Citizenship Convention 23rd January, 1962
MR. DOU-ER.-Thank you, Your Excellency. I am sure
we all agree that yours was a most charming and telling speech.
It has been a great honour to have you here. It gives me great
. pleasure to ask the right honourable the Prime Minister to ad ress
the gathering. TK2 1 RIGHT HONOURABLE R. G. MIENZIES, Prime
Minister of Australia.-Sir, Your Excellencies, ladies and
gentlemen: I feel almost embarrassed to come, even for a few
minutes, betw-en you and the memory of the remarkable speech
that has been addressed to us by His -Excellency the Governor-
General because I am sure it did our minds good and our hearts
ood to listen to it. There is really very little that needs
to be said by me on an occasion of this kind. This is the
thirteenth of these conventions. I daresay you have had
speeches galore made to you in the course of that time. Some
of you, as I can tell by the still optimistic expression on your
faces, are here not for the first time.
On the last occasion when I spoke here, I took the
op ortunity of saying something that I hope you will let me
repeat, not in words but in substance. ior a variety of
reasons, we in Australia have become accustomed to talking about
iew :% ustralians. It is a very sobering reflection that if, at
the end of a few years, the Governor-General became so enamoured
of life in Australia that he decided to stay here, he would be
a New Australian. He would be a migrant. In fact, I do not
want to prejudice the interests of the Treasury, Sir, but yo.
might perhaps be able to a) ply retrospectively for an assisted
passage. But we here who are old Australians, are all noo"
migrants. ciy grandparents came here. They migrated to
Australia. Some of the more distinguished among us are able
to trace our ancestry back further than that. Some of them
prefer not to. But it is interesting to recall that all of us
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who are, you might say, the old brigade, are poeople whose
parents or grandparents or great-grandparents or whatever it
may be came out to Australia seeking a new life in a new
country. They lived tlhe-n under iuch more primitive conditions
than exist today.
Therefore, I do not like these artificial distinctions
very much. ' Jo in Australia ought to recall ns I am~ sure we
do that we are a very young country. I do not uvcan that we
are young geologically but we are a very young nation. It is
not so long since 1788. It is only a few generations when you
cote to think of it. Therefore, tmis, of all modern and
civilised countries, is perhaps the youngest. le are nearer to
each other, from whatever generation we cove, than are thc
) eople of perhaps any othc~ r country in the world.
Even in the case of G-reat Britain there are blanks
in history. I have never quite discovered, Your ilxcellency,
what happecned between the time when the Rom~ ans left and the
Angles and the 3axons came. Thore are silent passages in
history. But with. us, over this relatively short period of
tin1e, there is continuity of history and a tremendous surge
of growKth. All periods of our history in Australia have had
their owm turbulent and someti es confused activity. " e had
tha old pastoral days, the old mining days, the agricultural
era and the manufacturing era. These things have come, one
on top of an~ ther, an in the result, this is a country full
of life and hope, achievement and ambition. It is therefore
easy and, indeed, natural for us to rcceive into the
population people whfo possess this sameo spirit; who are the
same kind of people as those wuho originally created this
spirit.
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It is easy for us to welcome them, and I believe I can say
that it is easy for them to live here and to feel that they
are among friene. s and living in a lively family atmosphere.
We in Australia as Sir W-ins ton Churchill once
reminded me, are rather disposed to conduct our political
affairs with a fine eighteenth century vigour, and I dare
say that that is quite right. Being before this audience,
I speak no party politics. It is very seldom in Australia
that you can get the great political parties the great
political bodies of thought to coincide precisely on some
topic, but on migration we are as one. The great movement of'
migration which began in substance after the war was created
by the Labour Administration and has been carried on by my
own. It has, up to a point, changed the face of Australia,
and it will continue to have the most profound effects on the
intellectual development, the cultural standards, the
scientific achievements and the social consciousness of people
in Australia. We will, in 50O years' time, be a different
people not detached from our old anchors, not detached from
our old traditions, but enriched by new ones. We will be a
different people I believe, a dynamic people a people with
much to contribute to the world. One of the great factors
contributing to that is that we have received so many hundreds
of thousands of people from outside Australia who have come
here not to be dependent and not to be different, but to be
part of Australian society and contributors to the overall
wealth, happiness and future of Australia. That is one
reason why many of us, as we look at this remarkable process
and get such comfort and such hope from it, always hope that
those who come here, for example, from various countries of
Europe, will not form colonies and will not segregate
themselves from the rest of the community. I do not want
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U to be taken as exaggerating on this matter. I believe it is
essential for Australia that there continue to be powerful
Scottish and Caledonian societies. I insist on that. I am
willing to concede to His Excellency tite Governor-General
St. George's society. I think it is a very good thing that
we from time to time remind ourselves of our inheritance, but
it would be a bad thing indeed if, in a country like this,
racial communities tended to separate themselves out. The
great thing about building up Australia through a programme
of this kind is that we should become one people. These are
the immortal words of the younger Pitt: " You must be one people."
And one people we must be or we shall be in perd..
These splendid bodies such as the Cominonwealth
Immigration Planning Council, the Commonwealth Immigration
Advisory Council and the Good Neighbour Movement that is an
organization which has so much to do with this matter know
that so well. They have done such superb work and they know
that they are not dealing with an academic problem. A
convention of this kind is not an occasion for a collection
of rather philosophical reflections. The real business is to
see that we become, steadily, one people. You are a good
neighbour because you prefer your neighbour to yourself. You
are a good neighbour to a new citizen in Australia because
you want him to feel that he is your neighbour and that you
are his, and that you both are members of one people.
Therefore, I regard the work that is being done as being of
the highest order of practicality. This is a splendid thing
to be doing. Looking at it with a broad view, one can say
that before very long there will be occupying high office
in Australia people whose names will fall unfamiliarly on the
ears of the Australians of this generation. It would
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, A n be indeed one of the great triumphs of the migration policy
that we so weld all new elements in with the old as to produce
an alloy which will be of power and significance and achievement
in our own country.
We all, on whichever side of Parliament we sit, are
tremendous supporters of this programme. We all are conscious
of the fact that, if it were not for the work of hundreds, and,
indeed, thousands, of people like yourselves, who devote much
time to the practical affairs of integration in Australia, the
programme could not succeed so well and could not endure so
long. It does endure I repeat that word because it does
not create internal hostilities. Allow it to create internal
hostilities, allow it to create some sort of differences between
one community and another or one race and another, and you will
find the whole object of migration frustrated. The fact is
that that has not happened. The fact is that, so long as there
are people like you, ladies and gentlemen, who will bend your
minds to these great problems, it will not happen.
Sir, it is a very great pleasure to be here and a
great pleasure to be allowed to say something to this
distinguished audience.
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