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4 PRIME MINISTER
CHECK AGAINST npFLIERY EMRARGOED UNTIL. DELI. VERY
SPEECH BY THE PRIME MINISTER
JOINT LABOR COUNCIL OF NEW SOUTH WALES
AND ALP EXECUTIVE DINNER
SYDNEY 30 NOVEMBER 1990
I am d3lighted to note, Mr President, that the New South
Wales Labor Council continues to demonstrate its grasp of
basic industrial principles, which has been a key to its
remarkable achievement over the past 120 years.
And one of those first principles is: get your claim in
early, and make it as ambitious as possible.
We are here tonight to register the Council's comprehensive
claim to primacy in the foundation of the Australian Labor
Party in New South Wales.
And on the Churchillian principle that the best way to get a
favourable verdict from History is to write it yourself, the
Council has produced its own history, in the shape of this
excellent little book ThA Foundtion nfLahnr ahead of
all the other publications, official and otherwise, we may
expect in the course of Labor's Centenary Year.
So first, let me congratulate the Council on its initiative,
its enterprise and its justified self confidence at the
bar of history.
Mr President, this is by any measure a genuinely historic
occasion not only for the Labor Council and the unions it
represents in Newa South Wales.
In commemorating one of the landmark events in the formation
of the Australian Labor Party, we are taking part in a
celebration of Australia itself a celebration of
Australian democracy.
And in the official Centenary next year we shall celebrate
not just 100 years of our Party, but 100 years of
Australia's greatest political, industrial and social force
this continuing, enduring, authentic Australian
institution which, 1 more than any other, has shaped the lives
of the Australian people and the destinies of this nation.
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Tonidght we commemorate a clear, precise, public event the
ad-option on 28 November 1890 of the Labor Council resolution
in these terms:
That with a view of securing better representation of
labour in Parliament, and to effectively organise all
that are favourable to the said object, this Council
deems it advisable to establish Labor Electoral Leagues
in every centre where practicable throughout the
colony, and the Parliamentary Committee be instructed
to prepare a scheme for the organisation and government
of same.
Now, Mr President, that resolution was in fact the last of a
long series of resolutions and recommendations adopted by
the Council over the previous two years all designed to
advance the Council's long-held plan for direct labour
representation in the New South Wales Parliament.
And these efforts were to be crowned with tremendous success
barely six months later, when 35 endorsed Labor candidates
were elected to the Legislative Assembly in June and July
1891 the first parliamentary Labor Party in the world.
Sco great a work as the creation of a Party like ours had to
bet, of course, the work of many hands and many years.
But it is fitting tonight that we should remember and honour
two of the Labor pioneers in particular Frank Dixon and
Peter Brennan, both of whom served as President of the Labor
Council. Until his untimely death in 1884, Dixon was the chief
advocate for a political Labor Party, and Brennan thereafter
was its chief architect.
Brennan's special achievement was to give the idea a form
and a structure to establish, indeed, the essential
elements of the structure of the Party in New South Wales to
this day.
Mr President, there is another event another centenarywhich
adds a dimension to the tributes we pay tonight.
This month, 100 years ago, marks at the end of more than
three months of bitter struggle and sacrifice -the defeat
of the maritime and shearers' strike of 1890 -always, in
the annals of Labor, the Great Strike.
In New South Wales the Labor Council's work to form the
Labor Party Was Well advanced before the Strike, and may in
fact have been delayed by it.
Nevertheless, the failure of the Great Strike reinforced the
case for direct parliamentary representation; and gave the
cause a new urgency, a new and passionate determination that
Labor's cause would be pursued through Parliamentary action,
and ultimately succeed through parliamentary power.
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And that, Mr President, is the fundamental achievement we
celebrate tonight the fundamental commitment to
parliamentary democracy which the union movement made 100
years ago and to which we as a party and a movement hold,
undiminished, today.
Mr President, following the November resolution, there took
place in New South Wales what the first historians of the
Labor Party, Roydhouse and Taperell, described as " the
greatest burst of political activity ever seen on this
continent." By May 1891, more than 40 Leagues the branches had been
established throughout New South Wales. The Parliamentary
Committee, constituted as the first Labor executive, drew up
the first Platform a solid, realistic fighting Platform
for industrial, social, electoral and education reform a
program deliberately designed for broad electoral appeal.
