CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY
WILLIAM QUEALE MEMORIAL
LECTURE
Delivered b_ the Prime Minister, MrlJohn Gorton
At the Bonython Hall, Univers ity of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA
11 DECEMBER 1969
" EDUCATION FOR MANAGEMENT"
Mr President and Gentlemen
Twice in the last few months, men from this plonet earth
have walked the surface of the moon. We saw them on our television sets
and we heard their voices in our homes. Now that is part of the history of
our times. We are back in an everyday world of our own, coping with
everyday problems. But we know that what was previously held impossible,
has been shown to be possible. We have seen this gigantic achievement, and
it should help us all to strive for similar break-throughs in the more mundane
problems which face us.
This, you may say, is a far cry from Education for
Management which is the subject of my lecture tonight. This, you may
say, has little to do with the late William Queale whose memory we honour
tonight and whose memorial lecture it is my very great privilege to be
delivering. Yet it is not, in fact, far removed, and let me tell you why.
The targets for man's first landings on the moon were set
a decade ago. Studies were made, equipment was designed and manufactured,
personnel selected and trained, test flights in space were carried out and
the moon flight itself planned on a world-wide basis. At every point
management techniques were under ruthless test, and without those
management techniques, the moon flight would have failed.
Secondly, the moonshot was a pinnacle of achievement
symbolising a new age, and that new age challenges management to seize
new opportunities, to adopt new methods, to aspire to new horizons.
William Queale, I am sure, would have agreed with that
for he was a man with a vision. It was not my privilege to know him,
though his record and his works are familiar things in the Australian
story. We are in his debt for that which he did for Australia and we
assemble here tonight to acknowledge that. / 2
-2
I chose to speak to you tonight on education for
management because of my personal interest in the subject and
because I believe, as Disraeli said of England, that " Upon the education
of the people of this country the fate of this country depends Education
of all kinds, but not least education in management.
Management is, I suppose, the science of
using with the maximum economy, manpower, physical resources and
intellectual skills in order to produce the maximum result. The goal
of the skilful manager is to produce, or at least to work to, a blue-print
or masterplan so that the goal, or goals, are set with absolute clarity,
that they are understood at every level of the hierarchy, that each man
knows the job he is to do, and does it without interfering with the work of
others, as expeditiously as careful planning can provide. And he must
be ready to abandon a blue-print, or a masterplan, when new and better
methods are proved, or other changes are evident. These are the tasks
of the manager and administrator.
I would like, first, to sketch the background to education
for management and tell you a little of it s history in Australia. Then,
if I have your patience, I will talk of management' s role in national
development. For the first half of this century our society continued
to develop logically from the revolutions of long ago social,
industrial, scientific and political revolutions which gave mankind
courses to steer and which divided him with " isms" and into comnfunities
distinguished by their wealth cr thdir pvierty, by their social standards or
their technologies, by their political freedoms or their subjection to
arbitrary rule. Two world wars drove mankind fast along these courses,
for better and for worse. The forced draught of war frantically
stimulated man's inventiveness in material matters. He flew, he
learned to communicate across great distances, he discovered
antibiotics, radar, the jet enc'fiTe computer, the guided missile,
nuclear power and he burst IA~ te space age. These were all extensions
of what had been happening.
Then in the last decade or so, he began to separate from
his past. It became clear that all around us things were beginning to
happen that were not an orderly extension of the past, a refinement and
a development of old systems, tested and brought to a level which
satisfied the generation into which we were born. We were facing something
new. / 3
-3
Peter F. Drucker, Professor of Management at New
York University's Graduate School of Business has this to say
" The last half century has been an age of continuity....
the towering economic achievement of today, the affluent,
mass consumption economies of the advanced countries, their
productivity and their technical powers, are built foursquare
on Victorian and Edwardian foundations and out of building
blocks quarried then. They are, above all, a fulfilment of the
economic and technological promotion of the Victorian and
Edwardian eras and a testimony to their economic vision.
