FOR MEDIA FILL--
PRIME MINISTER 3 O Q 6' 1979
OPENING OF THE NATIONAL YOUTH CONFERENCE, CANBERRA
I-have much pleasure in addressing this the first National
Youth ConCfrence.. It has been quite a long while in the
planning, ; tnd I think it really grows out of discussions
that have tLken place not just over the last year but over
a longer [) coriod than that. A number of people have put it
to me that qovernment's links with young people, with the
problems Lhat young people face in a modern community, should
be better aind more direct than they have been in the past.
The Office of Youth Affairs was established, and then the
Department. of Employment md Industrial Relations was divided,
on the one hand so that Tony Street could give his total
attention 1: o the very difficult and and intractable problems
of industt: Lal relations, but also so that there could be a
Minister who could devote his whole energies to the problems
of employment and to the problems of youth affairs,
expanding the Office of Youth Affairs and enabling it
hopefully to carry out a more effective function.
There has been a good deal of interest shown in this
conference, not just from youth organisations around the
country, but on one particular occasion there were over
20,000 calls from young people around Australia showing an
interest in the conference and what it was all about. We
welcome thdt interest very much indeed. The very fact that
so much interest has been shown I think indicates that young
people in the community are prepared to accept responsibility
and certaciily want to help in the search for solutions to
some of thie difficulties that we have at the moment. Amongst
all of you here there is a wide cross section some still
at school, some in training, some at work, and some as I am
told unemployed at the moment.
I think this gives all of us a unique opportunity to give the
Government. your analysis, your solutions, your ideas, about
the kind of approach that ought to be adopted. I hope that
there will be a very useful interchange and exchange of views
during theo course of the conference, because that is much of
what it ii all about.
For the next few moments I would like to put out a few ideas,
not in any dogmatic way, but mayb. e offering a challenge,
maybe seeking a responsive reaction, to see whether some of
the feelings I have are reflected in your own minds.
Throughout the conference we would certainly want your input
to what happens. / 2
A lot of people have been paying attention to the education
system in recent times. The role of the education system is
very much under scrutiny, under examination. People are asking
how we can widen career opportunities, widen the nature of
courses and make them more appropriate to the needs of students
in the modern world. I think overall Australia has some
reason to be proud of its educational system. In many ways
it is central to our achievements. There has been a great
growth of universities and colleges,, and compared with 10 or
years ago more people are staying at secondary school for higher
levels of schooling. Because there has been some success that
doesn't also mean that there is not a considerable degree of
concern as to whether the education system is clearly meeting
the needs of all young Australians. It is not just a question
of being able to meet the needs of those who are academically
orientated those who might wish and have the intellectual
c apacity to go to university and to college.. There are other
people in the community who have different inclinations and
different talents, whose needs are just as great, whose talents
in some ways might be just as great, but which lie in a different
direction. I believe there is a very real question as to
whether the education system meets that group of the Australian
community as well as it should.
The academic training is obviously suitable for many, but it is
not suitable for all. I think in a number of
secondary schools there is too much emphasis on academically
orientated courses, too much attention to the students who
can fit those courses. Maybe that is putting it the wrong
way. around, maybe it is not too much attention given to those
students, but too little attention given to students who don't
fit those courses, who don't fit into the academic stream'
who need a different kind of training, a different kind of
opportunity, more vocationally orientated, more technically
orientated. It is not a question of one person being better
than another. It is not a question of one educational stream
being better than another. I think it is a question of what
suits the talents of young Australians and what is going to
give people an opportunity to make their own way as they leave
school, as they finish formal education.
One of the most unfortunate aspects of a situation i n which
schools fail a ' Certain group of people within the Australian
ccmunity is that they get a feellng of inadequacy there, not because
they have failed the system, but because the system, the
education, the school, has failed them. If they leave school
and find it difficult to get a job within a reasonable time,
that feeling of inadequacy, that feeling of frustration is
clearly compounded, it grows and can lead to real questions
as to what it is all about. Is it a reasonable world, or
isn't it? I think in these areas, in these issues, there are
a number of things that need tackling. Some of the States
have started to. There are work experience-schemes undertaken
by some schools, but I don't think they go far enough. I don't
think they reach out to enough students, don't provide enough
* opportunity, and I doubt very muioh whether the
orientation of many of Australia's secondary schools is
appropriate * as we approach 1980. I-think it-needs
modification and greater emphasis given in. the technical
area.
