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PRIME MINISTER
ADDRESS BY THE PLUME MINISTER, THE HON P. J. KEATING MP,
TO THE NEW SOUTH WALES AUSTRALIA DAY COUNCIL LUNCH,
JANUARY 1993, DARLING HARBOUR CONVENTION CENTRE
I am very glad to be here, and particularly to welcome our guests from overseas.
This very large gathering is a measure both of your patriotism and your support for
A'd ney~ O01" ic bid.
For it is an Australia Day celebration and a great sporting occasion.
There is nothing unusual about that of course. Sport and patriotism have long been
virtually synonymous in Australia, and any Prli i-mMinister who does not know his sport
cannot expect to lead a happy life for long.
I won't boast. I will let my record this year speak for itself: I have addressed audiences
drawn from a wide and eccentric range of sports, including Australian Rules Football, and
I did it without causing the slightest embarrassment to anyone.
In fact Alan Border and Richie Richardson seemed genuinely startled by my knowledge of
cricket perhaps because they had adin the English press that I was Irish.
The fact remains that if Australians cannot bc fairly described as sports-mad, they most
certainly can be unfairly described that way.
For our overseas guests I should perhaps explain that our avid devotion to sport is believed
to derive from a long and intense contest with nature.
In the pioneering phase of our national life we were in perpetual competition with the
elements, and it is said that this translated culturally into an almost universal admiration
for physical prowess.
It is also said that our fascination with gambling has its origins in the game of chance
which the duel with nature always is.
That is how the story goes. In the great enpty spaces in Australia, men and women and
children had room to run and jump, and race their horscs, and kick balls around and
between gum-trees, and throw bags of wheat over fences and buildings.
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It was a physical culture and, of course, a healthy one which made our athletes all the
more formidable.
It is also suspected that our urge to compete derived in part from our status at first as a
colony, and then as a somewhat subordinate partner in the British Empire.
Such peoples thc New Zealanders provide another example are generally determined
to prove themsclves on playing fields. And battlefields. And throughout this century
Australians did just that,
Down here at the bottom of the world we're susceptible to feelings of inadequacy and
neglect. It is important to raise our self-esteem by beating the best in thc world.
So we have always made a great deal of what we do best: and it has long been said that
what we do bcst is sport.
That there is still some truth in this is undeniable.
Last year we watched with great pride as, in Barcelona, Australian athlctes won a swag of
medals quite out of proportion to the size of our population. But we reckoned it was about
the right number.
In the previous three or four Olympics we thought we did adequately when we did as well
or better than othcr comparable countrics.
In sport we expect nothing less than to be above the avcrage.
There were other sporting triumphs, the rugby union team among them. Like all other
Prime Ministers before me, I could stand here on Australia Day 1993 and read out a long
list of our sporting succcsscs in the past twelve months.
But I won't do that.
Instead let me mention a few other medals won by Australians in the past year. Medals
and awards in fields of endeavour for which we are less well known in the world. Fields
in which usually we have taken somewhat less pride than wc might.
But year after year Australian artists writcrs, dancers, musicians, film makers, actors
take on thc world and win.
Last year, for instance, a young Australian ballet danicer, Simone Goldsmith, won the gold
medal at the Royal Academy of Dance Gence Awards in London.
Another Australiani, Holly Smart, won it the year beforc. In fact Australians took all gold,
silvcr and bronze miedals in both years.
Last year a 26 year old Australian viol inist, Ben Lea, became one of the very few
forcigners to be appointed to wvhat many, people will tell you is the greatest orchestra in
the world the Vienna Philharmonic. Bcn's twin brother, Toby, is principal solo viola
with La Scala.
Last year an Australian, Jackie Farkas, won thc world's laT~ est prize of $ 250,000 for a
student film at the International Cincma Students Festival in Tokyo. While another
young Australian, Stavros Efthymiou was naincd Young Film-maker of the Year at the
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In the United States, Judy Davis won a Golden Globe Award, the Los Angeles Film
Critics Award and the National Board of Review Award for best supporting actres.
And last year a young Australian, Baz Luhrrnann, won the Prix de la Jeunesse at the
Cannes Film Festival for his film Strictly Ballroom.
Strictly Ballroom won a number of other prizes and many standing ovations around
the world. It also won thcrm here. And it was a huge box office success.
That, perhaps, is the most important thing not how much we impressed the world, but
the degree to which with our music, literature, opera, theatre, dance and sport we
inspired and amused ourselves.
I think all Australians should see Strictly Ballroom, including Australians who prefer sport
to art.
They will like it if only because Strictly Ballroomn is about competition, and sport the
most eccentric of sports ballroom dancing.
It is also about all those pioncering virtues of perseverance, and faith, and hope, and rising
above adversity.
The film is about thc need for things to change, the triumph of youth over age, of freedom
and self-expression over stifling conservatism, and of course the triumph of truth and
justice over villainy.
It reminds me of my own life, fighting those conservatives.
" Strictly Ballroom" is a film for our times. Or any other timcs.
It is an Australian fairy talc, both on the Screen and off it. The making of Strictly
Ballroom required those same virtucs of perseverance and courage as the film describes.
It is one of the curious things about patriotism that we all take credit for the success of a
few remarkable individuals. When our athletes won at Barelona we would say that " we"
won them.
When our artists perform brilliantly overseas we say that they are " ours".
Of course, we didn't win those medals. Our athletes did. And it was not our talent or our
perseverance which got their success in Barcelona or in Vienna.
Yet we did wvin. We won in the sensc that their triumphs strengthen our faith in Ourselves.
