ANNUAL GNEACONVENTION OF rT* IIñ N,, S
OF jE JJI. BERJAL A
AT SYDNEY--' Otc 13: 11M1.9R6 2
Sir, Parliamentary colleagues and Ladies anid Gentlemeni
I have learned at least th-Yroe things since I arriTed
hero tonight, and for an old fellov like ma to lea-rln anything
is such a novelty that-to learn tharee tG11ngs is quite exciting,,
( Laughiter), The first thing is that I hlave some resemblance
t~ o a gentleman whom I don't know the President of Puerto
R-Iro4 Now if I had known ' that you wer: ie going in for these
analugies, I would ' nave hired from. a theatrical outfi-uter a
very straggling dark beard and would have-presented myself to
you as the President of Cuba. ( Laughter) ( Applause)
The second thning T have learned I warn. my
col]. oague, Senator Spooner is one thiat I will in future
employ inr thie Cabinet room,) I aTA in thae habit of letting
every Ministea.' who wants to say something., say s.-mething
sometimes briefly and sometimes at considerable length. But
i have learned tonight thiat the right drill is to hear a little
argument not too rnuca arnd th; say, 17Those whlo agree with
me, 3ay ' Aye'" and if a loud noise comes out, I say, de-clare
it carried6( Laughter) You have no idea how mnuch time thiis
will save me in future, ' in Canberra. 6 ( Laughater)
Tlie th) ird thing I have . laarned ia that it Is not a
bad idea when people have spa echios to mraike with! I which you may
not agree, to make them stand -in a corridor with so many pillars
in, it that you can't see tbhem at all., ( Laught'er) I could sec
Bill Arthur and hoar him well, I aeheard him before toda-,
But two or three speakers here, standing in the middle will go
don,, n in my meomory as diser~ bo-dicd voices0 ( Laughiter) I~ think
perhaps,~ Bill, we inight do something about thiat in the Cabinet
room anid have a broad. pillai!, put between you and me and between
Bill Mci~ a'ncn and me ( Lsrnghter and then uhat will-bc th. a result, 7
, Je don't undertake to sa-y0
Bat, Sir. I am very gl~ ad to have: com--e in h. ere just
at the end of a d.-SCus: L* Lr. about thle United States of
America boc. iuso thLis is onie mat tat I was going to say somethling
to you about, I don' t th-ink we are so badly k-nown in
America. I don'-t think so,, I can :, omembe~ r years ago before
he wa r, one could go tUg t U ne Stte of Amyzerica and
find the vaguest possible ideas as to wheore Austral. ia was0
Indeed, oncza I went into a shop in San Francisco and the feJllow
identifying my accent as something weird and wondercftil, Saidi
to mn, " Where do you come from?" I saidg, " I come from Australia,"
and he said, " Where's thiat?" " Well, I said, " don't you kn) ow?"
He said, " IT ought to know0 I have an idea it's out on the
East1 Coast.' ( Laugter) But i must say that after the Second
Wqar, I nave not found anything of that kind, For aL ra nme
of young Americans we have become muchi better knownm than we were.
Ard on the Government level, I amn ba-. und to say that I thiil., and
I say it ww th great p1Loa' sulco that cur stocks are high withn the
Administration of thae Unditod'Statcs0Indeed in that supnosced
s-ink, of iniquity, Ne-, w-York, wich happens to be the centre of a
great deal of private financiJ'al en-terprise in the United. States,
our stocks are so h-igh t[ hat cuar credit rating to use that
abominable expression is hi. glier than u: erhaps any other country
in the world) 0 a0a 0/ 2
But I wanted to refer to the United States of America
because quite recently there have been arguments going on as
you have all noticed and, indeed, I have seen them continued
on the Agenda Pape-r about Australian defence, I am not going
to enter into a long disquisition about Australian defence.
