OPENING R. S VIL: LAGER , CHELTENHAMi
: D MARCH 1. 62
S. eech by the Prime Minvster the nt. Hon R. Gr, Men i3.
Sir George, and ladies and gentlemen,
I think I ought to begin by telling you that my
appearance here today, and that of my :. ife, are the result of a
long negotiation. Most of last year we were trying to fi:-. d a date,
When we found one that suited George Holland it turned out it
didn't suit me5 and when we found one that suited me it turned out
that it didn't suit somebody else. Je got to a point, finally,
wrhere we both began to wonder whether, if the event came off at the
beginning of March 1962, I would be here in my official capacity
at all. ( Laughter3 But with his usual magnanimity Sir George took
a chance and I did too. Anyhow on a photo finish here we are
and very pleased I am to be able to be here,
Sir George's referring in generous terms to the Aged
Persons' Homes Act is a very interesting conjunction of the planets
I may tell you today, because this particular scheme originated in
one of those rather abrupt remarks that one's wife makes
occasionally at breakfast time. My wife put her finger on this
years ago and said, " This is the great problem and why don't you do
something about it, the problem of providing proper living
accommodation, not in barracks, or institutions, but in an
ordinary human way for people who are up in years?" I was stunned
by this, but my rmind, for once, was quite active, and cut came the
scheme as we now know, it, which of course, has since been
improved. I'm interested to tell you that in her favour because,
without any fall realisaticn of it, when the date for today's
function was fixed Iforgot, you see, that it's her birthday today.'
Now, Sir George, there are two or three reasons I won't
be long why I'm delightedo to be here and one of them, if I may
start off with yourself, is because you are presiding here today,
and have had a great deal to do with this achievement. You know,
contrary to the public impression ladies and gentlemen, it isn't
all beer and skittles being a Prime Minister. I know there are
plenty of applicants for the job at any given moment, but it's
really not all that fun, you see. I've been a Prime Minister,
now, as anybody can tell you, for too long, for about 12 years
and a bit, on my recent term. During the great bulk of that, for
the first 10 or 11 years of that, the Federal President of the
League was George Holland. That means in the course of events
that he and I, over a long period of time, have seen a lot of each
other. It's been a very, very happy association not because I
found it easy to say " No" to him, I occasionally said but
quite frequently, as he'll agree, he got away with a certain amount
of loot rightly or wrongly, and we've had a very, very happy
personal association. Now no Govrnment in Australia will be as effective in
its work as anybody would expect unless it has representing great
groups in the nation competent and responsible people. A Federal
Government charged with responsibilities for repatriation, i. ith
responsibilities in relation to a mass of things affecting exservicemen
and ex-service women, wiould find it difficult to
discharge these responsibilities on a merely departmental basis.
So much depends on the quality of the service organisations and the
responsibility or irresponsibility with which they put forward
their case. I went to say about the League that in my
protracted experience as a Primo Minister and as a Minister, I
know of no organisation which has so firmly and agreeably asserted
what it believes to be the rights of its members and has so
scrupulously refrained from being a mere pressure group.
2.
This is a wonderful record. Of course, although I pay tribute to
many many scores and hundreds and thousands of people for it, I
would like to say that the people who are at the top themselves
can do much to make or mar the relations between the League and
the Government. That is my second reason for being delighted to
be here. The third reason is that I am really delighted, time
after time, with what is being done in this field not in
creating gloomy institutions, not in giving people an idea that
they are put away into a corner and as long as they can eat they
are all right. The whole basis of this Village, the whole basis
of so many of these Homes that have been referred to is that they
reconcile a sort of community life of an agreeable kind extremely
agreeable here with the Bowling Green, with individual life, with
a capacity for being private, with a capacity for being at home
and visiting your friends, and being visited by your friends,
but never just a number in an institution: hiuman beings with
every right in the world as all of us hope to have a home of their
own as they go along past the active working years of their lives.
This has created something that is completely new.
I remember never tired of saying this I remember
when I was a boy in Ballarat I lived with an old Scots grandmother
in a little cottage opposite the Benevolent Asylum which we
youngsters knew, irreverently, as " tae Benev". From the Benevolent
Asylum there came out a trickle of old men, diefly, with corduroy
trousers on, looking a little bit dejected, the whole thing rather
sad., rather pitiful, because in those days people didn't
understand that you don't cease to be a human being when you reach
a certain number of years of life, On the contrary, you become
more and more a human being, and you have your own requirements and
interests, and you want tu live your orwn life.
What has been going on in Australia I shall always be
proud of having had anything to do with and I have had a
little to do with it, I'll never cease to be proud of the fact
that w-. e have taken all of that atmosphere a! ray and we have now got
to a point : 0rhero, as this village demonstrates, fellow citizens,
ourselves, those who are here, meet on normal human terms, and are
able to live happily and enjoy the company of each other and the
company of their friends, not fooling that they are a drug on the
market, but feeling proudly independent individuals, It's very
interesting to me. I've been to a few such places well, fairly
recentlyo At the last one I looked at I met a man Id known many
years before in Mildura. I didn't know that he was living in this
particular place, He was always a cheerful chao, and he was still
a cheerful chap: life and soul of the party, all his friends,
comfortable home, comfortable circumstances. This to me was such
a tremendous improvement on the old idea in which a man could grow
old and unfortunate and just sort of disappear from sight,
So we have 6ot rid of all the elements of condescension
and of charity. We've substituted for these a feeling of goodwill
and of individual responsibility, and of friendship, and of
perpetuating a home atmosphere, and a home life. No Govcrnment
can create those things it can help to bring them about, But
they can be created in physical, terms only by -the enthusiastic
people of the kind who thought of this Village and who hLave
brought it to construction and to completion. I am greatly
indebted to them, as you are. I hope that for i: any, many
generationia to come this will be a centre of a happy life for, in
the long run, hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of men and women.
Sir I have a very great sense of privilege in
declaring the Village open.