" Now we face an age of discontinuity in world economy
and technology..., it will be a period of change in technology
and in economic policy, in industrial structures and in economic
theory, in the knowledge needed to govern and to manage...
While we have been finishing the great nineteenth century economic
edifice, the foundations have shifted from under our feet.
Drucker goes on to make the point of the need for
" knowledge workers" as distinct from the emphasis on "~ manual workers
So we come face to face with education and management.
Look around us and what do we see? We see a world
very different from the one our fathers knew, from the one we knew as
children and that is not because it is jusi so much older. We are in a
new age of burgeoning technological and scientific change. We are in a
new age of discussion as to how best to use the new tools, the new
knowledge, the new technologies, with which we are now provided.
Tais is the task of the managers, and the hardest factor
to cope with in an advanced community like ours is the " knowledge"
explosion. The hour still only contains 60 minutes and the day only
24 hours but the amount of paper work which has to be dealt with rises
in an exponential curve. As measured by manpower, number of periodicals
or scientific papers, science is growing exponentially with a doubling
time of about fifteen years. Almost ninety per cent of all scientific
endeavour in the history of mankind has been undertaken during the past
fifty years. During the past fifteen years the same number of scientists
were produced as existed during the entire previous period of science.
Exactly the same is true in the social sciences and history. Where can
one begin to burrow through the mountain of paper to make an informed
judgment, except with benefit of computer? / 4
It is important to understand these changes and
opportunities, for as we understand them, so we shall shape our skills
and condition our hearts and minds to extract the greatest benefits
from them. Thereforel we must look to education even more than we
have in the years gone by.
As our pioneer forbears searched for water to open up
an arid land and as our farmers planted the first grain so that they could
live, so must we, in much the same way, turn increasingly to education
to equip our nation for the long journey ahead. And education, by itself,
is not enough. It is how we apply education to the brave new world of the
seventies, the world which our children will inherit, that will determine
our future and our fate, in a society where knowledge grows and skills
abound. It is true, I think as Drucker postulates, that the most
rapidly growing area in international trade is probably no longer trade
in goods, but trade in technology, in patents and licences. This imt vitably
is creating a new economic and industrial environment for which we
must be educated and which we must know how to manage.
In Australia, as elsewhere, knowledge is growing in
importance in relation to experience. This is inevitable but the trend
is not absolute. There will always be some things that only experience
of life and the years can give. Computers cannot dispense wisdom. Y" Ot,
by and large, we have to accept that experience without knowledge is no
longer of the value that it was. By the same token, knowledge without
experience has a diminished value.
There are, I think, five elements we need to make up
the ideal for our education system.
The first, naturally, is an opportunity for everyone
of school age in Australia to have equal access to
opportunity for education, provided they are good
enough academically. This, by and large, we have.
The second is adequate resources in staff, buildings
and equipment to do the job. The problem is
identified; the final solution is not.
The third is a tertiary education opportunity for all
who have the ability to use it. This depends on
resources. 4
-The-fourth is a proper adjustment of education
methods and systems to meet the demands of the
new age. This need is recognised, but not yet
satisfied.
-The fifth is more intensive research into fundamentals,
into priorities and methods. ' ibis, too, is recognised.
Much remains to be done.
Today forty per cent of the Australian population is
under twenty-one and therefore of school and university age. And the
young are staying at school longer. The percentage staying on beyond
the age of compulsory attendance is nearly double that of ten years ago.
University enrolments have risen in ten years from 47, 000 to 107, 000
in 1969 and are expected to reach 127, 000 by 1972.
1 quote these facts to show the growth in higher education
and the pressure that is on the system.
There has been, in recent years, an increasing direct
interest by the central government in education. The responsibility for
education outside the Commonwealth territories is primarily one for the
States but for financial reasons there is an interlocking of activity between
the Commonwealth and the State Governments. There is also constitutional
provision for the granting of financial assistance by the central
government to the States on terms and conditions approved by Parliament.
