CHECK AGAINST nELITVERY EMBARGOED UNTIL DELITVERY
" CHANGE IS NOT OPTIONAL"
AN ADDRESS BY THE PRIME MINISTER
JOHN CURTIN MEMORIAL LECTURE
CURTIN UNIVERSITY
PERTH 5 OCTOBER 1991
Mr Vice-Chancellor, distinguished guests, ladies and
gentlemen. When I last had the honour of delivering the John Curtin
Memorial Lecture in September 1983 I said that there
were certain rare occasions in a lifetime which were bound,
by their associations, to be especially moving and
memorable. Tonight, how much more deeply must those emotions be felt
not only by me personally, but by all of us here who have a
sense of history at a time when we celebrate the fiftieth
anniversary of the formation of the Curtin Labor Government,
and celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the formation of
the Australian Labor Party and do so in the University
which bears his name.
We celebrate these key events in Australia's history in a
year in which all our perceptions of human history must
surely be heightened and sharpened under the impact of the
extraordinary events now unfolding before us.
When we consider the events of those two years, 1941 and
1991, bridging fifty of the most terrible and tumultuous
years in human history; and when we consider their impact on
Australia and the world, it is impossible, at least for
anyone of my generation, not to feel a sense of excitement,
exhilaration even, tinged with a sense of awe, and
impossible not to feel, above all, a sense of liberation and
hope for the opportunities and challenges which these events
hold for the future.
But for those of us of the Australian Labor Party, there is
something uniquely satisfying in commemorating both the
centenary of our party, and the advent of the great Curtin
Government fifty years ago, in this pivotal year of 1991.
2.
I use the word " uniquely" in its precise and correct sense.
For I make two assertions:
First, no political party in the world has had its course
shaped more profoundly, more directly by the impact of the
landmark events in world history since 1914 with 1941 the
watershed year, and 1991 a year of culmination.
And second, no political party expresses more fully, in its
own history, and in the history of a single nation, the
struggle for, and the triumph of, the fundamental principle
which lies at the heart of the meaning of 1991 for so many
peoples around the world today the commitment to elective
democracy. Ladies and gentlemen,
These are large claims. Yet I believe that the study of
Labor's history justifies them from the first commitment
made by the Australian trade unions to parliamentary
democracy one hundred years ago; and, within the framework
of that commitment, the development of the Platform,
objectives and structures of the Party, under the impact of
World War One, the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression,
the rise of Nazidom, the outbreak of the Second World War,
Hitler's invasion of Russia, Pearl Harbour, the Fall of
Singapore, the Revolution in China, the Korean War, Vietnam
and the pervasiveness of the impact of the Cold War. I
believe that the study of the Party's history warrants the
assertion that the Australian Labor Party has been uniquely
shaped by its response to these crucial world events.
At the same time, this international dimension to Labor's
development make all the more remarkable its central
achievement: that it remains the authentic Australian
political institution, that institution which, above all
others, reflects and expresses the Australian character and
the Australian way of democracy.
From that perspective, we can see that the truly remarkable
fact about the Labor Party's history is not its turbulence,
or its failures and we have had our share; not its
inconsistencies and no organisation as complex and diverse
as ours could exist without them in abundance. What stands
out is the Labor Party's capacity for change and renewal in
a world of immiense change, throughout a century of
unprecedented change; and yet, at the same time, the
consistency with which it has held to the fundamental
principle: the pursuit of its program through parliamentary
democracy. That capacity has been the key to its strength.
Even more, it has been the key to the strength of the
Australian democracy itself.
Never was that capacity so vital for Australia literally
" vital", for it was a matter of the nation's life as in
the critical year of 1941.
3.
And no Australian has, in his own life and career, more
thoroughly embodied that capacity for change than John
Curtin. Given this association, given our remembrance of this man
Curtin, this man for the times, who led the nation through
times of immense change, my theme tonight virtually sets
itself. It could scarcely be other than the theme of change, in our
own times of immeasurable change, and the challenges it
brings unavoidably in its wake.
I put these propositions:
In the world in which we now live, change is not
optional. Refusal to change has not been an option for Australia,
for the Australian economy, for the Australian
Government, or for the Australian Labor Party.
It is not optional for Australia, as it seeks its
proper place in our region and the world, and as it
transforms itself into an internationally competitive
economy. It is not optional for the Australian Government, given
its duty of leadership towards the achievement of these
goals. And it is not optional for the Australian Labor Party,
in its determination to maintain its historic role as
the powerhouse for change in this nation.