My distinguished colleague, the Minister for Defence recently
made, with our full approval., a considered statement on tiis
matter which, in most quarters I think, has been pretty well
received, But I think that as Liberals and that's what we
are here tonight we really ought to clarify our minds by
going back to the basic differences between ourselves and our
opponents those basic matters which determine on wthat side
we are, You can have all sorts of arguments of detail and I
don't resist them and I don't resent them. They are all very
healthy, But if we get so taken up with arguments about
particulars that we forget that we have basic differences a. Id
that these are the things that create the whole Parliamentary
controversy in Australia, then we will all into a most grievous
error. I wonder if we all remember that the Labor Party,
the Australian Labor Party, not so long ago committed itself
to the proposition, and it regards this as its pride and joy,
that we should seek to establish a nuclear-free zone in the
Southern Hemisphere, that no nuclear weapons should either be
established in the Southern Hemisphere, or fired from the
Southern Hemisphere, or stored in the Southern Hemisphere, or
in any way used from the Southern Hemisphere, This has been
their categorical statement,
This. afternoon when I got back I blush to tell you
from looking at a very, very good innings by Norman O'Neill,
I read the Communist Review and it, of course, seized the
Labor doctrine with the warmest possible approval and claims
it as a triumph for a long-sustained Communist propaganda,
Now just think about it. This is one of those catchpenny ideas.,
calculated to appeal to us if we don't think. Wouldn't it
be wonderful to have a Southern Hemisphere which was immune from
all the possible trials and struggles of the Northern Hemisphere,
Wouldn't it be a wonderful thingo This is what they say, in
effect if in Australia we could live quietly and comfortably
while Great Britain and the United States and Western Europe
and the Soviet Union tore each other to pieces. Even stated
in that way, you know, it doesn't appeal very much, does it?
Look at it a little further.
We have, and. it's thanks to your present Government
that we have it an ANZUS pact with the United States the
United States Australia, New Zealand under which we all come
to each other s aid in our mutual defence. If somebody attacks
us, if somebody attacks Australia, then we know that the United
States of America will come to our aid. Not a bad thing for
us, don't you think? Not a bad thing for us to have, metaphorically,
alongside of us the greatest power in the modern worldo
Do we want to dispose of it? If you had secret ballot, would
you vote to repeal the ANZUS pact? Would you vote to say that
Australia should have no alliance with the United States?
If that's the way you feel then you can support the Labor
Party's recent policy with complete conviction. Because that's
what they are saying to the United States and T know that
the United States understands this because I've been there
twice this year and I have discussed this very problem with
them, Suppose Australia is attacked say by Communist China,
directly or through devious routes, attacked some day by a
country which today has seven hundred million people and which
is reaching out into South East Asian countries Laos o 00 aP
C
moderately successfully North Viet Nam, successfully South
Viet Narm placed in a state of imminent peril so it goes
down the map, towards Australia suppose Australia is
attacked with nuclear weapons and who is there here tonight
who can say that won't happen some day and suppose the United
States of America said to us, " Very well. Now we are going
to come ino We are going to take a hand in this, You are
friends. You are our allies. We accept responsibility for
you," And we say to them, " Well, that's all right but you
can't put a nuclear weapon on Manus Island in our defence,
because it's south of the Fu. ator; and you can't bring in any
ballistic missile into Australian territory and fire it deeply
into the strongholds of your enemy because we are South of
the Equator, In other words," United States of America, you
can defend us, thank you very much, with conventional weapons
but in the event of a global nuclear contest, you keep out,"
Now, what nonsense it iSo Does anybody suppose that any one
of us wants to see a war of this disastrous kind; but how
suicidal, recognising that such a war is always possible, for
us to say to the United States of America and to any other
power Great Britain " You keep out of the Southern Hemisphere,
You attend to your business North of the Equator, We won't
have you here."' Now, ladies and gentlemen, if such a grim event
happened nobody in Australia could be found to warn the
United States off the course any more than anybody could be
found in the last war to warn the United States off the
course and say, " You are not to come in here. You are not
to come into New Guineao You are not to fight in our defence
in our own area," Yet the tragedy is that our opponents have
made this great single contribution tthought, They have
said, " A nuclear-free zone south of the Equator, and we don't
want any ally who is not prepared. to respect it." Well I've
been Prime Minister a long time as you know and I have found
a fair number of extraordinarily difficult problems to consider.
