CHECK AGAINST DELIVEFRY EMBARGOED UNTIL DELIVERY
SPEECH BY PRIME MINISTER
MELBOURNE OLYMPIC COMMITTEE
FAREWELL DINNER
MELBOURNE 8 SEPTEMBER 1990
If Australians tend to like their sport, then the people of
Melbourne are positively and passionately in love with it
and at no time more than in spring.
The annual bout of September fever brought on by football
finals followed by the first Tuesday in November when the
whole nation stops for the running of the Melbourne Cup
followed in its turn by the Australian Tennis Open feed
Melbourne's hunger for great sport and make Melbourne an
experienced and qualified host of top quality sporting
events. This year the springtime passion is even more powerful.
On September 18 in ten days time Melbourne and Australia
will stop once more, for the final event of another great
contest in which Melbourne is involved.
There will be parties in the streets, in homes, all over the
city, at the Arts Centre, at the Town Hall, waiting for the
answer to the urgent question: has Melbourne won the bid to
host the 1996 Olympic Games?
And for those of us in Tokyo, it will be a night to remember
and, we hope and believe, to celebrate.
If Melbourne Is successful, the Games will return to the
Southern Hemisphere for only the second time in the hundredyear
history of the modern Olympic movement.
To win that high honour to be host to the centenary Games
Melbourne will have to satisfy the International Olympic
Committee on a vast range of practical criteria.
We will have to show the close links that exist between the
Olympic Committee and the Australian Government. We will
have to demonstrate that the bid has the full support of the
community. We will have to show that we have the ability to
stage the Games with all the advance planning and the
infrastructure that this implies.
It's not my job to detail our whole case tonight on each of
these criteria.
That can wait for the hard-sell in Tokyo.
But I do want to underline one of them by pointing to the
depth of my Government's commitment to the bid and the
breadth of the political support it has drawn from
throughout Australia.
It is a great strength of the Australian community, that
this bid will be suported in Tokyo not only by political
office-holders myself as Prime Minister, the Premier of
Victoria and the Lord Mayor of Melbourne but also by
Federal and Victorian Opposition leaders, and by the three
previous Lords Mayor.
We are united in our support for Melbourne's bid to host the
Games and we are working fully with the Australian Olympic
Committee to make it a success.
Tonight we are farewelling the team that will travel to
Tokyo to put Melbourne's case.
Just like a team sport, where victory requires the
coordinated efforts of many individuals, so our team is
working together to ensure the best possible presentation is
made to the IOC on September 18.
In its composition, our team reflects the broad political
support for the bid and the even broader community support
for it. Business, trade unions, community groups will all
play a part in Tokyo.
Not least, the team shows the enormous support for the bid
from our sporting community, from Olympic heroes to younger
stars of the future to ordinary folk who have taken part in
the Darwin to Melbourne relay run that, like sparks from the
Olympic torch, has touched of f Olympic enthusiasm wherever
the runners have been seen.
And there is a larger team of people who can't come with us,
the volunteers and supporters, whose hard work and
dedication to Melbourne's Candidature has been the backbone
of our bid.
We thank you all.
The degree of support and cooperation that the bid has
received from throughout this city, this State and this
nation gives the greatest source of confidence for success.
I outlined earlier some of the formal criteria that
Melbourne needs to succeed. But you know there is one extra
ingredient in any successful Olympic Games.
It's called character that intangible quality of spirit
that sets a city apart as a special place.
3.
And Melbourne has it by the tonne.
With each host city it chooses, the Olympic Movement
incorporates a new spectacle, a new culture, a new people
into the fabric of the Games.
Those differences create the character of each Olympiad and
help retain the magic of the Olympics for the entire world.
And the athletes who star at a Games become loved and
honoured in the place of their achievement as well as by the
citizens of their own nation and the world.
Place and performance become linked in memory:
* Jesse Owens in Berlin
Emil Zatopek in Helsinki
Vladimir Kutz hand upraised in victory in Melbourne
Herb Elliott in Rome
Dawn Fraser in Tokyo
Mark Spitz with 7 gold in Munich
Nadia Comaneci in Montreal
Carl Lewis in Los Angeles
Flo-Jo in Seoul.
What an incredible collection of memories are conjured up by
those names and places memories of individual achievement
in a global context shared global memories of our shared
global heroes.
Anybody who doubts Melbourne's capacity in 1996 to add to
that superb record of triumph has forgotten the special
qualities of this great sporting city.
The contribution of the Olympics to this century has been
quite extraordinary and, as John Ralph said earlier, it is
due to the power of the Olympic ideals.
Few global institutions survive 100 years. Even fewer
survive and thrive like the OIC has.
It is certainly thriving in Australia.
Australia has been a part of the Olympic Movement's past.
Our commitment has taken us to every Games. We have been
fervent supporters of the ideals and the practice of the
Olympic spirit.
For the future, we believe Australia can provide an
unparalleled stage for the launch of a new century of the
Olympic Movement.
We respect and in many ways embody the traditions of the
past, while being youthful and flexcible and outward-looking
in the structure and nature of our society.
our very population represents an exciting amalgam of the
peoples of the world.
4.
In every respect we echo and reinforce the Olympic ideals;
in every capacity we are qualified for the high honour of
hosting the 1996 Olympic Games.
That is our mission in Tokyo. On behalf of all Australians
I wish success to the Melbourne bid; and as a member of the
team that will be in Tokyo presenting that bid, I can assure
you all we will be doing our darndest to come home winners.
L