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-Kwlr
PRIME MINISTER
CHECK AGAINS'IZDELIVFRY EMBARGOED UNTIL DELI. VERY
SPEECH BY THE PRIME MINISTER
SOCIALIST INTERNATIONAL DINNER
SYDNEY, 9 MARCH 1991
Mr President, Mr Secretary-General, distinguished guests,
ladies and gentlemen
It is a very great pleasure and honour to welcome you all
tonight, on this occasion of the meeting of the Socialist
International Leaders' Conference. I do so, of course, both
as Prime Minister of Australia and as leader of the
Australian Labor Party.
I extend an especially warm welcome to our distinguished
visitors from overseas, representing, as you do, the great
cause of social democracy around the world.
And I am here to say, at the outset, that there has never
been a time in the 20th century, when the fundamental values
and ideals of social democracy have been more relevant, more
important, for the future of humanity than they are today.
The events in Central and Eastern Europe have confirmed that
relevance dramatically. But the representation here of the
fraternal parties from Asia, the Middle East, Africa*-. and
South America remind us of our world-wide role and
relevance.
Mr President, it is just over a year since the Berlin Wall
came down.
There is no need for me, here tonight, to dwell on the
immense symbolism of that event.
It is unnecessary, because in your own presence, in your own
life and career of service and sacrifice, Mr President, we
have a living embodiment of more than .50 years of struggle
against two monstrous tyrannies.
And it was no accident of history but rather in the very
nature of things that both those totalitarianisms
identified, as their foremost and common enemy, the cause
you have served so nobly, the cause we represent the cause
of social democracy.
We are all honoured by your presence tonight. We are all
honoured by your Presidency.
This is a year of important anniversaries among them the
anniversary of the Socialist International and the
Frankfurt Declaration, about which I will say something
later. But here in Australia, as you all know, it is the 100th
birthday of the Australian Labor Party.
And to understand the true significance of that event, and
to understand its relevance to social democracy today, we
need, I think, to realise that this centenary marks a very
precise event an event which had a very specific purpose
and meaning.
What happened in 1891 here in Sydney, and more or less
simultaneously in the colonies of Queensland, Victoria and
South Australia, as they then were was that the trade
union movement established a political organisation with the
express purpose of securing direct parliamentary
representation for the workers in this country.
By that decision, by its commitment to the parliamentary
system, the Labor Movement set the Party, which it had
created, upon the course to which it has kept, to this day.
The Australian Labor Party has been profoundly shaped by its
fundamental commitment to parliamentary democracy.
But equally important: more than any other Australian
institution, more than any other political organisation, the
Australian Labor Party has shaped the very nature and
content of the Australian democracy itself.
In June 1891, history was made when the Labor Party, here in
New South Wales, secured the election of 35 members$ 2. a
third of the Parliament to form the world's first
parliamentary Labor Party.
And in the light of all that has happened since, it is
instructive to read the objective which the fledgling party
set itself. The founders stated, as their purpose:
' To secure 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.
To bring all electors who are in favour of democratic
and progressive legislation under one common banner and
to organise thoroughly such voters, with a view to
concerted and effective action at all general elections
in the future.'
Over the decades, the objectives of the Labor Party have
been hotly debated and frequently re-stated. Yet no
formulation has better stated its consistent purpose than
that of the Party founders one hundred years ago.
It has often been said, and correctly said, that the
Australian Labor Party was born with a sense of history.
Indeed, that sense of its past has always been, and remains,
one of the great sources of its strength and its confidence
about its future.
One of that first band of 35 members elected to the New
South Wales Parliament, George Black, himself wrote a
history, and tried to identify some of its formative
influences. ' No movement so widespread' he wrote in the 1920s, ' could
owe its origin to any one person. To discover the impulses
and influences which generated the Australian Labor
Movement, one must look far beyond those who stood beside
its cradle when its feeble cries, almost inarticulate, first
reached the public ear'. Black then proceeded to trace
Labor's first appearance in Parliament ' to the Eureka
Stockade, the Chartist movement in England, the teachings of
Tom Paine, William Cobbett, Robert Owen, through to the
French Revolution and Rousseau, Voltaire and Montaigne, and
ultimately to the Sermon on the Mount'. Perhaps even beyond
that, he said: ' from hilltop to hilltop of thought, to the
first incoherent mutterings of toilers who felt that their
conditions were unnatural and unjust, but had no idea as to
how they might be bettered.'
Now, that's a fairly comprehensive ancestry.
But there is a notable absentee from the cradle of
Australian Labor.
Karl Marx doesn't get a guernsey.
And the truth is, throughout its long, often turbu~ dlit,
always vigorous, history, the Australian Labor Party has
utterly rejected Marxism and the ideology constructed upon
it. Specifically., the Australian Labor Party, from the
beginning, has rejected the dogma of the class war.
And the distinctive creation of the early Labor Movement and
the first Labor Governments the arbitration system is
one of the enduring outcomes of that rejection. The legal
foundations of our arbitration system rest upon the
recognition of equality the equality of unions and
employers before the industrial tribunals.
In effect, a statutory declaration against the class war.
That, no doubt, is one of the reasons why we have the
distinction of having been singled out by Lenin himself, in
1914, as an example of all the worst shortcomings of social
democracy.
Mr President, as you will recall better than any of us here,
when this organisation was reconstituted as the Socialist
International in 1951, it too, specifically rejected Marxism
and the class war, in the terms of the Frankfurt
Declaration. It is now extraordinarily difficult to convey, to a new
g6neration, the derision and contempt with which it was
greeted by the ideologues who accepted the instruction of
the Comintern.
Yet, everything that is most hopeful in Europe today
springs, in large measure, from the stand taken by the
parties of social democracy in Western Europe 40 years ago.
It is easy enough to say, with hindsight, that the collapse
of the central command systems was inevitable that
ultimately the human spirit would break the system before
the system crushed the human spirit.
Yet,' few in the 50s would have dared to venture that the
collapse of communism, materially and morally, was a
foregone conclusion, at least in our lifetime.
And of all the factors which produced the epic, and
epoch-making events of 1989, none were more important than
the example and the efforts of the parties of social
democracy. That is why I said at the beginning that the values and
ideals we hold had never been more relevant or important.
And the key to those values is the enlargement of liberty,
through the advancement of equality of opportunity.
For all the variations we make in our respective panties,
the differences in emphasis according to time, cirqftstance,',
the diversities of economies, nationalities and cultures,
these are the enduring themes, the enduring values of social
democracy: liberty, equality, opportunity.
And underlying all, underpinning all, is the commitment to
democracy. This cause our cause endures precisely because it
rejects the -arrogance of dogmas and ideologies which claim
to be universal.
But the values the cause represents can speak to men and
women everywhiere.
It has been -the honour of the Australian Labor Party to be
the standard bearer of those values, now for a century
pre-eminently, but by no means exclusively, because this is
a great democracy, and we do not claim a prescriptive
monopoly on all virtue, now or in the future.
But I do profoundly believe that the greatest single source
of the strength of the Australian democracy has been the
strength of the Labor Party, and the values of liberty,
equality and opportunity the values of social democracy
which we represent.