MAYORAL DINNER, KEW, VICTORIA
O3TH MAY. 1964
Speech by the Prime Minister, the Rt. Hon. Sir Robert Menzies
Mr. Mayor, Councillor Ryan and Parliamentary Colleagues and
Ladies and Gentlemen You know, these toasts to Parliament are always
dubious affairs never more dubious than tonight. Here's this
wretched fellow, O'Brien ( Laughter) who has masqueraded for many
years as a friend of mine; he sandwiches me between himself and
Arthur Rylah who speaks after me. This, I venture to say, is a
dirty football trick ( Laughter), characteristic of the Tigers.
( Laughter). Oh, you neednet be too perky about this. I've seen
a few odd things done by Hawthorn, but still,. o.... You noticed,
though didn't you, that in the middle of a good deal of propaganda
against the Commonwealth, to which I am accustcmed, he came back,
time after time, to his real grievance which is that Geelong were
able to buy a player from West Australia and that now some other
team I don't know which is subject to the Coulter Law, and
is going to buy another player, but his team, the Tigers have
fallen so far in public and footballing esteem they couldntt afford
to buy half a rover, That this is the thing that works in his
wain was quite obvious tonight because in the middle of a bit of
high-falutin' about Western Australia and so on, he kept coming
back to the real substance of his grievance. Now all I can tell
you, Sir, is that my team this afternoon won its second match for
the year by one point ( Laughter, applause) and this delighted me
while at the same time faintly surprising me,
Now I will resist this temptation to instruct
my young friend there, OBrien.... I must interrupt myself. I have
a Secretary who gives me a not-e when something is going to happen
and when they referred to him they had in brackets after his
name " solicitor". How right they were, ( Laughter) But I am
accustomed to this. If I gc to the Melbourne Town Hall somebody
gets up and makes a pcwerful speech about the injustice to Victoria
and my only comfort is that when I am in Sydney which I am, not
infrequently, earnest-looking men of high status in the community
say, " You know, it's a terrible thing the way this Government of
yours is run by the Victorians. Why dont we have more men from
Sydney in the Government?" and I have to say to them, " Well, why
don't you send them in?" so I am not unaccustomed to this.
But I have been very interested tonight because
here I am sitting with two people on my right who are members for
the East Yarra province and nobody among you except the very
venerable, like Bill Dickinson, will remember that I was once the
member for East Yarra, and by Jove I know more about how I became
the member for East Yarra than most of you will ever know because
I stood for East Yarra in a frolicsome moment, being then a
barrister with a good deal of business, and in those days nobody
had a party nomination you just nominated yourself and you went
around and you prayed that you might get a few supporters. Of
course, rightly or wrongly the great men of the Victorian
Government have now made, I believe, voting compulsory, but in
those days it was voluntary. About 14,000 votes were cast in an
electorate of 90 000 and therefore you had to go out and see
whether you could pick up enough of them to win.
Now, I an told there are no press here and
therefore I can admit to the most brutal violation of the
electoral laws because when I stood, I had to get somebody, a
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great friend of mine, to act as my secretary, and then we engaged
one or two gentlemen in different corners of the electorate to go
around and do a bit of canvassing. They were paid practically
per capita. ( Laughter) I had 56 meetings, the largest of which
at the Hawthorn Town Hall, was 56 people and the smallest of which,
at Glen Iris, was four, two of whom were on my staff. ( Laughter)
That little escapade quite unsuccessful as it turned out
because a relative of his defeated me by 2 to 1, cost me œ 1,200.
Oh, these were the days.
