, would have stopped those increases.
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It was a clear indication how some substantial
elements of the Labor Party interpret their policy. It is a policy
which is supported by the Member for Bendigo, by the Victorian
Labor Party, and by very significant sections of the Labor Party in
Canberra. It is a oolicy which will deny diversity and end experimentation.
It will inevitably lead to a centralised monolithic system of
enforced uniformity and conformity.
We repudiate it utterly. Labor's policies, based
on the South Australian model, would put a penalty on dedicated
parents. The harder they work for their child's school, the less
money that school will get from a Labor Government. They would
have a means test on education, but no means test on pensions.
This is comnletelY unacceptable. We will provide
the maximum Commonwealth support for both Government and non-Government
schools with the minimum of Comm-onwealth control.
Parents wh(-send their children tc non-Government
schools are saving the taxpayer hundreds of millions of dollars.
At the same time, they are exercising their right to freedom of choice
to which we as Liberals are dedicated.
We will fight to maintain that freedom of choice.