Under these arrangements the Commonwealth is able to
make significant cortributions to education in Australia.
I do not want to bore you tonight with too many figures,
but may I quote just a few to illustrate the point of increased Government
interest in education. The Commonwealth Government is spending on education
almost five times as much per head of population as it was ten years ago.
The amount has gone up from $ 44 a head to $ 22 a head. The total has
risen from around $ 40 million in a polqulation of nine million to $ 265
million this year in a population of 12: i million.
At the same time, the Australian States have more than
doubled their net expenditure on education, per head of population, in
the last ten years and they are now committing nearly one-third of their
total revenue and loan moneys to this end. / 6
6-
All this has not been enough to solve the problem, but there
are many other calls being made by society on the resources of the community,
and we have, in education, at least been advancing.
In tackling the range of problems we face, and being
mindful of the five elements for an ideal system which I have mentioned,
the Commonwealth and State programmes have touched the whole area
from pre-school to postgraduate and adult education.
It is appropriate for me, I think, to confine myself
largely to the tertiary level for this is where the established education
system and management training come closest together.
A good geea education is, of course, basic to any
professional competence, but it is at the point where specialisation has
taken place that management training is most needed. We must ensure that
the expert is not " grooved" or his vision narrowed by the blinkers of his
specialisation. In talking of management training at the tertiary level,
it may be appropriate for me to mention here that the first university
to introduce a course in commercial studies was the University of
Adelaide which had an Advanced Commercial Certificate in 1902.
The University received a benefaction in that year of
1l, 000 from Mr Joseph Fisher, which was to provide an income for " the
promotion of the study of commerce in the University". The need was
justified on rather negative grounds as was made clear by the inaugural
Joseph Fisher lecturer who said
" The slow starvation of hundreds of young, briefless
barristers, and the forlorn outlook of scores of ' general
practitioners' relegated to the back block townships, must
eventually work a cure by giving pause to the enthusiasm which
creates these in such profusion. Their places would be more
than supplied if it were possible to offer a truly educational
course having a direct bearing on business life equal to that
lavished on the professions."
Well, we've come a long way, I suppose, because
frankly, I do not know of any starving barristers today and most of our
GP's " go bush" only by choice. Adelaide's first commercial certificate
was followed by diplomas and degrees and commercial studies available in
a variety of courses eventually became part of our tertiary education
system in all States. The concept of management training as part of / 7
-7
commercial studies was introduced in a limited way at a much later date.
Now I come to the resources we have today for management
training, either as part of, or in addition to, commercial training in
the higher levels of our education systems.
The most relevant management education courses are for
Master's degrees in Busiess Administration at the Universities of
Adelaide, Melbourne, New South Wales and Monash. This year the total
enrolment at all of them was 406.
Then there are courses, full -time and part-time, for
diplomas in management, in business studies and business administration
at some of our advanced colleges of education and our leading technical
schools. Something like eighteen institutions are currently providing
these courses over the whole of the Commonwealth.
Supplementing these courses are others with which industry
itself is closely associated. For instance the Australian Administrative
Staff College at Mt Eliza in Victoria, the Summer School of Business
Administration at the University of Melbourne and the Institute of Administration,
run by the University of New South Wales at Little Bay.
Other universities have plans i this field of business
administration ranging from studies at Diploma level to a Master's
degree. Now all this is good up to a point. You will see that
the existing facilities are mostly for undergraduate studies. These are
essential and there will have to be more of them. But when we come to
a discussion of the nation's future needs at postgraduate level in management
we find ourselves in the middle of a continuing deb ate. Should each
Australian State and the Capital Territory bave its own university or its
own College of Advanced Education staffed and equipped for this purpose?
Or should resources be concentrated in one or two
institutions of excellence2 Should we accept the problems posed by
location and possible interstate jealousies for the sake of a concentration
of effort and staff and equipment.