And they stated the Party's objective:
" To secur7e for the wealth producers of this colony such
legislation as will advance their interests by the
return to Parliament of candidates pledged to uphold
the Platform of this association; and to bring all
electors who are in favour of democracy and progressive
legislation under one common banner."
That was the cobjective for which we were founded.
It is the objective for which we continue to fight.
Mr President, in a century of infinite change, in a century
which has transformed six colonies into a great nation, in a
century which has seen the collapse of empires, the
discrediting of ideologies and dogmas never more
dramatically than in our own time the foresight and clear
vision of our founders shines out a constant star which
has guided us for a century.
And that of course, Mr President, is the real point of this
historic occasion tonight and our centenary celebrations
next year.
We of the Labor Party and the Labor movement do not
commemorate some dead past.
We celebrate the past as the unbroken and unbreakable link
to the living present and even more important to the future.
We do right to honour our past. We are right to be proud of
our history not least because it is so very much the
history of the Australian people.
But its real importance lies in the strength we draw from it
for the present and the future.
And in this context, ladies and gentlemen, we have every
right to draw the contrast with our political opponents.
I will not say of them, as was said of the DLP remember
the DLP? that, like the mule, they were born without pride
of ancestry or hope of posterity.
Well.... . perhaps I will say it.
But I thought Bob Carr summed it up neatly when he
introduced Paul Keating as the William McKell Lecturer at
Parliament House, here in Sydney, last Friday.
And Bob said that he might concede that the Liberals had
some sense of pride in their history on the day Peter Reith
delivered the Bob Askin Memorial Lecture.
But perhaps, the Leader of the Federal Opposition put it
even better himself.
Because, only a few days ago, trying to explain away his
cave-in on family allowances when he was rolled by his
rural rump and failed the first test of his leadership-
Dr Hewson said this:
" One of the things that I have been doing since I
became Leader is trying to put a lot of our history
behind us."
Now, of course, we can all understand why this new-look
leader of the Tories would seek to put their past behind
him. For the truth is this
Their unprecedented electoral success over three post-war
decades represented an unprecedented failure of performance.
Theirs were the decades of opportunities 1nnt for the
Australian nation a record of wilfully creating a
second-class economy, sheltered behind the high walls of
Country Party tariffs and isolated from the challenge of
international competition.
And theirs were the decades of opportunities denied for the
bulk of the Australian people the entrenchment of
privilege, the deliberate creation of division.
That is why it was so vital for Labor in 1983 to embark on
the task of reconciliation, recovery and reconstruction.
And in a very real sense, our mission in 1983 was what it
had been 40 years earlier to save this nation.
No wonder Dr Hewson seeks to put his party's history behind
him. But history is not so easily cut away.
And on this occasion -this celebration of the workers' part
in founding the workers' party let us look briefly at
their record for the working men and women of this country.
What does Tory history tell us about the most basic concern
of working Australians their jobs?
By the end of their last term in office in 1963 they had
created double-dLgit unemployment. They were prepared to
stand idly by while whole industries closed down not least
in importance, the steel industry, with its thousands of
employees and its3 millions of dollars of exports.
We have created more than 1.6 million new jobs. Jobs for
bread-winners. Jobs for women. Jobs for young people.
For those still without jobs, we have created new
opportunities for training and re-training.
Visit a SkillShare Centre in the suburbs and the country
towns and you seo those opportunities being taken up by
people with hope and plans for the future. Yet our
opponents are on record as wanting to shut down the
SkillShare Centres.
Where do they stand on wages policy?
Simply, they havet opposed every wage increase that has been
offered for the last seven and a half years.
that is, at no stage in the life of this
Governmient, in the Tory view, have the times been
right for the workers to get a wage increase.
What about superannuation? When the Liberals were in
office, superannuation was a privilege reserved for the
wealthy, white-collared few. But we have opened up this
erstwhile privilege, and put the legitimate expectation of
superannuation within the grasp of ordinary workers. The
number of people covered by superannuation has increased by
almost a half in our time in office and is steadily
rising, guaranteeing security to individuals and boosting
the savings of the nation.
What about health care surely one of the most basic
concerns of working Australians.
Labor has erected Medicare to provide, for the first time in
the history of this nation, affordable and accessible health
care for all Australians.
The Tory health policy consists of nothing but a
determination to knock down Medicare. Remember Peter Shack?
There, I must acknowledge, was a man with a sense of
history: " The Liberal and National Parties do not have a
particularly goad track record in health, and you don't need
me to remind you of our last period in Government."