Then, some months later, there was a byelection
and I stood again, and being a little browned-off after 56
meetings and four people including the staff, I decided I would
have 8 meetings. My entire campaign cost me œ 90 and I won by
2 to 1. Now there may be a lesson in this. I don't undertake
to say what it is, but that's how it happened and that's how I
became the member for East Yarra. Thirteen months later I left,
voluntarily, and stood for the Lower House, After that, all my
troubles began. Really, Dick, when I look back on the Upper House,
my thirteen months there, it was wonderfulo Peace, perfect
peace in this dark world of sin. ( Laughter) It was absolutely
marvellous. It was only when I stepped across to King's Hall
and had a look at my colleagues in the Lower House being battered
from pillar to post, the conscience stirred in me, so I left the
Upper House and went into the Lower House and ever sinco then,
I have been in one kind of trouble or another, All except one.
This I always think about when I come out into my own place and
among my own people. You know, the electorate of Kooyong.....
No doubt I have said this to you before, but I'll say it again.....
the electorate of Kooyong is one of the few in the Federal
Parliament that still retains its own nameo There has been a
Kooyong seat since 1901 and in the whole of that time, they have
had four members represent them,
The first was Knox who was the memuer for Kooyong
until about 1909 or something of that kind; the second was Sir
Robert Best who was always, when his party,. my party, was in
office, a Minister; the third was John Latham who represented
Kooyong with immense distinction for twelve years and was a
Minister at all relevant times and Deputy Prime Minister.
In 1934, I went up to become Attorney-General, member for Kooyong,
and I had a simple ambition at that time that I might be undetected
long enough to he member for Kooyong for twelve years which seemed
to be the ruling rate, and as you all now to your sorrow, I've been
member for Kooyong now for thirty years. ( Applause)
The one point I want to make is that in the case
of Best, Latham, Menzies, Kooyong was always represented by a
Minister, except when the other party was in power. In short,
Kooyong has the greatest record of any electorate in Australia
in insisting upon being represented by people who, rightly or
wrongly, achieved some status in the political life of the country.
All I want to say to you is I hope that will long continue.
( Applause) I don't mean by that that I hope I will long continue.
I have that philosophic state of mind now, that state of euphoria
which proceeds from the certain knowledge that whatever else
happens, I'm a certainty for a State funeral.( Laughter) I really
don't want to have a State funeral while I am still in Parliament
if that's the right way to put it I d rather like some day to
have a few years of private life. Private life is a tremendously
precious thing. A lot of you chaps don't realise that the
greatest sacrifice that a man makes who is heavily and continually
immersed in politics is that he loses his private life. It would
be fun, wouldn't it, to have a bit some day, but in the meantime,
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what I want to say to Kcoyong and Kew is the very heart of itI is
that I hope the standards will be kept high and that some successor
of mine will someday be able to stand here and be spoken about by
a successor of young O'Brien, if such a thing is conceivable
( Laughter) and be attacked for being a better Australian than he
is a Victorian. ( Laughter)
Well, I ought to say no more about that, I'm sure, but
before I sit duwn, I want to say this to you. It's quite true,
all these arguments go on; it's quite true that in a Federal
system there will always be the most intricate problems. You
can't treat every State the same, if you are dealing with a
country in which there ib an insistent demand for development
here or there or there. Of course youean't and nobody really
pretends that you can. Nobody from Victoria, no representative
of the Government of Victoria ever pretends for a moment that there
ought to be no more per capita spent in West Australia than
there is in Victoria. I've never heard it said. There is, of
course, an entirely inteliigible arguaent all the time as to
whether this doesn't go too far, whether perhaps a little adjustment
ought to be made, but what we must realise here is that we
do live in a Federal commvonixy and thac we live in a very great
continent, a tremendous continent, roughly the size of the United
States of America, ai. d that if this is in due course, as I believe
it will be, a great conntry and indeed a great power, then we
must not be too loca. in our vision. We must see the continent
as a whole ana do what we ui for the continent as a whole.