We also won in that their success was in some measure a return on the kind of society we
have ceated here. A society which does not stifle hope or excellence, but encourages it:
encourages it through the creation of institutions like the Australian Institute of
Sport, the National Institute of Dramatic Art, or the Australian Film and Television
school.
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encourages it through commitment to the principles of cultural pluralism which we
have followed in the past 20 years. For while Strictly Ballroom is unambiguously
Australian, the cast and crew and themes of the film arc nothing if not
multicultural.
T'here will, no doubt, be people here who say that we do not do enough to encourage
excellence. There will be some who say we do not do enough to raise the level of
equality. I can only say we do our best by both, and most Australians are agreed that this is at least
the proper ambition.
So I'm inclincd to think that, so long as we foster talent and ambition, when Australian
athletes or artists win we have a right to say that " we" won too.
And, ladies and gcntlcmen, I would also say that if today we considered what all of us
have achieved in recent years, we might begin to feel even morc pride in ourselves.
Becausc what Australians have been engaged in for the past few years, and what will
engage us for the rest of this dccade, is a contest at least as great as our forebears' contest
with nature, and much greater than anything which happens on a sporting field.
It is a contcst, in one sense, with the rest of the world; in another, with ourselves.
It is the effort to transform our economy into one which is modern and competitive. It is
an effort to rc-direct our priorities. It is an effort to make an historic shift to Asia and the
Pacific. All this means transforming ourselves our habits of mind and work; the way we se
ourselves, and the way we sec the rest of the world.
We will nccd those qualities which great athlctes and artists have.
It will requirc confidence in ourselves, our institutions, our abilitics and our strength of
purpose. It will require a miatufe sense of identity.
I am one of thosc who is certain that the great transformation of Australia will occur.
I am confident becausc I know what changes have already been made. I know what we
have already achieved.
Therc has been a revolution in our thinking, and an irrcvcrsible re-casting of our
economy. Few countries, in fact, have moved so dramatically to restructure and rebuild.
Fcwer still have determined oni doing this without sacrif icing those principles of fairness
and equity which have always guided Australian democracy.
My point today is not to argue about who is most fit to lead Australia through thc change.
My point is that Australians have proved themsclves capable of making it.
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Today I could quote to you at great length the irrefutable evidence for this:
thc rise in manufacturing exports.
the increase in those exports as a proportion of GDP;
the increase in the proportion of exports going to Asia.
the number of Australian firms who have in the past few ycars achieved
international best practice.
the enterprise agreements which are transforming our workplaces.
This is not the place to make a speech on the economy.
But it is the place to talk about thc Australian people, and I mention these things as a
tribute to thcir achievements in recent years.
We are going through bard times. More difficulties inevitably face us. But I am in no
doubt that sometime in this decade the peoplc of Australia will be able to look back and
say that, confronted with the challenge of securing their future, they rose to meet that
challenge, And I say that because have seen it happening.
On Australia Day 1993 Australians need look no further than their own recent history to
find their inspiration and their pride.
We will need help, and no doubt our sports men and women will continue to lift our
spirits. And we will continue to see in them an image of what we would like ourselves to
be even an image of what we imiagine We are.
We do see in our hcroes an idealiscd reflection of ourselves, or at least a modcl for
imitating. I
An earlier gencration saw it in the likes of Donald Bradman. At other times people like
Dawn Fraser and Betty Cuthbert and Shirley Strickland have provided the inspiration.
Or Jon Konrads, or Rod Layer or Alan Border.
Or, ladies and gentlemen, Evonne Goolagong, or Lionel Rose or Mark Ella or Mal
Meninga.
That last list could be turned into a very long one the list of Aboriginal Australians who
have excelled in the field by which Australians so frcqucntly judgc themselves.
As it is, the l~ ist of four includes two world chamnpions and two national captains.
Four measures of our national achievement.
In this United Nations International Year of the World's Indigenous People we might look
harder at the idealised reflection of ourselves.
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And we might draw, perhaps, this conclusion: if we can share the inspiration, the pride
and the patriotism of Aboriginal champions, surely we can share the feelings of those
Aboriginal Australians whosc inspiration and pridc has been shattered, and who have no
reason to feel patriotic.
If we can take pride in what the champions have achieved, surely the same pride requires
us to take sympathetic understanding to their people.
If we can share the triumphs we can share the responsibility.
It seems to me that all great achievemients begin with an act of imagination.
Out there at Bowial in the twenties youn Donald Bradmani must * have imagined himself
making centuries at the Sydney Cricket Ground and somewhere else in New South
Wales the young Bill O'Reilly probably imagined himself getting him out.
I don't know whether Ben Lea cvcr imagined he'd play in the Vienna Philharmonic, but I
suspcct he did.
And against all the odds, thc young Lionel Rose no doubt imagined himself one day a
world champion and a national hero.
If thcy can do it, we can.
I have a feeling that thc solution to one of our great problems is, essentially, that act of
imagination. if sport can teach us that, I amn even more for sport.
If the arts can teach it, I am even more for the arts.
If this bid for the Olympics in the year 2000 can teach uis, I am even more for thc bid.
And if the personal triumphis of the past year, and this bid for thc Olympics in thc year
2000, help Australians imagine a modern, strong, competitive and fair society, those
people will have done their country a great service.
I see the Sydney bid playing a substantial role in the grcat challenges which face Australia
in 1990s.
Whether it succeeds or tails might, in the end, be judged less important than the
inspiration and confidence it gives us.
But like all Australians, I dearly hope that it succccds and sincerely bclicvc that it
should. Thank you all for coming and for the support you are giving this great project. ' V F . UV' L'V
ENDS nc 1 07 1 8 nn M n a D n r a