INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS ON HUMAN RELATIONS
HED T 11LBOURNE. VICTORIA 3JF MAY. j96
Speech by thePe ' M4iister,,, t~ ien Sir RobertMenzies~
Mr. Chairman Such are the infirmities of human memory that I was
all ready to address you as Mr. President. ( Laughter) I am
very glad or sorry as the case may be to be reminded that
I am the President, though I fear I won't be very conspicuously
present for a very long portion of the proceedings. However,
I am here to open them.
The first thing I want to do is to read to you, wiith
the permission of the Council, the folloling message which was
sent by the Council to His Royal Highness, Prince Philip:
" The Chairman and Members of the Council of
the International Congress on Human Relations in
Melbourne send greetings and good wishes on the eve
of the Congress. We appreciate the keen interest
you have shoxm in the revolutionary technical changes
in industry and commerce and believe that this Congress
will assist materially in the understanding of the
great social problems of our day. The Commonwealth
and indeed the whole world will benefit from the work
of this Congress which you have supported by your
gracious patronage."
Prince Philip has now replied in these terms
" Thank you for your kind message which I was
delighted to receive. I am sure that each one of you
who attends this international congress will learn
something of value which will contribute to better and
happier human relations throughout the world. MY
begt wishes to you all."
Then there is another message from the Prime Minister
of Japan w., hich, very generously, has been done into English for
my benefit ( Laughter) " It gives me great pleasure to congratulate
you on the successful opening of the International
Congress of Human Relations."
I call that a very intelligent anticipation because it hasntt
yet been opened,,,...
" I would say it is a very timely project to hold this
congress at a time when all the industrially-developed
countries in the world are faced with difficult social
and economic problems resulting from advancement in
technology and automation. Japan is no exception.
Although Japan was well known for abundant human
resources until quite recently, the progress achieved
in industrial mechanisation has brought in its wake
an increasingl~ y serious labour shortage. Consequently
how to turn technical advancement to the true benefit
of the human being is now a widely-discussed topic in
our business circles. I am happy to know that Mr. Masaru
Ibuka is participating in this congress as a lecturer. / 2
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" I am sure that Mr. Ibuka with his profound
knowledge and experience in modern management
will be able to contribute to this conference
in many ways. I sincerely hope that closer
co-operation will be further promoted between
Australia and Japan as well as among the
participating countries as a whole to solve the
various problems common to our industries."
Well, having read those two stimulating messages to you I just
want to approach the task of opening the Congress and o1 saying,
with your permission, a few words about its business,
Long experience has shown me now that the first
thing to do when you have to open something is to discover what
it is. I find this is no small advantage and therefore I
looked very closely to see what was the broad theme of the
congress, and there it was, and here it is The Social and
Economic Impact of Automation and Technical Change.
, Now Sir, in the presence of a great number of
pundits in this field, it is not for me to undertake a technical
examination of this theme. All I can do in a few minutes is
to present you with what you will regard as platitudes but which
I might hope to regard as a few elements of commonsense in
approaching this problem.
Change. Change is a fact. It cantt be ignored.
It must not be disposed of by wishful thinking, and yet the
curious thing about us human beings is that we are always
chronically demanding change and equally chronically afraid of
it, 1: think that's basically true. We are all progressives
in politics and we say so, repeatedly. There are no people in
the whole political arena who are not desperately anxious for
change and no voters that ever I have been able to discover who
don't share that desperate anxiety. But when it comes to the
point there is not much change, is there? There is a certain
amount of resistance to change. You get this curious paradox in
the human being. Well, on this problem we, I thinkl, might present
a question to ourselves: Does technological change threaten
full employment? Because a lot of people think, and very
seriously, that it does. That always seems to me to be an
error an error about as old as the Industrial Revolution.
I would just like to make the briefest of analysis of this
point with you. First of all I have no doubt myself that full
employment stimulates the demand for technological improvement.
In a human world we have just agreed that it is a surplus
of jobs over men, which is how some people will define full
employment, a surplus of that kind tends to mean, c. oesn't it,
a little less personal effort, some bidding-up for the employees
who are required for some enterprise some initial increasing
unit cost of whatever it is that is being produced.