I do not profess to know, but a decision has to be made and
made without too much delay and for myself, I incline towards the
avoidance of too much duplication. But this is a problem to the solution of
which managers themselves should devote their thoughts and decide their
attitudes. / 8
-8
In some respects, Australia has been slower than some other industrial
countries in its development of management training. The first Master's
Degree in business administration was not available until 1962 and our
education resources are no,-t yet fully geared to the surge in national
development which is upon us, particularly in the mineral industries.
Until about eight years ago, an Australian business
executive who wanted management education at the highest level had to
go abroad and usually he went to America, to renowned institutions like
Harvard and Stanford. Many still do.
And yet, for years before that we had shown the world
we could grow the best wool, wheat and meat in the world, we could
build aeroplanes and ships and develop major industries. Some of our
scientists and medical men had been pre-eminent in their fields and
of world-wide reputation. Australians, in fact, were proving they
could succeed in any company.
But they had little opportunity for refining their admninistrative
skills. The specialist was in his slot. There was little incentive
for him to broaden the base of his management skill.
Now we are seeking to overcome that. Industry at
large is beginning to recognise it as the Institute of Management did
long ago. The demand from traduates and undergraduates for management
training is rising sharply. So too is the demand from industry.
I envisage the solution emerging as the result of joint
development by governments and industry. Most of you will be familiar
with the decision the Government made in May of this year to Institute
an inquiry into Australia's future needs in the field of post-graduate
education in management and how best these needs could be met.
This followed the study made by a panel from the
Manufacturing Industries Advisory Council which set the future needs of
industry as high as five hundred Masters of Business Administration a
year. Since our decision in May, representatives of the
Commonwealth have been abroad to visit a number of leading business
schools and, as a result, the Commonwealth has invited a group of
overseas experts to conduct the enquiry on the best method of management
training for Australia. Some acceptances of these invitations have
already been received and I would expect the Minister for Educat ion and
Science to be in a position to announce further details about the enquiry
very soon. / 9
79
I believe, here, we are starting at the right point.
I turn now to management for national development. The
size of the task in Australia hardly needs restating before a distinguished
audience like this, for you are all, in your respective spheres, deeply
involved. It is primarily an exercise in responsible government and
" responsible government? as the late Sir Frederic Eggleston once
said is " the attempt, never completely successful, of free democracies
to secure in an integral process an effective forum, proper consideration
and decision and effective execution".
I see it as an exercise at three levels. First we have
the application of political principles to the formation of policy by
governments. Then there is the administrative arm of government,
which is non-political and continuous, and which provides the tools
governments need to do the j ob. It has vast skills and inherent
qualities of management. I refer to the Public Service.
And finally there is private enterprise which makes
the heart of a nation whole. This we might define as a huge, sprawling,
incredibly diverse association of individuals and comnirinities, bound
only byecononic 17,7 v: d cubject to economic sanctions.
Let us look for a moment at the political level in the
exercise of responsible government. No political philosophy can succeed
in a democracy ( though it may survive) unless it has a concept of
management which is based on the human values of the individual, a
respect for his liberties and an understanding of the forces which motivate
him. There must be incentives to work and prcper rewards for labour.
The opportunity to live without fear and in dignity must be his.
In our early civilisation, man's needs were few. They
were concerned with subsistence and survival. Management was a
primitive exercise in looking after oneself. Today those needs still are
there but they exist in a new environment which is made complicated and
demanding by man himself because of the development of his knowledge,
his skills, his inventions and his innovations.
A political philosophy has to encoutipass in this modern
age full regard t r the liberty of the individual and also recognise a
framework of society in which that liberty can exist. It must be committed
to the security of the social system in a world caught precariously between
the eternal values and the forces of destruction.