I find no difficulty in this one, I will never be heard to
say to the United States, " You keep out" if we are in danger,
Nor would you, But our opponents, who are now masquerading
for the first time I think; I am not sure as advocates
of improved defence for Australia, nullify the whole of their
argument by striking at its very basis, by striking what they
. intended to be or what they ought to understand to be a
deadly blow at the ANZUS alliance which is increasingly the
sheet anchor of Australian security,
Well, . thapte rihaps enables me to go on a little
from that point, because what I have been saying to you about
that merely exhibits what I'll call an isolationism of mind.
Now, we came into existence as a party because we were not
isolationists in mind. I don't mean merely in terms of
defence, I don't mean merely in terms of international
relationso I mean in every sense of the word. The soul of
Liberalism is that we are not divided into little isolated
units. We don't say, " Well, we are manufacturers and therefore
we couldn't care less about anybody elseo" We don't say
" We are primary producers and we couldn't care less about
anybody else," We don't say, " We are employers" or " We're
this or we're that and we couldn't care less about other
people," There are plenty of pressure groups in the country.
There are plenty of pressure groups in the world. The whole
of the remarkable events of the last ten days brought to a
point by the courage and skill of the President of the United
States ( Applause) the whole of those events has arisen
because of the existence in the world of pressure groups, the
O. a0 0. 0/ 4
grca't Communist pressure group not only in1 the Soviet Union
but in all, the satellite countries of Europe -a pressure
group reaching its way out into Asia9 into Africa, constantly
maintaining tension, constantly making people Live with the
fear in th~ e back of thieir minds of disasters to come this
is the greatest pressure group0 But wo have some ourselves.
It is in a sense the age of the pressure group. It is in a
sense a period of time, politicllyaditrainlyi
which people seek to promote differences, seek to promote a
clash of interests, so that in the waters so stirred up they
may fish to their own advantage.
We are Liberals, we are not a sectional party.
We represent no pressure group. It is our historic mission in
Australia to see that the interests of the community as a whole
at all times prevail over the interests of any individual jr
any group. This is our great mission in Australian politics.
And I really came tonight so that I might remind you of it and
beg of you never to lose sight of it. Are we the employers'
party? Are we the employees' party? Are we the party of the
rich or the party of somebody else? Our opponents will
frequently try to pretend that we are, but the fact is that
we have frequently reached our most unpopular moments by
running contrary to what were the superficial interests of
people whom we were supposed to represent in Parliament.
( Applause) I remember this and remember i~ t with considerable
satisfaction ( Applause) and we've done that and we'll continue
to do that because we believe that the whole is greater than
the part, we believe that Australia has interests as Australia
and that the people of Australia, men, women and children,
have interests superior to those of any particular group or
section. ( Applause) And therefore I say to you, " Away with
all this pressure group idea." Personally, I ea sick to death
of it and I am happy to say it no longer retains the fain~ test
impact on my reasoning mind. The Liberal Party of Australia
is a unique experiment in the history of ! nstralian politics.
Just let me remind you of it because this is not
only our future task but it's part of the pride that we ought
to have in our own history. I have been in Parliament, one
way and another, man and boy, for a long, long tire, and ever
since I was a boy at school, I have been hearing politics
talked in the house. Therefore I night claim in a rough and
ready fashion to know something about politics in Australia.
