S-I
PRIME MINISTER
SPEECH BY THE PRIME MINISTER, THE HON P. J. KEATING, MP
NATIONAL IMMIGRATION OUTLOOK CONFERENCE
SYDNEY, 13 NOVEMBER 1992
Ladies and gentlemen
I am delighted to have the opportunity to address this
very distinguished gathering, and I think I should begin
by saying on behalf of the Government, thank you for
giving your time and expertise to a conference of very
great importance to Australia.
The names of those taking part attest to the Continuing
centrality of immigration in Australia's life and, I
think, to the great public spirit at large these days.
And I think it is true to say that these days we can
sense in Ausiralian public life beyond the party
political sphere a new sense of purpose and engagement in
national issues, a new level of interest in the future.
it is something I think all of us would encourage.
Ladies and gentlemnen, a few months ago I attended a
preview screening of the Australian film, Strictly
Ballroom which has since set box office re'cords ' and won a
raft of prizes here anld elsewhere in the world. It is an
extraordinary popular phenomenon.
Strictly Ballroom has a few lessons for us I think.
For a start it is a reminder that creativity and
productivity, the cultural and the economic, are
complementary. Strictly Ballroom is popular culture, including
inulticulture, and it is art. It is also a terrific
return on a public and private sector investment and it
exports. It is both economics and culture, including
multiculture. The story of the film would have been impossible without
the post-war immigration policy. It could not have been
conceived without it. Nor could the personnel the cast
and crew have been conceived for that matter.
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Strictly Ballroom concernls faith and hope and opportunity
and care. The making of it concerned the same things.
Strictly Ballroom is about excellence but it is also,
quintessentially, about ordinary people.
The film tells us that, hard as it often is to do it, old
ways need to change. It tells us that we need to be open
to new ideas.
But it is also about the best of Australian values
their immutability and their adaptability. It is a
decidedly iunpiA film. It's about continuity as well
as change.
it might be read as a metaphor for Australia in the last
half of the century. It is about all of us. There is a
bit of all of us in it, and it suggests to all of us, I
think, that there is a lot to learn from the experience
of multicultural Australia.
Ladies and gentlemen, in the latter half of the 1970s,
when I found that I was increasingly in 8 position to
have some influence in the Labor Party, and therefore
potentially some influence on Australian public life, the
nature of my ambitions became clearer to me.
Since then they have become clearer still.
I hope you will bear with me for a moment while I try to
explain them. I think it is worth doing because I don't
think my experience is at all atypical.
The comm unity I grew up in was distinctly Anglo and
Celtic Australian. I grew up with old fashioned
Australian working class traditions, one of which was a
pretty happ~ y partnership with s-ocial mobility.
Success was encouraged and applauded, but it was assumed
that you wouldn't forget your roots. You would take them
with you wherever you went in life, whatever you did.
Now I don't need to explain to you the relatively simple
cultural parameters of such a society. The faiths, on
the outside at least, were work, family, church, league,
racehorses and rock and roll.
Under the surface lurked a love of Australia and its way
of life, a broad egalitarianism, a belief in social
justice, the idea I know it's a cliche but it's true
of a fair go for everyone.
These values were simple enough once you understood them,
and to grow up in them was to understand them.
But what perhaps does need to be explained is the paradox
they contained for people of my generation.
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For, you see, I had the greatest respect for the values
and traditions of the Bankstown community. I still do.
Fundamentally, they are what I am.
_ Bankstown is nothing more or less than home.
And, as people do with homes, I want to protect what it
is and what it stands for.
But the paradox was this: much 88 I loved it, I wanted
to change it. I wanted to open the place up.
The Australia I knew as a young man was narrow, insular,
uncertain of itself.
The Australia of the 1970s was still too narrow.
It seemed to me that, for all its great virtues,
Australia was missing out on what the world had to offer,
and it was offering the world less than it could.
Australians in those days tended to believe that you
could only keep traditions up by keeping others out.
By the 1970s I had begun to see my cause among those who
wanted to open Australia up to the outside world I
wanted a Labor Party and a Labor government which was
open to the world and phobia-free.