It has always been the fact, but never more true than now,
that there are only two choices:
either we make change ourselves or have changes
imposed on us by the rest of the world;
either to achieve change ourselves, by ourselves,
setting our own objectives and using our own
methods, or have change thrust upon us.
Could there ever have been any doubt which choice this
Australian Labor Government would make?
So I illustrate my theme of change, and support my
propositions about change, by reference to Curtin's own
career. The remarkable events which brought the Curtin Government to
power on 7 October 1941 represented one of the dramatic
points of climax in Australian political and parliamentary
history.
But for Curtin himself, 7 October represented the end of a
long period of preparation, not only personal preparation,
but a long hard struggle to prepare the Labor Party to take
charge of Australia in war-time.
It is difficult now to convey the immensity of the task,
because it involved profound and sometimes heart-breaking
changes of attitudes in the nation itself, in the Labor
Party, and, not least, in his own attitudes.
This last factor is one of the keys to Curtin's greatness:
his capacity to change, even when change involved his own
deepest feelings, if he believed the change was essential to
the future of the Labor Party or the safety of the nation.
He demonstrated this capacity time and again in 1931, in
1937, in 1940, in 1941, and,' for him, most wrenching of all,
in 1942, when he exhausted himself to achieve Labor's
historic reversal of its attitude against conscription in
war-time.
In 1931, for example, he had taken the leading role, as a
Western Australian delegate to the Federal Conference, in
expelling the Lang forces in New South Wales for their
sabotage of the Scullin Government and their opposition to
the Premiers Plan. He accepted this duty, even though he
was as trenchant a critic of the Premiers Plan as a means of
dealing with the Great Depression as Jack Lang or anybody
else. By 1937, he had become absolutely convinced that the
international situation, in both Europe and the Pacific,
demanded that the Labor Party abandon the isolationist,
neo-pacifist, position it had taken in the wake of the
horrors of the First World War, and the conscription split
of 1916. This was Curtin's theme at Conference after
Conference, especially in New South Wales, where the fight
for Labor unity and the fight for Australia's security
became, for him, an indivisible cause and commitment.
Curtin made a landmark speech in the House of
Representatives on Australian defence during the Estimates
debate on 5 November 1936. Its theme was: " A greater
degree of self-reliance in Australia's defence is
essential". Three years before the outbreak of war in
Europe and five years before Pearl Harbour, his speech was
uncannily accurate as a prediction of the situation in which
Australia was to find itself. But the point I make here is
that the speech demonstrated Curtin's capacity to run
against prevailing orthodoxies, including Labor orthodoxies.
He told the House of Representatives: " The dependence of
Australia upon the competence, let alone the readiness, of
British statesmen to send forces to our aid is too dangerous
a hazard upon which to found Australia's defence policy."
The UAP Member for Barton, Mr Albert Lane, interjected:
" Great Britain has never failed us."
Curtin replied: " History has had no experience of the
situation I am visualising."
Albert Lane again interjected: " It is all imagination."
Curtin: " No, it represents a reasonable examination of the
possibilities of the situation. Great wars in which
Australia's security is to be imperilled would not be
European wars. They will be wars in the South Pacific."
It has to be remembered that, in 1936, the attitude implicit
in Albert Lane's interjections represented the dominant
Australian attitude, and not just on the part of the
conservative Establishment. The more significant,
therefore, and for most of his hearers, the more unsettling,
was Curtin's declaration:
We should look upon the people of the United States of
America, our neighbour across the Pacific Ocean, with a
degree of fraternity, disregarding altogether the
direct trade relations which their circumstances and
ours have produced, as men and women who speak our
language and who are of the same common origin. We
should not be engaged in saying, as apparently we have
been saying in the past, that we do not care a dump for
them and in making difficulties for them.
How novel, how radical such sentiments were in the Australia
of 1936 can be measured by the fact that even at the end of
1941, after Pearl Harbour, Curtin's famous call to the
United States, " without any inhibitions of any kind.... free
of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the
United Kingdom" could raise angry criticism in Australia and
deep resentment in London.
But the central message of Curtin's speech in November 1936
was directed towards the Labor Party. It was the signal for
the beginning of an immense change from the basically
pacifist and decidedly isolationist attitudes which
dominated the Party at all levels, as a result of the
Conscription Split and the human tragedy of the 1914-18 War.
But to achieve that change called for all Curtin's powers of
persuasion and perseverance.