Well now, of course, there are some industries,
perhaps represented here this morning, which believe they can
pass it on and if they believe they can pass it on they think
that is all right. They will accept the causes of the passing on.
But in industries which have to meet the market in a competitive
world and those industries include an increasing number of
manufacturers in Australia, for example, for exportc, rising
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costs which result from the initial application of over-full
employment or full employment will stimulate two things. One
is technological advance. This will at once be seen as something
which provides the answer, something that reconciles the new
standard of pay or the new standard of competition for labour
with the need to produce and to produce effectively for a market.
So technological advance is stimulated, in my opinion by full
employment, and market advance is also stimulated by l
employment because as the pressure comes on so the search for
the market and particularly for the variation of the market wiill
grow stronger and stronger.
Now that is one side of the picture as I see it
full employment really stimulates the demand for Lechnological
improvement. The other side of that proposition is this that
technological imp3rovement need not threaten employment. All
sorts of short-term expedients may have to be applied to cushion
the impact, the immediate impact of new labour-saving devices
and I anticipate you w~ ill be hearing some expert views on those
matters before you finish. But it would be to despair about
the reality and substance of human progress to ignore the
dominant facts that technological advance will cheapen the
processes of production and therefore give rise to a greater
demand and therefore directly and indirectly stimulate employment.
I emphasise " and indirectly". One has only to
recall the history, the modern history of the motor car industry
and its mass production to roalise that what is indirect is
even more extensive than what is direct in the employment f~ ield
and yet this has been in an industry where immense technological
progress has been made. And again, technological advance leads
to new types of production, new commodities to create new
demands and to meet new demands. Whole new industries can
arise as indeed they have been increasingly during the last
forty years.. I just pause for a minute to emphasise this point
that the advance in technology leads to new types of production.
One is frequently conscious of the fact to take Australia by
way of example there is a certain orthodoxy in our minds about
what we can sell to other countries, just as, I venture to say,
British industry was for a considerable time handicapped by
o similar belief that there were certain things the world could
buy and if they didn't want to buy those, it was just too bad.
Now we Australians here have constantly to be on the searLch for
a new product which a new market will be willing to take, and
in order to do that there will need to be the most tremendous
pressure in the technological field not a fear of it but a
use of it, a stimulation of it for those purposes.
There is another aspect in my own country which
is also quite material, W1e need here, and are at all times
moving towards it, a better and a speedier application in
industry both primary industry and secondary industry of
scientific and technological research because that will tend to
reduce costs and therefore to increase the stability of the
whole economy. The process has been a little too slow, I
think in the past, I have a strong feeling that there are
many Items which could lead to great technological advance which
are sluggish in their journey from the lab, to the farm or to
the factory. This is a matter to wihich we are constantly
directing attention and of course that will be no threat to
full employment. 6n the contrary, this constant application of
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new ideas to stimulate old productions and to create new
ones is the best guarantee, properly considered, of useful
employment for a rapidly-increasing population.
I venture to say, Sir, that it is dangerous
to be distracted by isolated instances or to suffer from a
fear of becoming a technologically-advanced community.
Nobody need fear that. On the contrary, we should all pray
for it. The great questions, Sir, on which this conference
of distinguished minds will throw much light are therefore:
Are we willing to respond to the challenge of change? Are
we competent to respond to the challenge of change? And in
all this the role of education is of course of supreme
moment not only scientific education, not only technical
education, but also education in humane letters without which
our whole sense of proportion and perspective can weaken with
disastrous human consequences as we have had every reason to
learn in the course of our lifetimes,
Sir, those are purely preliminary observations.
I don't profess, as I said at the beginning, that there is
any novelty about them but I have found it interesting to
bring a few of my own thoughts together in this fashion.
I wish this congress great success. I can't imagine a better
time at which to hold it. I can't imagine a more useful theme
to discuss. Men are thinking about it all over t'ae world.
You can throw so much light on it in this conference that you
will be able to provide that light in other countries around
the globe. I wish you every success. I now declare the
Congress open.
0 VP