But look back on it. d'hon did we ever have a completely
concerted body until this party was established? I was
Leader of tGhe Opposition from 1943 on and I very well remember
sitting down and casting up how many organization-there were
that were theoret'ically on our side in politics in Australia,
and there were fourteen. Fourteen. Well, you remember when
Woodrow Wilson produced his fourteen points, old Clemenceau
said, " Le bon Dieu n'avait que dit," 1 Ten was enough he
thought, for the Lord0But we had fourteen like Woodrow
Wilson0 And with an effort, with a lot of understanding men
and women, we created a party of one out of a dispersed number
of groups of fourteen0 I dontt think this ever happened
before. There have been parties, there have been compromises,
There have been changes across the floor of the House. I
don't think in the history of Federation until then, we had
over had one party which was united not by a series of
particular doctrines but by a consuming faith, a faith which
is superior to doctrine or to dogma. We had people who a year
before were arguing with each other because " You're a bit too
far to the Right you're a bit too far to the Left" -some of
you will remember this; and then we realised, all of a sudden,
a o a
that there's room for many mansions even in our heaven, tha. t
there is room for many views in a party which gets together and
which has one ultimate faith, Let us argue on the sidelines
about what we think of this, or this, or this. I dont grudge
all the argument that you will have on the various resolutions
that are on the Notice Paper. I~. 1 read others when we come to
our Federal Council Meeting. And I'll say, " Good, Let's fight
it out. Let's thrash these things out, but don't let us believe
that the details are more important than the whole," Don't lot
us believe for one moment that we ought to allow our magnificent
unity in our task to be dispersed by partisan disputes, Now
this is tremendously important in Australia, Tremendously,
We've been in office a long time, I know even
my best friends when they meet me in the street will say to
me, ' By jove, old man, now how long is it that you've been in
office?" Well I shrug my shoulders and admit to the truth
and they say, 1Oh, yes. It's a long time," And I wonder what
they are thinking about in their minds, ( Laughter) Now,
I've no great ambitions on these matters Any man who is not
content to have been the Prime Minister of his country for a
quarter of its Federal history is greedy and I hope nobody
will think I am greedy. ( Laugher) So don't think I am
displaying any personal interest on this matter ( Applause) but
I tell you that much more important than who is Prime Minister,
much more important than who is a Minister, is the importance
of this party as a party not growing old in its ideas, not
losing sight of its historic mission,
Men may grow old; wome. n, in my observation, never
do, ( Laughter) ( Applause) Men may grow oldo We all get
older, We get tired, , Jo perhaps worry a little more about
things than we did once. Well, that's in the course of nature,
But the Liberal Party as a party is yourg. Have that in your
mind. There may be people in it who have grown white-haired in
the service of the party but the party is young. Compared with
the great historic parties of the United States, of Great
Britain, this is a boy, this party, and if it is to retain its
youth, if it is to grow at all., sturdily, into maturity, then
it must do it by remembering that its great mission is to serve
all the people of Australia, to keep up our friendships with
great nations around the world, to preserve our standing, our
credit, our repute, and to allow sectional arguments to be
dealt with, but not to cause divisions at the heart of the
party. ( Applause) Now, Sir, that's one great mission we have,
There's another one that I would like to say a word or two
about because I don't want to speak too long, We are living
in a Federal community. We are living in a nation which was
created as such only sixty years ago, but it was created as
a Federal community with sovereignty which, in the long run,
attaches to the people, divided between a Commonwealth, a
great central administration, and the administrations and
governments and parliaments of the States. The essence of
federalism is that there is a division of sovereignty not
that somebody is sovereign and that somebody isn't, A division
of sovereignty this is the complete essence of our democracy
and of federalism, Federalism in Australia for which we stand
whih is one of the keynotes in our policy, will not be destroyed
by overt actso Nobody is going to come along and put up a
referendum to abolish the States, Well he may, if he is feeling
gay and enterprising, but he won't succeed. The people of
Australia, once you put the question to then " Do you want to
destroy the States?" will never say '" Yes", 30 o. 0 / 6
But things can be changed by subtlety more easily
than they can by direct attack, and one of the subtle things
that is going on today, practised perhaps by some people in
this room inadvertently, is to put more and more and more
responsibility on the Commonwealth and still pretend the
Commonwealth powers haven't increased, Ladies and gentlemen,
if this bad habit of taking everything to the Commonwealth
something crops up; well we're short of money, we want to
do this or want to do that " Let's go to Canberra" and you
know this happens every day I get only a percentage of them
on my desk, but it happens every day. What do you suppose is
going to happen if the Commonwealth is ultimately given all
financial responsibility? Then it will have a pretty powerful
case some day to have all political authority because it is
a pretty good thing to have responsibility and authority married
together. Now I say to you beware of this. The States have
great powers. We have great powers. Admittedly in the
financial world by reason of a number of events, we have
predominant financial powers in the Commonwealth, but it is
still true that there are things in the hands of the States,
masses of administrative responsibilities which, in my
considered opinion, after a lot of experience, they are much
more competent to attend to than we would be at Canberra.