Even as late as Easter 1940, when the Nazi-Soviet Non-
Aggression Pact had produced the Fourth Partition of Poland,
the rape of Finland and the Soviet annexation of Latvia,
Lithuania and Estonia, this sentiment was strong enough to
produce from the New South Wales Annual Conference the
notorious " Hands Of f Russia" resolution, which declared that
" the Australian people have nothing to gain from a
continuance of this war".
But after the fall of France in June 1940, with Hitler's
full might poised against Britain, the combined Labor
leadership political and union reaffirmed its total
support for the war effort, short of forming a national
government under Menzies.
Curtin defended his co-operation with Menzies: " We are
opposed to the Government of the country, not to the country
it governs. We did not win the 1937 election, so we had to
do our best to see that the country had requisite defences."
Curtin staked his future on a speech to a meeting of 150
union delegates at the Sydney Trades Hall in 8 August 1940:
" You and I are faced wi th an early judgement by
the electors. I merely ask for unity The job
is sticky and getting harder. It would be
cowardly for me to slide out."
The heart of Curtin's speech was his summary of his attitude
to the war in Europe and Australia's place in it:
" The Nazis in Germany decimated the trade unions.
Fascism in Italy began with foul murders and with
the thrusting of castor oil down the throats of
trade unionists. Those two philosophies are now
in alliance against everything that Labor in Great
Britain and the Dominions stands for. I remind
you that almost the only places in the world in
which a Labor minority can raise its head and be
articulate today are Australia and Great
Britain.... I refuse to allow Australia to be a
prey to Nazism and Fascism."
Menzies called the elections for 21 September 1940. The
results were a remarkable vindication for Curtin, but he
nearly paid a disastrous personal price for party unity.
Neglecting his own seat of Fremantle for the sake of his
national responsibilities, he was saved by a handful of
votes from our soldiers in North Africa.
But the election result rendered Menzies dependent on the
votes of two Victorian independents. This was the
Parliament which a year later, in October 1941, was to
create and sustain the Curtin wartime Government until
Labor's landslide victory of 1943.
Australia's growing danger throughout 1941 intensified the
pressures on Menzies not from Labor, but from the
Coalition. " I was surrounded", Menzies was later to say,
" by doubtful supporters and appalling halfwits". As Paul
Hasluck, another great Western Australian, wrote in his
masterwork The Government and the People 1939-41:
" The United Australia Party itself had been
disintegrating for at least three years past. The
internal loyalty of the party had been damaged by
a variety of causes and party discipline weakened
over a long period of time, while the party had
accumulated within itself the poison of personal
disappointments and animosities. Far from binding
the party more tightly together, the coming of the
war had removed the opportunities it might
otherwise have had for internal reconstruction."
The contrast with Curtin's leadership could not have been
greater.
Menzies resigned on 29 August 1941 and the Leader of the
Country Party, Arthur Fadden, was installed in the Prime
Ministership. The Fadden Government lasted 40 days.
Fadden himself used to say: " Like Noah's flood, I reigned
for 40 days and 40 nights". So I suppose Menzies could have
said, appropriately enough: " Apres moi, le deluge".
During the debate on the Budget on 3 October, the two
Independents, Coles and Wilson, convinced that the Coalition
was incapable of leading Australia in war-time, voted with
Labor to bring down the Fadden Government and make Curtin
Prime Minister.
Curtin pledged: " We will carry on the war wholeheartedly
and with no inhibitions of any sort or description."
The rest is history Pearl Harbour; the forging of the
American-Australian Alliance and the Curtin-Macarthur
partnership; the fall of Singapore; the struggle of will
with Churchill to bring the Australian divisions home from
the Middle East and prevent their diversion to Burma;
Curtin's lonely vigil while our best troops made the
perilous crossing of the Indian Ocean; the sweeping
victories of the Japanese forces; the mobilisation of
civilian and industrial Australia; the searing debate in the
Labor Party over conscription; then from the end of 1942,
after one year in office, the long slow turning of the tide
of war.
I have said on many occasions that the most important truth
of all about Curtin and Curtin's leadership, was that even
in the darkest and most demanding days of the war, he never
lost sight of Labor's peacetime objectives at home and
abroad.
But he based his vision on a world and nation undergoing
enormous change.
Internationally, Curtin recognised the fundamental changes
which had occurred in the balance of forces in the world and
in Australia's strategic situation. one of his greatest
achievements was to forge the relationship with the United
States, which all subsequent governments have seen as a
keystone of Australia's security.
