OPENING OF CHRYSLER MANUFACTURING CENTRE,
T1ONSLEY PARK, SOUTH AUSTRALIA 2ND OCTOR19
Speech by the Prime Minister. the Rt. Hon. Sir Robert Menzies
Sir, Mr. Premier and Ladies and Gentlemen
Might I begin with a rather assertive question?
Can you hear me? Because I cantt hear myself. I've been
flying with a cold. In a little time, I will unveil something
or other here. I'm still not clear as to whether I declare
the building open or the estate open, or declare it duly
inaugurated, but it doesn't matter because at a glance this
afternoon, you could tell it has been open for weeks. ( Laughter)
And therefore my function is purely retrospective.
I must say, listening to Mr. Cheseborough, as I did
with great interest, I thought he seemed a little biased in
favour of this car the Valiant. ( Laughter) It puts me in a
very, very embarrassing position, because on one occasion, I
opened a factory that was going to produce a competitor car
for the Ford Company, On another occasion, I seem to remember
opening something fo, the Holden people. Very difficult to
be a politician nowadays ( Laughter) but at the same time I
must say that apart from his propaganda, I was the recipient
as I came out here, with my wife, of -he most pointed piece of
propagand, the kind of thing that could happen to you only in
South Australia, ( Laughter) only in a State where no poor
humble Federal fellow like me can possibly arrive or depart
without being the victim of propaganda from beginning to end.
And what happened this afternoon? There we x., ere,
sitting in scme car thac ,. ras p-o idod for me I dontt know
what make I looked to the right, there was a Valiant? I looked
to the left, there was a Valiant; I looked ahead of us there
was a Valiant, and I thought, " By Jove, this car has got one
hu-ndred per cent. of the market." Indeed without desiring to
advertise any other ear, it was a distinct refreshment of my
sW'rits to discover in a moment that there was another car on
the road. I think it was a Holden. ( Laughter) But, there they
were to the right of us, to the left of us and in front of
us. Now, I am no expert, Sir, but all I can tell you is that
my wife made the most admiring remarks as they passed alongside
us and that is a good beginning because women buy cars and men
pay for them. ( Laughter)
Sir, on any occasion like this it is very interesting
for me to look back a little, if you donlt mind. For example,
I can look back over a great number of years of very close
friendship with Fergie over there. There never was a better
representative in negotiations with political people than
Fergie. ( Applause) Many is the time over the last fifteen
years, or several times at any rate, over the last fifteen years,
he has had occasion to look at me, sometimes with approval,
sometimes with disapproval, dependent entirely on the rate of
sales tax, ( Laughter) but however it went, he was a man I
want to tell this to you in the presence of his colleagues
on this platform he was a man who was always intelligent and
understanding and put a case without pretending that there was
no other side to the question. This is a very great asset and
I have always had a great respect for him.
But as I was reminding an audience in Sydney the other
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day, it is not much less than thirty years ago that I found
myself then being Attorney-General of Australia talking
to a very famous motor car manufacturer in England. I won't
mention his narle you'll all think of the wrong one but
he was a rather melancholy chap, I thought, and we met on an
occasionandtiutook~ me into a corner and he was under the erroneous
belief that I was a person of some influence I was a humble
Attorney-General in those days. He said to me, " You people
must not make motor bodies in Australia," Well, shad3s of
Adelaide, you know. ( Laughter)
Dear me, this rather rjc'czed me because in my earlier
days I used to come and be a house guest with Ted Holden and
I was very familiar with the motor body wVOr. ks.
shouldn't make them. You peoplE. ought to grow wool and wheat
and things you understand." 1 TiAi was a serious proposition,
and our-modest motor body industry ought to be swept out.
I tried to explain to him that what was then a modest, smallish
motor body industry would undoubtedly some day be some kind
of fragment ii,. a very enormous motor vehicle industry, and
that it was very foolish on his part to think that he could
stop the tide frcm mro ving. However, he was much older than
I was, and therufore much wiser and he therefore disagreed
with me. ( Laughter)
Now what has happened since? It wasn't long after
that conversation only about five years, I wtould thi nk that
I found myself as a Prim~ e Minister greatly concerned tc see
whether we could establish an industry of building motor
vehicles in Australia, and this was regarded by a lot of
people wit%, h some hor-ror and we had all sorts of expert ad~ vice.
Expert advice is the very devi. l., You want to have at least
a hundi-ed experts and then conduct a Gallup Poll among them
and then think out tiae answer for yourseif. ( Laughter) That's
my firm belief.