I think nearly everyone here would have been at school more
recently than Ian Viner and myself, so I have thrown out some
ideas and views, and would certainly welcome your reactions.
Most of those who leave school manage the transition to work
or to further study without much difficulty. But 10% of each
age group as they leave school find it difficult in getting
a job in the course of the following year. I think it is
that group 10% or a bit above that much of our
attention needs t~ o be directed to. They are the ones in
greatest difficulty, ones that the present system is not
assisting in the way it ought.
I think that we a~ lso ought to have in mind that those who
hold off getting a job in the hope of getting one that they
really want ought to consider the benefits of experience
that they would gain in some kind of work, rather than
remain an inexperienced unemployed. That is a question
that people who have difficulty in getting the job they
want I hope would ask themselves.
The Government has for some time been concerned about the
problems of transition from school to work. There has been
concern about thE! direction of our education system.
We have had the Williams Inquiry, the committee which has
reported into education and training. It has reported on
the difficulties of school leavers. It has emphasised
that there is a greater need for basic skill; it has
emphasised the importance of attitudes of students, of
schools and of parents; it has emphasised the importance
of adequate transition from school to work and arrangements
that make that possible; and in particular it has discussed
the forms of training that are available and suggested
modification and change. It has suggested that there should
be further emphasis on technical training and on further
education. In recent times we have sought, when we have
had additional funds and additional resources, to make sure
that they go into technical and further education, believing
that that more directly fits the needs of the present time.
We have a wide range of programs that are designed to help
the unemployed and young unemployed without skills in
particular. The National Employment and Training Scheme,
the apprenticeshi~ p scheme CRAFT, the Education Program for
Unemployed Youth, which I think from some of the classes
that I have seen might be giving some people an. opportunity
in life for the first time. In the classes that I have visited I
think~ maybe for the first time in their lives.) people felt
that somebody was concerned, somebody cared about what
happened. That again is only touching a relatively small
proportion of young people.
The programs are designed to give special training, work
experience, to create a greater degree of self-confidence,
and by the end of this financial . year something over half
* a million Australians, many of them young. Australians, will
have been assisted by these various training. programs.,
* That is a very substantial number. We are not complacent
about it, we are not satisfied with the programs as they
are. Ian Viner monitors them, they will be-improved as we
can, and this again is an area where we would wdlcome your
views about the rnature of the various training programs.
For a moment I would like to put some of the problems that
, Australia faces into the wider international background.
Australia is not an island unto itself. We live in a world,
and we need to take account of the ' world around us. I say
it not by any means as an excuse for our own problems.
What problems we have we have to tackle, but at the same
time we need to understand the kind of world Australia must
live in, that Australia must trade in, and sometimes that
world assists us, sometimes it makes it more difficult.
When it makes it more difficult we just have to be more
determined to do things better within this country, not to
say everything is against us and give up and say it is too
hard. That is a defeatist attitude, which the Government
certainly doesn't and never would accept. I believe that
most Australians also wouldn't accept it.
There are now complex economic problems, not only in
Australia but in many countries. Inflation is too high
for many reasons. Governments have had the view that they
can spend and just go on spending, me et all needs by if
necessary printing funds. That has led, as much as anything
else, to inflation being embedded very deeply within many
Western societies.
In one sense Australia is fortunate, because here inflation
is less than in Northern America, it is less than in many
countries in Europe, and Very significantly less. But because
world inflation is high, the growth of world trade is very
low. New investment and development in many countries is
very low. in the 20 or 25 years to 1972 world trade grew
by about 8% a year. In the years of high inflation since
1972 world trade has grown by only about 4% a year.
The difference between those figures, the difference
from the growth it represents in different countries, is
really represented by the much higher number of unemployed in
Australia, in Britain, in the United States, in Europe
and many countries around the world.
How therefore do we return to a situation of growth?
For so long people in my generation and I think Ian's
probably took growth for granted. In the late ' 40s to
and ' 60s, really up to the end of the 1960s it seemed
that growth, relatively low inflation, very high levels of
employment, had come to stay, they came to be accepted,
and people believe d that they could go on regardless and
that state just wouldn't change. It came to be accepted
as a permanent fact of life. As a result of that people
in Australia and again in many other countries began to
pursue a whole range of policies that weren't conducive to
growth, to development, to investment and therefore to
the creation of the kind of jobs and the numbers of jobs that
we in Australia and people in other countries needed.