What about taxation? Our Government has consistently and
steadily cut income taxes. We're doing it again from 1
January. We have made sure that everyone pays their fair
share: through capital gains and fringe benefits taxes. At
last Australia has a fair taxation system.
Yet now our opponents want to skew the system back again by
making sure that working people pay a consumption tax
whenever they visit a supermarket or corner store. And
behind this public commitment to a consumption tax lurks
their hankering for the flat tax.
And now we have the good doctor declaring that abolishing
the Department of Social Security might be a good idea so
that the needy can make their own way down to the voluntary
agencies like the Salvation Army and the Sydney City
Mission, and get their welfare assistance from them.
Then his Social Security spokesman, Senator Alston ( I can't
ask you to remember him because you have probably never
heard of him) but anyway, he said, well hang on, let's not
limit this to the welfare agencies. This Senator thought it
could be that a firm of accountants might like to deliver
all the welfare services give Price Waterhouse the job of
paying the pension I
It would be easy but it would be dangerous to dismiss
all these things as passing fads. The truth is that they
express the oldest convictions of Toryism in this country
their deep-seated conviction that the system of social
justice we of the Labor Party have fought to build, must be
destroyed, because in the words of Dr Heweon, it is only
' the bnd-nut mentality'. Those are his words. That is
their real attitude.
Some things never change.
what has changed since 1927, for instance, when one,
Theodore Hooke Hill, holding a Beat in the Legislative
Assembly in the very same area now represented federally by
Dr Hewson, rose to denounce Labor's legislation for widows'
pensions, in these terms:
' It was Just such a system of diseased humanitarianism
which led to the fall of the Roman Empire.'
Scratch the paint off one of these new Liberals and you will
find a good old-fashioned unrepentant Tory.
on all the main issues jobs, wages, health, taxation,
welfare their words and their quack remedies and their pet
schemes reveal their true colours and their real priorities.
Sure, they have a new nominal leader who gives himself
only two more years in the job that's staying power for
you.
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But can anyone believe their party itself has changed -in
its pursuit of privilege in its commitment to the one,
permanent principl. e of Tory thinking: to get into power and
to keep Labor out at all costs?
One hundred years ago, Labor's first platform correctly
described Australia's workers as ' the wealth producers'.
Nowhere today is the Tories' unrelenting opposition to the
true interests of those wealth producers more starkly
revealed in no way do they more clearly demonstrate their
commitment to privilege than in this: their instinctive
repugnance for the solidarity of the political and
industrial wings of the Labor movement
a solidarity which for the past 100 years has
worked tirelessly on behalf of those wealth
producers a solidarity that today finds its fullest
expression in the spirit of the Accord between the
Federal Labor Government and the national trade
union movement.
Tonight we pay tribute to the central role the New South
Wales Labor Council played in the foundation of the
Australian Labor Party this Council which is the oldest
peak council of unions in Australia and one of the very
oldest in the world.
It is most fitting that this occasion should take place at
the end of a month which has seen another step of very great
importance to the welfare of the people of Australia and the
well-being of the Australian economy; another step in the
historic partnership between the Australian trade union
movement and the Australian Labor Government the
renegotiation of Mark Six of the Accord, which will deliver
lasting improvements in family living standards through
lower inflation, further cuts in income tax, and save jobs.
My friends,
Tonight we re-affirm our faith in the partnership between
political and industrial Labor, which was forged one hundred
years ago.
Never in all those hundred years has the strength of that
partnership been more important for Australia.
These are testing times for us all.
I do not for a moment deny the difficulties and hardships of
the recessionary phase through which we are passing.
But ours has never been just a fairweather partnership.
It was created at a time of tremendous challenge for the
Labor movement.
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It has been sustained through tines of desperate peril for
the movement and for the nation.
Now, its~ continued strength is the key to economic recovery.
And the foundation for the sustained recovery, which we
shall achieve, will be the immense structural changes we
have wrought in creating a nore modern and competitive
economy. And the indispensable condition for this
transformation has been and remains, the partnership of
Labor. These aire the supreme facts of the economic life of this
nation : Ln 1990.
And they are facts which in themselves stand as testimony to
the extraordinary importance of the work which began at the
Sydney Trrades Hall in 1890.
And that: is the measure of the debt we all owe -first, as
AustraliLans, and as the heirs and successors of those who
put the: Lr hands to the great work, in the great cause of
Labor, one hundred years ago.
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