The exerssad," h, but you cnnt do it. Nobody
could build a car in Australia with less than I think it was
forty, but it may have been fifty thousand vehicles a year as
t'. e extent of the demand." " And that, of course," they said,
" 1is impossible. Not within remote cooee is the time when
you can sell 50,7000 motor vehicles in Australi* a, made in
Australia." Well, it is only twenty-five years ago that that was
happening. I remember it very well. There were all sorts
of misconceptions, there were all sorts of expressions of
anxiety and inferiority on the part of people, and today we
have in Australia a state of affairs in which 4+ 00,000 new
motor vehicles go on the: roads every year. Four hundred
thousand.... and there will be thousands and thousands of
them that will come out of this great factory. The whole
scene has changed, and so far from great motor vehicle
people in other countries regarding with hostility what goes
on in Australia, they have steadily, one by one, come to
Australia themselves and invested in Australia,
I remember in the same impudent period of my life
when I was much more impudent than I am now, having a talk
in America to the then head of General Motors and telling him
that if he wanted to feel any assurance about his position
in Australia, the right thing to do was to put somte money
here and do sortie work here and produce a few~ jobs here, and
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this rather surprised him, though perhaps it wasntt entirely
without effect. ftmay have had some small effect because,
much later on, it happened.
And the same way in Great Britain. 4herever
you go in Australia today, you will see engaged in the
business of car and vehicle production companies whose names
are household words in Great Britain, in America, in Germany,
in France. This tremendous movement of enterprise into
Australia is the most exciting thing of our time and vre ought
to be proud of it and we ought not to be too frightened of it
and we ought not to believe that whatever is done to p) revent
it from running into excesses is something wrong, Uhat we
want to maintain in this country is something that we have
been enjoying for years, a remarkable stability in the value
of money, not unimportant to the investor, and also the most
astonishing rate of growitL-, growth of population, growth of
employment, growth 311 along the line,
It's a marvellous thing, isnvt it, how all these
things, proper-ly considered work together. I go around a
works like this. I don't need to be told that there are
quite a number o'L' people ILere, as I go around who are whp. t
we usud to call New A~ ustralians, whc are peopie who migrated
ha since the war. There are millions now anyh-ow, something
well over a million in Australia and every large factory I
go to contains a high. percentage ol' people who have come in
in these years. There cculd not Lave been a. n immigration policy
or programme without eirployment on this scale in industries
of this kind. Ths rural industries, vital as they are to
the survival of Australia, can't employ people by the scores
of thousands extra every year, WIe know tiiat they cant.
It is industries of this kind which enable the migration
programme to continue, and the fact that the migratCion
programme continues, that you have this remarkable increase
in the population year by year has given strength and tone
and optimism to the people who run retail stores in Australia,
to all sorts of other manufacturers who produce things that
in demand by stores and which are bought by them because
they are in demand by their ordinary customers. This is a
whole interwoven structure.
I dont profess to have any particular credit
for this. I just think I ought to remind you that the prime
political responsibility for economic policy and financial
stability in Australia comes flatly on to the Federal Parliament
and the Federal Government. ( Applause) And this is
perhaps a matter that gets a little overlooked occasionally.
I look down here. I see one of my colleagues in the Ministry,
Dr. Forbes. This is a great responsibility he carries. I
carry a bigger one, because when anything goes wrong, everybody
knows whose fault it is, ( Laughter)
But this is our sole contribution, that we must
try to be sensible try to have a stability in money, try to
have an economic climate that will favour the growt h Of
industry in Australia, and if we do that, we have made some
useful contribution to what goes on. But in the long run,
at the operating end, it is the people who have the imagination
to establish an enterprise of this kind in this place, it is
the thousands of people who work or will work in it in all
sorts of degrees of employment, these are the people who really
make the result because it is on the skill of their work, the
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fidelity7 the honesty of their work, that the industry that they
are working in will depend. This is wihat will persuade the
people to buy the product and this is what will mean in the
long run a growing prosperity right down the line.
Sir, whenever I come to a matter of this kind,
these thoughts pass through my mind. I think I am one of three
people who went into the Federal Parliament thirty years ago
and is still there in the inscrutable wisdom of Provi. dence,
( Laughter) Only three of us, Very interesting, because
looking back over that time, I would say that they w:, e by
far the most exciting thirty years in the history of Australia,
Indeed, that is the last thing I want to say to you.
Don't let us fall into the error of thinking that
all the history is in the books, the books thiat we read at
school, Some history is there, but don't let us think it is
all there. There is more history being made around us each
year than was made in twenty-five years in earlier generations.
Tremendously exciting history wonderful things new generations
coming on, and I, though I belong to an old and I suppose,
partly exhausted generation, I am all for it. I think this is
tie moft tremendous thing. We ought to be realising it, we
ought to to proud of it and when we come along here we ought
to, as I am sure we do, lcok around us and say, " Thxs is the
perfect illustration of the world that we are living in and
the Aust:; alia that is and is to be."
I now do whatever it is, retrospectively.