Envisioning the post-war reconstruction of Australia, he
foresaw the need for basic change in attitudes, in the
nation itself, and in the Labor Movement.
In the last years of the War in the last years of his life
he began the preparation for change to peace, just as in
1936, he had begun preparing the Labor Party for war.
He summed up his approach at the Federal Labor Conference in
Canberra in November 1943:
" I have said that the world can never be the same in
the years to come as it was before the war.
Australia's capacity to govern involves adaptability to
resolve new problems and meet new conditions. What
was good 20 years ago may not be good enough now."
Ladies and gentlemen
I use that quotation and the approach it represents as a
bridge between the challenges facing Australia 50 years ago,
and Curtin's response, on one hand, and, on the other, the
challenges we face now and the response we need to make
today. And today, more than ever, in adapting to new
problems and conditions, what may have been good enough
twenty years ago is almost certainly not good enough now.
And I repeat my main theme: either we change ourselves or
have changes imposed on us by the rest of the world.
The first thing is for us all to realise that this tough,
increasingly competitive world of five and a half billion
people does not owe, and will not give, seventeen million
Australians an easy prosperity. The days of our being able
to hitch a free ride in a world clamouring, and prepared to
pay high prices, for our rural and mineral products, are
behind us. From this fact flows everything else.
The challenge for the foreseeable future, is to produce more
than we spend. The rest of the world will not allow us to
continue indefinitely to live beyond our means by borrowing
from them.
Our rural and mineral products will remain important into
the future. But the challenge is to add to them. That is,
we must export more manufactured goods and services and
substitute more quality Australian production for imports.
The challenge is therefore to make the decisions and adopt
the practices and attitudes which will enable this and
succeeding generations to achieve those basic goals.
Those are the challenges. How we are prepared together to
meet them will determine the standards we can enjoy and the
kind of Australia we will pass on to our children.
And so in that context, I want to deal with the main area of
change where, as a Government and as a Party, we have
adopted policies which of necessity involved new approaches,
new responses, new attitudes and, in key areas, sharp
departures from old orthodoxies. That is the area of
economic management, in the widest meaning of that term.
In 1983, we inherited an economy in recession. The early
years of this Government were therefore naturally dominated
by the need to restore growth and reduce unemployment. The
goals for which we had received so convincing a mandate in
March 1983 were national reconciliation, national recovery
and national reconstruction. The National Economic Summit
of April 1983, and the First Accord laid the foundations for
their fulfilment. The change in industrial attitudes from
confrontation to cooperation took priority on our agenda.
The pressing need for fundamental changes in other areas of
economic management policy was not then so sharply apparent.
But, during those first years of Government, the signs
emerged: sharp falls in the value of the Australian dollar,
a worsening current account deficit and the associated
build-up of foreign debt. By the middle of the 1980s, the
need for fundamental and lasting change in the very
structure of the Australian economy had become overwhelming.
As our Government moved to respond, it became clear that
Australia had reached a fork in the road: down one track
lay great challenges, coupled with the prospect of renewed
vigour in our economy; down the other, an apparently easier
ride, but one that would have seen a permanent fall in
living standards, not only relative to our traditional
standards of comparison in Europe, but relative to our
rapidly growing neighbours in Asia.
There was only one choice for a Government committed to
bettering the lot of the Australian people, and in
particular, its working men and women and their families.
And we made that choice. We embarked on a program of reform
and restructuring unprecedented in Australia's history.
But even in our first year, there was one great change that
we made to breach the walls of orthodoxy one that marked
the first step on the long road towards opening up the
Australian economy. It was our decision, in December 1983,
to float the dollar.
In March, as soon as we assumed office, we had had to deal
immediately with an exchange rate crisis. The problems of
speculation against the fixed rate of the dollar recurred
later in the year. It was clear that those episodes would
continually recur and would severely limit our capacity to
achieve policy objectives. Accordingly, we took the
decision, in company with many other developed economies, to
float our currency and free our institutions to trade with
minimal interference on international financial markets.
This decision broke a long tradition of a fixed exchange
rate, against sterling, and against the US dollar and, most
recently, against a basket of other currencies. It was
controversial. It was resisted and criticised in many
quarters. Many saw it as ma ' king Australia hostage to the
vagaries of the financial markets.
But it was a decision that was as unavoidable as it was
correct. The international currency speculators had
regularly demonstrated their capacity to make profits by
building pressure against the rate the Reserve Bank was
defending. We made the difficult judgment that this longestablished,
purported sheet anchor of a fixed rate, had, in
fact, become a major source of instability and an
unacceptable limitation on policy flexibility.