A number of policies were pursued by countries which were
in a sense anti-growth, anti-development, and anti-jobs.
Now, at the end of the 1970' s, we seek to grapple with
those difficulties, with those problems, and overcome
the difficulties of the. past. A number of the old theories
that people had followed for a'long while just don't work
* in a system where there is high inflation coupled with
relatively high unemployment.
I
It is not possible to spend your way out of difficulty when
inflation is high, because the extra spending just compounds
inflation. In a sense it is not all that unlike a family
that has spent too much over a period of two or three years
and might suddenly find itself very much in debt, with the
house being mortgaged and a second mortgage. The banker
comes along and says if you continue these habits you are
going to lose your home and are going to lose all your assets.
The family wakes up and decides they can't allow this to
happen, they have got to get their spending back into a
reasonable pattern and live within their income.
obviously the analogy is simplified, but there are some
similarities and important ones between the resources
Available to a family and the resources available to a
nation. Ultimately both have to live within their incomes
within what they can produce.
Cnie of the cruellest things that can be done for the problems
of unemployment is to suggest that there are quick, easy
solutions. There aren't quick, there aren't easy
solutions. The problems are going to take a while to work
through, and the solutions have to be real ones. We dont
believe, and my Government has never believed, that so-called
job creation schemes themselves would work and provide any
permanent solution. Certainly it is very easy to put more people
on a Government payroll. There was a year once before in
Australia when an extra 100,000 in one year went on Government
payrolls, but 155,000 lost their jobs in the private sector
of the Australian community. That meant in a sense that the
additional employment was becoming a very great burden on
Australian taxpayers, but even in spite of that not enough
people could go on the Government payroll to reduce the
numbers unemployed. The number unemployed in fact increased
very substantially. It is not much consolation for governments
to spend substantial sums on job creation schemes if that
reduced investment, reduces development, and thereby leads
to less employment overall. That is what it is all about.
Since 1975 we have worked for permanent jobs funded from real
growth, real investment, real development throughout the
Australian community. Not for something transient or
artificial, not for something that will only last for a year
or two, but something that will build a basis of scope as we
go forward into the 1980' s. Now more and more major countries
are rejecting the discredited policies that many of them
have followed, and more of then are at least coming to
accept that the kind of policies pursued by this Government
are in fact the only ones that will work in the longer term.
That is needed if inflation is to come down, if trade is to
grow, and there is to be more activity, not . just in Australia
but in many other countries.
Of course there are still problems. our policies are best
designed to cope with those problems and in re-establishing
the conditions in which'there will be invest ' nent and development
and opportunities. Inflation for some time in Australia has
been lower than that in North'America, much lower than in
Britain, much lower than many countries of-Europe, and therefore
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our industries have beconre conpetitive again. They sell better on
the Australian market and overseas. If they are selling
better they employ more and produce more. During this
period there has been a good deal of technological change
and much talk about it. Some people say it is best to put up the
shutters against technological change because it tends to
reduce the number of jobs. That again is a defeatist
attitude and it is not an option I believe that is open to
us because our industries depend on being competitive, they
depend on being able -to do well or better than the same
industries in other countries. We are not going to be able
to do that with outmoded technology which can either produce
a product that is not so good, or if they can produce one
that is good they might produce it at considerably higher
cost. So new technology is inevitable, we need to embrace
it and use it to our advantage. I think that sometimes
there needs to be much more discussion with working men
and women about the introduction of new technology, the
problems of transition as it is introduced into a factory
or a particular workplace, but there is no option but to
accept the challenges of new technology and see that it is
used to Australia's advantage to create more jobs overall
rather than less.,
The future in the 1980' s I believe is one which Australia
should face with a great and a growing confidence. The
prospects for the 1980' s are good. There is more
development, more investment taking place in this country
now than for a very very long while. There are the
possibilities of real reward, for personal efforts of
individuals. That is not to say there aren't'problems,
that is not to say there aren't difficulties, that is not
to say there aren't some people and too many young peoplefinding
it difficult to get the kind of work that is needed
and finding it difficult to find their place within the
Australian community. But the opportunities are still very
great. We have an unparalled opportunity to play a role in our own
part of the world, in South-east Asia and East Asia, and
trade with those regions is going more rapidly than with any
other. We are attracting great investment. There will be
more resource processing using the great power reserves,
the great reserves of coal, which makes us one of the more
fortunate of the Western countries.