10
It has to be flexible and it cannot be so if it does not
accept the virtues of compromise. Henry Clay, in writing of the Federal
system in America, said compromise was the cement that held the Union
together. " All legislation", he explains " is founded on the
principle of mutual concession.... let him who elevates himself above
humanity, above its weaknesses, its infirmities, its wants, its
necessities say, if he pleases, ' I will never compromise'; but let
no one who is not above the frailties of our common nature disdain
compromise" That, I am afraid, is commonsense, though compromise
must never involve abdication from principle. It seems to me that, in
meeting the challenge of the change around us, we have to be concerned,
at political level, not only with the art of compromise, but with a fuller
understanding of how to manage the " knowledge worker" of whom I have
already spoken. He needs and expects more than just " a living. He
must be challenged to achieve greatness in his own field, not so much by
people as by seeking to attain objectives objectives which others may
regard as unattainable. Governments have the task, in a management sense, of
defining the objectives of a society. In material terms those objectives
in Australia can be summarised quite briefly.
We want to see Australia free, independent, secure and
prosperous.
We want people and capital resources to develop this
continent.
We want to increase our self-sufficiency at home and
enlarge our markets abroad.
We want to play a responsible part in the community of
nations with a proper recognition of our regional
responsibilities.
" We want to provide the greatest variety of opportunity for
self-fulfilment and purposeful living to the individuals
who make up our nation. / 11
11
Those objectives may be as old as our sovereignty, yet they
are constantly taking new forms. New objectives are also emerging which
are less tangible but of real importance, but I will come to them a little
later. I have spoken a good deal on the political level of management
in national development, but perhaps I may be forgiven because of my
direct involvement in it.
The second level I want to talk about now is the Public Service.
This is the link which joins succeeding governments and it has management
responsibili ties of a high order.
While the politician has to make the ultimate decisions and is
accountable to his peers and his constituents for what hie does or does not
do, top management in the Public Service still has weighty responsibilities.
This is where the translation of policy decisions into administrative action,
advisory functions and a whole range of support activities exist. Facts,
figures, analysis, assessment and advice must flow continuously to the
Cabinet, the Ministry and the Parliament.
I believe the Service performs these tasks well. Its probity
is unquestioned and its record second to none. The officers of the Service
are part of the new breed of " knowledge workers" as well as the architects
of management techniques in government. The Service has come a long
way in the second half of this century. University graduates are joining in
greater numbers and occupy many posts in the higher echelons.
It was not always so and in the first thirty years or so of
Federation, entry was by examination at the age of fourteen or thereabouts.
This led W. K. Hancock to write in 1930
" Democratic sentiment, applauds the sound argument that
every office boy should have a chance to become a manger
and perverts it into a practical rule that no-one shall become
a manager who has not been an office boy.
I quo te this to show that in the administration of government,
a vast transormation has already taken place and the process is still
going on. The higher educational qualifications in the Public Service and
the training in management practices which the Serivce provides internally
and externally are powerful reinforcements for the system of responsible
government. / 12
-212-
In recent years the cross-pollination of industry and the Public
Service ar-officer-iel-baa. beon increasing. The fact that industry now
turns frequently to the-Public Ser'-Ice in its search for top executives,
top managers and specialists is a tribute to the system and the quality
of the officer it attracts and trains. Similarly the opportunities the
Public Service-itself provides do attract recruits from industry.
In thi s sophisticated, twentieth century world, I do not believe
the Public Service should be separated from industry by any significant
barriers or artificial divisions of skill providing the traditional rights of
the public servant are protected. After all, the differences between the
responsibilities each accepts and the service each provides are not
very great. The real barrier has been the non-transferability of
superannuation. To remove this barrier the Commonwealth Government
has accepted the concept of " portability of pensions" a clumsy phrase
perhaps but one which means that, subject to certain conditions, a
Commonwealth public servant does not lose his superannuation rights if he
transfers to different spheres of Commonwealth employment, to the
State public services, to the universities or to industry. It would seem
eminently sensible for this to become a general principle in all sectors
of employment. Though I know the industry has reservation as to this.
May I now take the third level of activity in managing for
national development. I refer to private enterprise. This is your
territory, gentlemen.