Therefore it's one of our tasks it is the other
task that I wanted to mention to you to preserve the Federal
structure, to preserve a system of Government under which
the national Government the national Parliament have
responsibility for great national affairs and the State
Parliaments, the State governments have responsibility within
their own borders for very great local affairs. It would be
a dreadful thing I think if this came to an end, because, you
know, to talk of freedom, individual freedom, may be thought
occasionally to be rather old-fashioned, but it is the great
thing that matters, individual freedom and if you get all
power concentrated into one set of hans then freedom begins
to disappear. It is in the division of power between governments
, hat freedom flourishes. The moment you get some other
state of affairs there is an enormous temptation to subordinate
the freedom of the individual. I will take a single example
from overseas. In the United Kingdom, all power is at Westminster
and therefore you have the possible danger that I have referred
to. But the British inv. nted self-government but for Great
Britain, nobody would have heard of self-government. It is
not only the mother of Parliaments, it is the only mother of
Parliaments in the world and because they understand these
things and because there is a passion in the British heart for
freedom, no tyrant for hundreds of years has been able to
prevail in Great Britain. ( Applause) But across the Channel,
in France, a country of which we all speak with profound respect,
we have had a different history, Somebody was under the
impression in fact I said something about it at the London
Conference that because the French had had a Revolution, in
the latter part of the eighteenth century, it must be taken
that they understood democracy perfectly. This, of course, is
a complete non sequitur, because the plain truth is they don't
understand democracy very well. For years and years, right
through this current century, their system of Parliament has
been so dispersed, the Frenchman himself so individualist in
his views that any average government lasted six weeks, sometimes
six months changes of administration, changes of administration,
five years, 22 governments or something of that kind and in the
result, what we call parliamentary democracy became ineffective
So. ./ 7
I71
and th. e country was increasingly run, if there was to be
continuity, by what they are pleased to call the bureau or
what we are pleased to call the civil. service.
Bureaucratic control is the inevitable result of
grave uncertainty of government because somebody has to carry
on, somebody must do the job. In the last two or three
years, of course, we have had the remarkable episode of
President De Gaulle who has, let us face up to it almost
dictatorial powers, but who because of his strength, his
flaming patriotism, has restored the pride of the French, as
I ventured to tell him the last time I spoke with him in
Pari. s But after him, what do we know?
Now, the one thing I am illustrating to you is
that you must have a passion in the mind for preserving
individual freedom and for restraining the powers of government
then, and particularly so in the case of Australia, You do
well to say, " We have a system of division of authorityo We
have a great country that is going to be greater and greater
as time goes on and we must be careful not to allow ourselves
by folly or inadvertence to lose a Federal system which has in
reality served us so well." ( Applause)
Sir, there is just one other matter that I would
like to say before I conclude and that is that the task of
government in Australia was at one time thought to be
distributive. " We have so much wealth, lot us divide it upo
Let us reduce the inequalities between the rich and the poor.
Lot us develop our social services, so that there will be
a proper protection for people who have, so to speak, fallen
by the wayside." All this is great stuff and your present
Government has had a hand in it9 not to be surpassed in the
history of the Commonwealth, but we are rapidly reaching a
point of time when the main business of government is not to
distribute but to create, to help to create ( Applause) to
help to have more and more production, because if the mind
is concentrated blindly on sharing out what you have, then
before you can say, " Knife", you won't be having any more
next year or the year afterwards. The creation of resources in
Australiao their development, the creation of markets for
Australia, their development, the creation of ingenuity in
research in technology in Australia and, what's even more
important, speedy application to the problems, the practical
problems of production these are the great challenges of
the next ten years, I have only to mention them to you?
this great creative task, for you to realise that in spite of
some commentators I am not sitting down in ai armchair at home
with my back turned to the future, and contemplating the
glories of the past, not at all.
We haven't done all that badly in the past, but we
have a great job, and that is to do twice as well in the
future. It is a creative task, a task which will be based
upon our undertstanding of government and its function and
its division, It will be based primarily upon our realisation
that the time has gone by for little sectional conflicts
between farmer and manufacturer, between employer and employee.
The time has come in a pretty difficult world for ten million
of the best people living in the world to go on and demonstrate
that they can command by their own efforts a magnificent
future,