That judgment has proved correct. Our ability to manage our
external situation to provide the time necessary to achieve
essential structural reform, while maintaining reasonable
employment growth derives from the closer integration of
Australia with international capital markets that floating
our currency made possible.
No wise government would be reckless about predicting the
future in regard to the levels of Australia's overseas debt.
However, stabilising it as a ratio of GDP has been one of
our central policy objectives. Nor would I want to argue,
in the face of the clear facts, that all this borrowing has
been prudent. But in the midst of the more hysterical
commentary, it is easy to lose sight of the substantial
build-up of Australian equity overseas and restructuring at
home that this borrowing has financed.
This year's Budget forecasts foreshadow a stabilising of the
ratio of this debt to GDP a landmark in the continuing
process of adjustment in which we are engaged, and an
enormous set-back for the prophets of doom.
But, returning to my central theme of change, let me go back
to the crisis of the middle of the 1980s, and I use that
dramatic and perhaps overused word ' crisis' with
deliberation. For the questions that confronted us then, as
the dollar fell and the current account deficit rose both,
apparently, without limit were fundamentally questions of
national confidence: could Australia survive, compete and
prosper in this rapidly changing world?
11.
We were determined that Australia's answer would be Yka.
But we realised that it would require a root-and-branch reexamination
of many, long-standing features of our national
life, and of the assumptions underpinning them.
The results of this re-examination have been far-reaching
and are by no means complete.
But let me mention three examples: the role of the public
sector; policies towards industry; and the wages system
Our first task was to institute a thorough review of the use
Australians were making of our national resources. This was
the essence of our response.
As a Government, this exercise would not have been credible,
had we not begun with the public sector.
We worked throughout the remaining years of the 1980s to
eliminate the public sector deficit. In doing so, we
demonstrated that traditional Labor objectives could be
achieved, within a balanced budget framework, by a carefully
designed combination of targeted assistance and increased
equity in the tax system. This break with the conventional
wisdom that a balanced budget, or even worse yet, as the
post-war orthodoxy had it, a surplus, could only be achieved
at the expense of traditional Labor values, was resisted in
some quarters. But the break with old orthodoxy was
crucial. Reductions in Government's call on national
savings have a direct impact on the current account,
allowing a much higher level of domestic investment for a
given deficit.
We also looked at the stock of publicly owned assets. In
many areas, the pattern of public ownership was longestablished
and the reasons for it long since overtaken by
developments in the economy. It has been critically
important that we be prepared to acknowledge the
anachronisms in many areas of public ownership, both to give
Government necessary budgetary flexibility and to improve
the performance of the companies and the sectors of the
economy in which they operate.
I believe the recent Commonwealth Bank float demonstrates
the benefits this reappraisal has brought. It has been
extremely successful with many Australian workers welcoming
the opportunity to invest directly in one of our great
national institutions, while the Bank itself has been
strengthened by its excellent reception on the share market.
In our policies towards industry, the change has been no
less dramatic.
12.
Tariff protection had been one of the abiding features of
the Australian economy since Federation. It had become an
article of faith. Tariffs protected Australian industry by
making foreign goods more expensive here; and the supposed
virtues of this protection became deeply embedded in the
very psyche of the nation.
Right from the start, this Government deliberately and
determinedly set about pulling down the tariff walls. By
1992, our existing programs will have slashed the nominal
rate of assistance to the manufacturing sector by over onethird,
from 13 to 8 per cent, and the effective rate from 22
to 12 per cent.
We have not done this, as some would have you believe,
because we have been converted, to paraphrase Keynes, to the
views of some long-defunct economist. We have done this
because we believe that the facts of Australian economic
history clearly support two fundamental propositions.
First, that industries protected by tariffs do not develop
and become internationally competitive, but rather become
isolated and fall further behind world standards, creating a
demand for even higher tariffs. Second, that tariffs burden
our export industries, reducing their competitiveness and,
by inflating costs, make the development of new export
industries more difficult.
In short, tariffs reduce the capacity of the Australian
economy to advance living standards.
Now, of course, that process of change, one of the most
radical changes in our nation's history, has involved
dismantling some of our most cherished orthodoxies, held for
generations by much of industry employers as much as
unions. But we are convinced that the tariff walls are an
obstruction against achieving the fundamental objectives of
a Labor Government. So we are removing them.
At the same time, we have seen immense changes in our wages
system, both in retrospect and in prospect.