Now private enterprise has provided a great deal of the
thrust tbat has taken Australia to the point of development we are at
today, and it is indeed the base of our free enterprise society.
It was private enterprise which opened up our rural lands;
it was private enterprise which gave us our manufacturing industries.
It was private enterprise which first drew from the earth the mineral
wealth that today has given a new dimension to our growth, our export
opportunity and our national economy as a whole.
But it has not, and I probably need not remind you, done t,,.-se
things exclusively on its own. Governments had to create a climate
of opportunity and indeed to provide important incentives. This they
have done, and through this we have seen the development of a partnership,
ragged though it may appear at times, between the public and the
private sectors in order the better to attain our national objectives. / 13
13
It was private enterprise, too, as I told you earlier in my
historical reference to education for management, that inspired commercial
education at the tertiary level. It was also informed private enterprise
which began to advocate higher post-graduate education for management.
But private enterprise in my opinion, is not pulling its weight in one
important field; research for industry has been too much dependent on
Government finances.
I say this frankly because I think it merits your consideration
and because it seems to me that research should have a very high priority
when we are working out which way we will go in the next decade.
This applies to management needs as well as management policies.
An analysis by Dr Peter Stubbs of the Institute of Appled
Economic Research at the University of Melbourne showed that while the
Australian research effort overall was small the percentage contribution
made by the Government sector to the total amount spent was far greater
than the percentage contributed by the Governments of other countries
in their own economies. The countries he selected for comparisons were
the United States of America, Britain, Belgium, France West Germany
and Holland. Of the estimated gross national expenditure on research and
development, the Government sector in Australia contributed around 73 per
cent and the next highest government contribution was in Britain where it
was 64 per cent.
Dr Stubbs makes it clear that in this field Australian industry,
that is the private sector, has played a very small role both in its
proportion to the Australian national effort and in absolute terms when
compared with other industrial countries.
I bring this to your notice because if we are to gvrasp the
opportunities the future holds, we have to be inventors and innovate
and it is top management which has to frame the policy towards innovation.
By inn ovation I mean the act of bringing invention to fruition, the
development part of " research and development" Invention we know as
the act of creating a new product or process and Australians have a good
record here, but development of an invention to tliFe point where it becomes
commercial does not occur in Australia to the degree that it should.
No-one can be an innovator without thorough research and a
study of all the possibilities and no-one can be a successful innovator
without management skills. / 14
14
We need the most advanced and specialised managerial skills
we can attract. There have been regrettable cases in the past when
citizens have had abundant gifts to offer but they have been unable to fit
into already existing patterns of organisation. No matter how radical
we may think ourselves, most of us are deeply ingrained with conservatism
in organisational matters.
An example is that of the Greek town planner and architect
Constantinos Doxiadis. Dr Doxiadis was a leading architect in Greece
before the Second World War, and in that war he led the Greek underground
and was awarded the British OBE. After the war he was a Cabinet Minister
and directed Marshall Plan operations in Greece. Following a change of
government in 1951, he lost office and decided to migrate to Australia.
Once in Australia he found that technical difficulties about
qualifications prevented him from contributing as much as he would have
liked and for two years he grew tomatoes in Western Australia. He wrote
several books on town planning and in 1953 returned to Greece. He made
one more attempt at Australia in 1956 but was unable to find an appropriate
post for his talents.
Since then he has founded his own university in Athens, and has
begun massive town planning projects in Greece, in Philadelphia, Washington
and Louisville in the US, in Baghdad and Khartoum, in En gland, South
America and Asia. Only Australia has made no use of his genius. He
won the coveted Aspen Award and is a member of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences.
I would like to think that if Dr Doxiadis were to come as a migrant
now, with -our growing sophistication and our recognition of the need for
advanced managerial skills, he would not be rejected. But I cannot be sure.