There are other opportunities for Australia in the cultural
and artistic, scientific and sporting fields. As a nation
we need to build on all of these to create a better life,
a more equal and a more tolerant community. In the international
environment, as a middle-ranking power we can act as a force
for moderation as we have in many areas, and I think that is
a role that Australia ought to play with vigour.
I think there is one se nse where I sometimes become very
disappointed at the attitudes of Australians in relation
to a number of things. It is * not by accident, it is not
by chance that we sometimes call ourselves a nation of
knockers. If somebody does something well there are always / 7
.7
the detractors that want to destroy. How often do we hear
people saying " Australia can'It do it, that working people in
other countries produce something better. That we are not
really competitive because our costs are too high. I think
it really is time that we put that kind of view behind us, and
especially it is time that we put that view behind us because
it just doesn't happen to be factually correct. Very often
Australians are the greatest detractors of Australia. We need
to understand that if we are not going to have some kind of
pride in this nation, some kind of pride in where we want
to take Australia in partnership, then nobody else will.
We are Australia, you are Australia, more your future than
mine because you are all a good deal younger than I am.
We need to have pride in what we can achieve and in what we.
have done.
Let me just give one or two examples. Two years ago Jim Kill~ en
came to us wanting to order a major defence ship for the
Royal Australian Navy. It was going to cost $ 70 million or
million. Defence hadn't gone to Australian firms to get
Australian prices. The automatic assumption was we couldn't
do it in this country, it would cost much too much, subsidy
would be enormous. So they had gone around the world and got
the best tender from France, the cheapest international tender.
As a Government we said that was not good enough. We wanted to
see how much more, we assumed it would cost more, how much
more it would cost to build that ship in Australia. maybe
we imuld be prepared to provide the subsidy that is necessary
to do it. A few months ago we got the Australian tender from
Vickers, and. it wasn't a dollar, it wasn't a cent more
than the tender. It was some millions of dollars below
the cheapest tender overseas. That is an example of Australians
doing it. Australian management, Australian initiative,
Australian working people being able to produce with the best.
There are other examples where Australian manufacturing industry
is producing goods in competition against production from Singapore,
from Taiwan and from Hong Kong, and winning contracts around the
Indian Ocean and South East Asia because Australians do it
better, and they provide a better product, and they can sell
against that kind of competition. In other areas, in the mundane
area that affects so many of us, how many people say they have
to buy an imported car because they are better, they are
better produced, they are better finished. It just doesn't
happen tb be true. A world class product is produced in
this country by more than one company, and it is finished
just as well as any imported product. It is time I think
we began to have some pride in things Australian and in
Australian achievements. Because if we don't do that, nobody
else will, nobody else can. I don't mean that we should do it
in a way that is chauvanistic or bombastic -wearing the
Australian flag on both arms all the time -but this is a
great nation, and it is up to us t~ o build it for the future.
In particular, it is up to people like yourselves I believe
to* build it for the future, because it depends on what. happens
as each generation passes, the kind of nation we have, the kind
of nation we create. 0../ 8
8
But whatever we do in material things, I would hope that with the
great migration program that has taken place over the last
years, above all else we achieve a nation with a growing
sense of tolerance, a growing sense of understanding of the
different needs and aspirations of different groups of people
of different individuals within the Australian community so
that this can be truly a land which is the best country in
the world to bring up a family, the best country in the world
for men and women, young and old,. to live out their lives.
That isreally what it is all about. It is not about power
or greatness or physical achievements, but the kind of
country where people can lead their lives and the way in
which they can do it, giving themselves a sense of
satisfaction and a sense of achievement.
Often you get people who want to get to a certain position,
and they are not happy unless they are in it. For an
individual and for a nation, the way they walk through
life I think is infinitely more important than the
position they ultimately achieve. The way they
walk through life depends upon their relationship with
their mates, their friends, the kind of community and
friendship and comradeship which has always been so
much a part of the Australian tradition. So, Ladies and
Gentlemen I have great pleasure in declaring open this
first National Youth Conference. We look forward to hearing
your views, to hearing your ideas about the future of this
nation and the course of direction that Government policy
ought to take.