Like Australia itself, Bankstown is now a very different
place, and perhaps the most obvious change can be seen in
the shopping malls where these days Lebanese and
Vietnamese businesses predominate.
This causes some concern among the older residents just
as it caused concern among my parents' generation when
migrants from Italy and Greece began to move in.
These and other migrant groups have added to the life of
Bankstown they've given it more strength and interest.
In due course I have no doubt the migrants of recent
years will too.
But the old values are still strong there is still that
faith in the idea of social justice, expanded opportunity
and broad egalitarian democracy, faith in Australia,
concern about Australia all these are still the
dominant values, and they transcend ethnic origins.
One of those values is tolerance.
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we should not lose eight of the fact that along with the
willingness of migrants to come and join in the life of
Australia, and ' thd wir'lingness of governments to
facilitate that, the essential preconditions for the
success of the immigration program were the values of
democracy, tolerance and goodwill in which earlier
generations of Australians believed.
This is not self-congratulation so much as giving credit
where it's due. I say we should give credit to democracy
Australian democracy.
For under that laconic exterior a serious democracy is
lurking. And under the conservative attachment to the
Australian way of life, there is a capacity to
accommodate change, and welcome difference.
We can draw a parallel between multicultural policy and
economic policy in the 1980s.
As Treasurer I saw miy role as the necessary one of
opening Australia up to the world, making us a player: inthe
longer run, I have no doubt, not just a player, but a
winner. There have been setbacks the recession has been an
awful setback: but essentially that is what it is a
setback on the long road to an Australia which
successfully competes in the world and thus successfully
sustains a high standard of living, increased
opportunities and a healthy democracy for its people.
Just as we are an infinitely more interesting, rich and
rewarding society because we are now multicultural, so
the rewards will be greater infinitely greater
because our economy has joined up with the world.
Imperfect as they might be, the deeper democratic values
of ordinary Australians were absolutely necessary in the
transformation of Australia from a narrow and inward
looking society to a more cosmopolitan and outward
looking one.
i have said several times this year at various functions,
here and overseas if you want the proof of our capacity
to change in the next decade look at the change we have
made in the last one.
It has been the willingness of Australians to make the
change and the capacity of their institutions to make it
which has brought about the revolution in our workplaces,
and which more than anything else gives us reason for
confidence about the future.
We are succeeding In making this a competitive, exportoriented,
productive culture because the people of
Australia have come with us. I I I J A. I I i Ld Q _ 4
We will only make it wealthier society, and therefore a
place where more opportunity exists, by the same meansnot
by creating an underclass, or by employing some form
of trickle down economics, but taking all the people with
US. I won't belabour you with figures now. Nor am I
shrinking from realities which still need to be
addressed. But the shape of the Australian economy has changed
dramatically in the last few years and the most telling
evidence of this is in the fact that our exported
manufactures have doubled and total exports now make up
23 per cent of Gross Domestic Product compared with 14
per cent a decade ago.
The message is the same as the message of
multiculturalism. The basic values of Australia support
change. our broad egalitarianism does not drag us down, it
underpins our capacity to adapt.
It is our strength. And for me that is the resolution of
the paradox between those things which we value and
those things we want, what we have and what we need,
between inertia and progress.
The basic mould of Australian society has served us well
through generations, through great trials and
extraordinary change.
We need to make it stronger, bigger, more adaptable and
interesting.
But it must not be broken.
The Accord provides another example another example of
building from the mould from the cooperative, equitable
nation-building instincts of Australian society.
The Accord is primarily responsible for giving us rates
of du& strial disputation sixty per cent below the 1970s,
the creation of 1.5 million jobs since 1983, a ten per
cent reduction in labor costs, a substantial shift from
wages to profits, the lowest rate of inflation in the
OECD, a doubling of manufactured exports since 1983 and
an increase of 63 per cent since 1988-89.
There has been no greater contribution to our
competitiveness than this partnership and there is no
better guarantee of it increasing.
The recession has given us totally unacceptable levels of
unemploymeat, but we will not find jobs for those people
by disp~ osing of our strengths and the Accord is perhaps
the greatest of these.
ILL'.. I ~ oU. PU~
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I firmly believe that our economic success rests
ultimately on the same bases as our social success -our
success as a nation involves both.