I put it to you, therefore, that when we look at our management
standards and the contributions which come from the public and priva te
sectors, we should also look at our research needs and explore ways in which
government and industry can come closer together. Some progress has been
made in recent years and the Australian Government has made finance
available through special committees for both fundamental research and
applied research in industry. But I believe there is room for more direct
activity by industry and the field of development and application of new
inventions in techniques and processes. / i
15
Given wide-ranging and effective research, I believe we then
have a solid ground floor from which the practitioners of the three levels
of national management can operate. These levels, as I have explained,
are represented by the politician both in government and opposition the
Public Service and private enterprise. How well they fit together is the
measure of our capacity tcget the job done. I believe they fit remarkably
well and we see this across the whole panorama of national activity today.
When I spoke earlier about our material objectives, I spoke of
a different, non-material range of objectives before us. These may be
stated simply as the objective of a more satisfying life for our citizens.
In concerning ourselves as a people. * i th what makes for a
more satisfying life, we have to admit that we are mostly only vaguely
interested in what is happening to our environment, and what is more
important what, indeed, we are doing to it. The sins of commission, I
think are perhaps as great as the sins of omission.
We all of us as citizens pollute the very air we breathe,
we savage our unique wildlife with little s1u me, we slay our fellows on
the roads with monstrous carelessness and we accept the congestion of
our cities as though urban sprawl was the fault of somebody else.
We blame everybody but ourselves for the grey areas in our daily lives.
You may ask: What has all this to do with education for
management? What has this to do with education for national development?
I think it has much to do with those things. For the success of government
efforts in this direction depends heavily on . an educated public opinion,
on the bre aking down of the barriers of " it doesn't matter" and " I don't
care". This is where private enterprise, which I have loosely descri ed
as a " free-acting association of individuals and communities" has to make
up the partnership and take up the challenge. It is a challenge to the
" knowledge workers" and the managers to help create the climate in which
an articulate public opinion can flourish and where people will come to say
simply " I do care" and where as a result a more satisfying life will
be the more easily attained.
It is a brave man, indeed, who is dogmatic about the kind of
people and the kind of nation we will be in the next century, but as we move
towards its beginning, I believe the desire for a better life and a sense of
involvement in the making of a nation are things close to the heart of most
Australians. These things we cannot achieve by some kind of imperial
rescript. They will come to us if we make a conscious effort to read some
of the signs around us, as I'm sure William Queale did in his day, and if
we keep the human values straight. An educated public opinion is our
starting point. i16
16
So tonight, Mr President, we have looked historically at
our record in education-for-management and the need to do better if we
are to succeed in a world of change. We have looked at the base structure
of education development in Australia and the elements of government and
the people which form the management team for national development.
We have looked ar our national objectives in material and human terms.
And we have grounds for confidence, but none for complacency.
believe that if governments and people continue to question and to strive,
and are not bound by the concepts and practices of the past, we can stand
up to the weathering of the centuries.
You may ask " What of the future if we do all these things?"
I am no prophet but let me tell you what I see, from the shape of things
as they are 0 1 see Australia as a nation of perhaps twenty-five million
people by the end of the century. That is double our
population today.
I see Australia as a society retaining political freedoms and
using that freedom plus skilled management to provide
economic freedom and more opportunity for creative
self-expression.
* I see Australia as a nation of explorers probing the seas,
and the discoveries of the earth, and seeking new and better
ways of providing more and better material things.
0 1 see Australia developing in an environment we seek to
protect and not destroy.
a I see Australia as growing in tolerance, as increasing in the
realisation that there is a common and a noble task for
all sections of society to work for in harmony.
I conclude, Mr President, by saying just this. We are all practical
men. Of necessity we have to be. But we can have our dreams. And I
say " let us have those dreams".
Thomas Jefferson, a long time ago, said " We must dream of
an aristocracy of achievement arising out of a democracy of opportunity'".
You and your successors, I and . ni y successors, have the chance
in this niation to translate those dreams into reality.
I Mifn k you.