This, I am perfectly ctrtain. xepresernts the views of most
Australians who look outside CJhieir own bsckyard and who see this
place from Sydney to Porth from Hobart to Daiwino It's a tremendous
thing. Now, I'm going off once more, and it's no joyride,
in a fortnight s time to attend. a Prire Ministers' Conference in
London, but before I do that, I am going to the United States so
that I may have some r3al taiks with the new President of the
United States '* rhom I have met, of course, but whom I don't k1iow
as well as I kneu the late PresidenG Kennedy, This is tremerdously
important -chat we and the United States we, relatively small,
the United States vastly great should undei. stand each cther
not just with that after-dirner backø-slapping quality which is
so easy, but in true terms, speaking to each other as man to man,
country to country. This is ' f tremnendous significance. Indeed,
Sir, it is of vital significance to Australia and to Australia's
future. Therefore this is one of the number one tasks that I must
undertake. Then we are going to have a Prime Ministers' Conference.
Well, I first attended a Prime Ministers' Conference when I was
not a Prime Minister. You may say that's rather characteristic of
me, horning in, but the fact was that in 1935 there was a
Conference, and Mr. Lyons was then Prime Minister and he was ill
and he said to me, being also in London, would I go along and
represent him. I'll never forget it, at No. 10 Downing Street,
Ramsay MacDonald was the Prime Minister. George Forbes was the
Prime Minister of New Zealand, or as Ramsay called him, Forrbis.
Talk about Sassenachs. ( Laughter) Hertzog was there from South
Africa. I think that year Bennett was theie fbr Canada. Five of
us. We all spoke the same language, not only literally, but we
all felt rather the same way about the world's problems. It was
quite possible at that time to come out of a meeting adn say, " Here
is a joint view that represents the view of the British Commonwealth."
Now today, all this is gone. South Africa is out.
We have about twelve or thirteen new countries in the Commonwealth,
half a dozen of whom know nothing about democracy but have
dictators of their own, 4 4,
It's no longer possible to sit there and talk as
we could even ten years ago about all the great things that we
have in common, the sense of democratic parliamentary existence,
the sense of equality before the law, the impeccability of the
law, these great traditions which still work I am happy to say,
in what I choose to call the Crown members ol the Commonwealth.
But today you have all sorts, an infinite variety from Makarios
in Cyprus and N1k'umah in Ghana through Ababaka Bulewa in Nigeria,
who is a great man who understands all thesa things to perfection,
down to Tanganyika with a frightfully good man like Nyerere and
Zanzibar which is, for all practical purposes, a communist
protectorate, but which is now engaged in some rather tenuous
alliance with Tanganyika,
I don't need to go right through the list the fact
is that we now present a group of people of almost infinite variety
and the last time I attended one of these meetings at Marlborough
House, no longer at No. 10 because it was too small, it was
staggering to see what quarrels could emerge between two new
members of the Commonwealth about matters which you and I would
regard as the commonplaces of' political life. In other words,
we now have a new and turbulant Commonwealth, quite diffferent; all
the old unifying elements in the case of half a dozen of us have
been weakened and th4. s Conference is going to determine, I believe,
whether a structure so made can, long continue or whether, if it
continues, it could continue except by laying down certain
principles of life and of unde~ rstanding which will be the true'
condition of membership,, Don't any o2 you envy me going to this Conference,
This will be, as I am perfectly certain, one of the crucial
conferences in the enti4-re history of the Commonweal. th. A:. 1 I can
say is that I will do my best. I have lived long enough to have
got over the habits of dogmatism. I know thai;' certaiii things
that seem to re to be inevitably right will not be so regarded by
other people and we must learn to live together., In fact, Mr.
Mayor, the whc-. 1,3 essence of your delightful party tonighv' is that
we are all here living togeth-r. W,, e don't need to learn to live
tog~ ther but there are hundreds of millions cf people in the
world with whom -we will have to learn to live together, and this is
not easy. This calls for immenise tolerance, for great patience,
for the most genuine attempts at understanding. Facing that kind
of probhlem as I do i~ n the next six weeks, I beg of you to be
excused from conducting an argument on another matter with a man
who i~ s a close and valued friend of mine., He can save it until
next yaar.