In retrospect, the great change in the industrial wing of
the Labor movement can be seen as pivotal. Wide acceptance
within the movement of the proposition that workers'
interests can, in appropriate circumstances, be better
safeguarded by cooperation than by confrontation has
underpinned much of our success. In many industries, the
union movement has not merely facilitated change it has
set the agenda. On training and re-training and in
reforming awards to make them relevant to contemporary
industrial conditions, the union movement has been in the
vanguard.
13.
And now, with the Australian Industrial Relations Commission
in the midst of its critical review of the National Wage
Case principles, we confront the prospect of perhaps the
greatest changes in our wages system we have seen. The
sharply increased emphasis on workplace bargaining against
demonstrated productivity benchmarks will fundamentally
alter industrial relations in Australia. One indication of
the extent of this change has been the questioning by the
Commission itself the foundation stone of the wages system
of its own future role.
Those who may have believed, in 1983, that its attachment to
the trade union movement would be a millstone around the
neck of the new Labor Government have been utterly
confounded. Confounded, because the industrial wing of our
great movement has shown the courage that Curtin showed in
changing and adapting, in spite of the pain and the
difficulty, to further the fundamental objectives, both of
the Party and of the nation he loved so deeply and served so
splendidly. Ladies and gentlemen,
This Labor Government has never been in doubt about the kind
of Australia we wish to build an Australia with a modern,
diversified, competitive and export-oriented economy; an
Australia vigorously engaged with the world economy, and
enmeshed in particular with the dynamism of Asia and the
Pacific; an Australia committed to maintaining and enhancing
the quality of life, social justice and the preservation of
our natural environment; a self-reliant Australia, not
merely fitting in with the world as we find it, but helping
to shape it and capable of taking on the best the world has
to offer and winning.
This process of modernisation, of adaptation to the changing
world economy, is not something that has some future cut-off
point. It must be a continuing process.
There is no point at which we can say change and reform have
finished because there is no point at which the world will
stop changing.
And this is the essential point. We live in a world of
unprecedented, indeed breathtaking, change. And, of course,
the profound interest and excitement of the events in Europe
should not distract us from the central fact of our future:
that our own region is a crucible for change. We can no
longer afford the easy simplicities, the costly
complacencies of the fifties and sixties and seventies. I
say " costly" because we are now paying the price for the
neglect of those decades. Our task now is to make sure that
future generations are not called upon to pay a similar
price for any neglect or complacency on our part, in this
make-or-break decade.
14.
I put one last proposition and I put it in all earnestness
to every member of the Australian Labor Party, especially
those who are disposed to criticise our program of change
and reform as representing some kind of unwarranted or
unauthorised departure from Labor principles and tradition.
Of course, harsher language is sometimes used, not
altogether unlike that used against Curtin during the
Conscription debate in 1942 and which actually brought him
to the point of offering his resignation to Caucus: the
charge that he would end up by leading from the other side.
I ask such critics today just to consider this:
Suppose Australia had not had the great good fortune to have
had a Labor Government for the past eight and a half years,
through the choice of the people in four successive
elections. And suppose that Labor Government had not
accepted the need for change, and forced the pace of change.
And, thinking this proposition through if Labor, which
would then have been reduced to long opposition, had clung
to old shibboleths and refused to change, in these years
which, in the very heartland of international communism,
have culminated in the shattering of the shibboleths of
seventy-five years, and the shuddering collapse of central
command planning what would then have been the situation?
I say this: the Australian Labor Party would have run the
very real risk of being doomed, not just to permanent
opposition, but to permanent irrelevance and impotence.
Ladies and gentlemen
Earlier, I quoted part of John Curtin's speech to the
Federal Labor Conference, in November 1943, in which he
emphasised the need for change in our national habits and
attitudes, and way of thinking about things and our way of
doing things. John Curtin had no doubt how that was to be
achieved. He had no doubt that the Australian Labor Party
alone had the capacity to change itself and thereby change
the nation. He concluded his speech to Federal Conference
in November 1943:
The Labor Party has a great tradition in organising
co-operation for the welfare of the mass of the people.
It is peculiarly fitted by knowledge, experience, and
the confidence of the people, to lead them towards the
wider horizons of co-operation now appearing before
mankind. If the Labor Party is to maintain its place
in the vanguard of the march of human progress, it must
not fail to do its part in this momentous opportunity
to bring nearer to achievement the fellowship and
welfare of all peace-loving peoples.
That was John Curtin's declaration of faith in Labor's
historic role. His words ring down five decades, and never
with greater resonance than today.