PRIME MINISTER]
SPEECH BY THE PRIME NIKISTER
LAUNCHING THE CENTENARY HISTORY OF THE
AUSTRALIAN LABOR PARTY
" THE LIGHT ON THE HILL"
COLLINGIIOOD, 21 JUNE 1992.
Friends It's not surprising that in this Centenary Year, we are
hearing a great deal about Labor traditions.
So I might begin by pointing out that the publication of
this history itself celebrates one of the most remarkable,
and one of the very oldest of all Labor traditions the
Labor Party-Is deep sense of history, and of its place in
Australian history.
It has been said truly that the Labor Party was born with a
sense of history.
And I give you a remarkable proof of that.
In 1892 within a year of the Party's official foundationtwo
of the founding members, Thomas Roydhouse and
Robert Taperell wrote a book and published it in Sydney.
They called it The L~ abor Party in New South Walpq A
History cdL-itz-Foundation and Legislative Career.
That was just a year after the election of the first Labor
members the 35 who formed the world's first parliamentary
Labor Party, exactly one hundred years ago this mouth.
Roydhouse and Taperell record the very difficult decisions
the Party had to make, not only in working out its role
within the established parliamentary system, but about the
rules governing the relationship between the parliamentary
party, the party membership the rank and file outside
and the union movement which had brought the political party
into being. And really, within that first year, they had
established the essential structures which were to make the
Party unique, and which were so essential to its survival
for the next decade and indeed for the next century.
But the point I want to make, in the context of this
occasion today, is this:
2.
What other political party not just in Australia, but
anywhere within a year of its formation, has had the
confidence in its future, the certainty about its destiny,
to publish an account of its origins and call it
' history'?
So Doctor McMullin joins a select band, and his book takes
its place in a long tradition.
And the important thing is this:
With us of the Australian Labor Party, our sense of history
is a deep source of strength for our future. From our pride
in our past, we draw confidence for the future.
The great thing about understanding our history is that it
enables us to put the pre-occupations of the present into
perspective. And the discerning reader of Ross McMullin's pages will come
to realise that events which may seem novel, unprecedented,
even unintelligible in the day-to-day hurly-burly of
politics, are in fact part of an ongoing story a volatile,
turbulent story certainly but destined to become just a
part of the great rolling stream of Australian history.
In a recent book, The Lessons of History, a leading British
historian Sir Michael Howard, writes:
The past is infinitely various, an inexhaustible
storehouse of events from which we can prove anything,
or its contrary.
But Howard also writes:
Without history we are groping in total darkness.
We of the Labor Party not only have a history but are strong
enough to have it recorded, in critical and sometimes even
in unflattering terms.
And we are strong enough to learn its lessons, not least
from our mistakes and even our follies.
In this, as in so much else, I invite the contrast with the
other forces, the anti-labor forces, in Australian political
history. Now I don't go quite as far as to say that our opponents are
like the mule without pride of ancestry or hope of
posterity. I simply say: where is the evidence that they understand or
ever learn the lessons of their own history?
My friends, I believe our great and beloved historian
Manning Clark has best identified the purpose of the writing
of Australian history. It is, he said, to try to explain
who we are and how we came to be who we are.
That, of course, is primarily a task for Australians
ourselves. But it is often instructive to get the outside view.
And from the very early years, the Australian Labor Party
drew the interest of writers from overseas Albert Metin's
SorIilliam Wijthout DontrIne in 1901 for example.
In the light: of the epic events now occurring in Eastern
Europe and in the light of some of the comments critics of
the Labor Party make today it is worth noting what one
noted commentator had to say in 1914.
I refer to none other than Lenin himself.
And he wrote! in 1914:
The leaders of the Australian Labor Party are trade
union cofficials" an element which is everywhere most
moderat~ e and capital serving. The liberals in Europe
and in Russia who try to teach the people the
needlessness of class war by the example of Australia
only deceive themselves and others.
Three quarters of a century on, at this time of Labor's
Centenary, in the week in which the citizens of Leningrad
have voted to rename their city St Petersburg, I am
perfectly prepared to let Lenin's criticism stand or fall by
the judgement of history.
But the truth is, my friends, that Lenin's critique did
discern the two key elements in the nature, character and
purpose of the Australian Labor Party the two mainstays of
Labor continuity and Labor's cause:
the solidarity of political and industrial Labor;
and the commitment to parliamentary democracy.
Lenin condemned them. We celebrate them.
Friends, It has been for me, now for more than thirty years, a
privilege beyond words to represent, in whatever way I have
been able to do, those two great strands which bind the
Labor cause -together.
No Australian has ever owed more to this great Movement,
this unique Australian institution, than I do.
If I have been able to achieve anything in public life, it
is because of those two commitments the double commitment
our founders made one hundred years ago the commitment to
advance the cause of the working men and women of Australia
through the means of parliamentary democracy. That is the
banner they unfurled one hundred years ago. That is the
banner we hold high today, under which we will take
Australia into the 21st century.
Ladies and gentlemen,
I congratulate all involved in this publication.
I have no doubt that Ross McMullin found his most daunting
challenge in trying to produce some order from the sheer
mass of material available. To marshal into a coherent,
readable whole what is practically seven accounts, spanning
a continent as well as a century, is a splendid feat of
organisation. I congratulate the publishers Oxford Press on this very
handsome volume.
I congratulate the Federal Executive for commissioning the
work and the Federal Secretariat for supporting it, while as
Ross acknowledges, always respecting his complete
independence. As I have written for the dustjacket:
This important and provocative book presents the
tremendous and turbulent history of the Australian
Labor Party warts and all. Its publication itself
demonstrates the strength of a Party and a Movement
courageous enough to commission an untrammelled account
of its failures and faults, as well as its immense
achievements.