The key is this if we include Australians and their
beat traditions we'll succeed. If we leave their Late to
chance, I believe we'll fail.
More than that, we will lose one of the great egalitarian
societies in the world. We'll lose both our heritage and
our future.
I want to make the point very plainly: the chances for
truly radical change depend on social acceptance of
change. Change which tramples on social values, which
breaks the mould, will simply not succeed.
What I want to say tonight concerns change. Not change
of the strictly economic type with which I know I am
generally associated. it concerns some of the things I
believe we can do in this decade leading to the centenary
of federation to extend the domain of our common heritage
and our common hopes.
if it is true that it was caring for cultural traditions
which made multiculturalism a success, it follows that
fostering ai~ nitifgtenation's cultural life is a
matter of priority.
It's why, among reasons like pure pleasure, I set a lot
of store in the arts.
I think much more than is often appreciated in politics,
they serve to bind society together.
The arts define and re-define us and in that they give us
confidence. They encourage tolerance as well as
excellence, they shape and reinforce the mould of our
society, and by all this they can help carry us through.
Again, we can learn something from that famous decade a
century ago.
The legacy of the 1890s was not just federation and the
Labour movement it was an Image of ourselves and this
land indelibly engraved by Australian writers and
artists. They defined Australia, and in so doing they gave
Australians faith in themselves for generations to come.
I live in hope and it's a confident hope that the
1990s will renew our faith and the faith of new
generations.
.7
That's substantially why this year we established a panel
of leading Australians to develop a national cultural
policy to bring cultural questions into the mainstream
of decision making in Australia, and to encourage
excellence and broaden participation.
In this the Government is taking a leading role, but it
also responding to public interest and concern.
As I said when I began there is, just now, an enlivened
interest in the nation.
it can be seen in programs aimed at re-defining Australia
both at home and abroad, particularly in Asia.
Some of these programs are coming from government
departments, but what is most striking and most
encouraging is the degree to which they are being
generated by groups of independent individuals or by
institutions which never contemplated such a role for
themselves a few years ago.
I think it is true to say that they are in part a return
on the issues of nationhood which the Government has
raised this year.
Not that we invented them there has been for a long
time I believe a rising tide of national feeling and a
great need to open the channels of expression.
You can be sure that we intend to keep them open.
Ladies and gentlemen, when we think about the issues of
Australian nationhood in the 1990s, once again I think
there is something to be learned from the multicultural
experience. it's worth remembering that long before the post-war
immigration program one could have drawn a cultural map
of Australia defining regional and other differences
based on AuStrala2 experience.
The map essentially still exists. And, as with
multiculturalisem, the object is to find unity in the
diversity, productivity in the diversity.
Long may Queenslanders be Queenslanders and Sandgropers
Sandgropers, and the people of Wagga or Weipa, or the
Mallee or the Barossa take pride in their distinctive
communities, all they do and all they have done.
In fact it should please Australian nationalists to think
that, culturally speaking, Australia will be
characterised by stronger regional identities as time
passes. And by a stronger natlonal Identity. i iov ji rqo uuz) r ui i
We need a strong national identity at home to give us
more strength of purpose and belief. We need it abroad
to leave no one in any doubt about who we are and what we
stand for.
I think we should and can encourage it.
We can encourage the idea of Australian citizenship in a
number of ways, including by serious consideration of our
national symbols and by a full non-partisan debate on
constitutional change.
I think I have made my position on these pretty clear in
the course of this year. I am one who thinks our flag
would better reflect our contemporary identity and
aspirations if it did not carry on it the flag of another
country. I also believe that thefLaA should not be changed
without the support of a majority of the Australian
people and it will not be.
There would now appear to be no doubt that something very
close to such a majority exists in support of an
Australian republic, and that the number is growing.
It seems to me that the public Is increasingly interested
in this debate and expects of the Government that the
appropriate constitutional changes be fully and expertly
canvassed and considered.
I don't believe Governments in the nineties are going to
be able to avoid this responsibility, and, I think and
certainly hope, that the time is rapidly approaching when
it will be possible for political leaders to discuss
these matters without the inference being drawn that one
is Irish, or creating a distraction, or hostile to
Britain or Her Majesty the queen.
This is not change so much as institutions keeping up
with change with national growth.
These things will have to be confronted because the
people, particularly younger people, want them. And
deserve them.
If it is true that those basic values of Australian
democracy were an essential factor in the success of
multiculturalism, then I think it is probably time that
we acknowledged them more formally.
I saw recently that Asian participants in an Academy of
Social Sciences project said that they were at once proud
of their Australian citizenship and puzzled by how little
pride native-born Australians seemed to take in it.
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1 think it is probably true that Australians who were
born here tend to take their rights and responsibilities
for granted, and lapse into believing that this democracy
came to us by accident in the same way that we not so
long ago believed our prosperity was an historical
accident. In truth, just as we have learned that we must work at
creating national wealth, that we must be cleverer and
more cooperative and cohesive, so we have to work at
social and political development at national growth.
In this decade I think we might profitably aim at
building in the whole community a more spirited sense of
our democratic achievements and greater involvement in
the questions now confronting us.
it would be absurd if migrants attending citizenship
ceremonies felt more strongly and were more knowledgeable
about Australian democracy than Australians of long
standing. if our education system is the best means of changing
this, then we should use the education system to change
it. If there are other means, we should employ those as
well. In the next few years we should be looking at all those
elements of our political and constitutional heritage
which have been lost to Australians or leeched of
meaning. Just as we deliver our cultural heritage back to all
Australians, I think we should be seeking ways to deliver
the essential strands of our nationhood.
The patriation of our Constitution from London might be a
start.
As my colleague, the Minister for Justice, said last
night, another very useful initiative might be the
adoption of an Oath of Citizenship sworn to Australia and
the principles of democracy and tolerance, and explicitly
recognising that Australian citizenship is a common bond
involving reciprocal rights and obligations which unite
us all.
At another level there can be no greater hope than that
our efforts to achieve reconciliation with the Aboriginal
people succeed, and that we can convert the
unconscionable tragedy of 200 years into a common cause
for social justice.
Ladies and gentlemen, last February we brought down an
economic statement with the non economic name of Npne_
Nation".
I LL
By this we meant to convey our message that social and
political cohesion and purpose were as important as
economics in the effort for recovery and securing the
nation's long term future.
It was not just the name, but the programs we announced
which told the story the National Rail Highway and road
programs, the National Traff* gA-uthority, the National
Electicity idwere at-6once emblems and manf-festations
of-our intent.
As a Labor Government whose primary goal is always full
employment, we recognise just how severe the effects of
recession have been how severe they continue to be.
We have devoted by far the greatest part of our efforts
this year to reducing levels of unemployment and doing
our best to alleviate its effects. We have devoted a
very large part of the Budget to this.
We have also taken the view that the solution is not
merely economic.
And the experience of immigration and multiculturalism in
Australia makes that plain.
one cannot speak of immigration without thinking of the
hope and faith which migrants need. In themselves and in
Australia. If we are to succeed as this, the greatest of Australia's
social undertakings has succeeded, we will need those
elements of hope and faith in Australia.
And we will need the tolerance and good will on which the
immigration program rested.
We will need to keep the best of our traditions alive and
guiding us, and our hearts and minds open to the world.
I think that is the best lesson to be learned from the
past fifty years of our history.
That lesson applied might see us with our democratic
traditions essentially unchanged in the year 2000 but our
people more aware of them, and more eloquent in their
expression of them.
By this I mean something beyond a nation in which
everyone knows the words of the National Anthem.-but
that would certainly be a good start.
whatever decisions Australians make in the next few years
and I think it is likely that they will choose to have
an Australian Head of State the proper role for
Government in these things is to open debate and the way
for change. I L) V L) I I q U U UL, r
I I-IU v L i 4U. U UQ F
The greatest hope is that by the year of the centenary of
federation the social justice Australians have always
believed in is more than ever before a thoroughgoing
reality in Australia and that, above all, full
employment is entrenched again.
if these are my hopes for the year 2000, my hope today is
that, for 811 the necessary detail of your deliberations
here and elsewhere in your professional lives, you never
lose sight of this bigger picture.
Thank you.