PRIME MINISTER
TRANSCRIPT OF THE PRIME MINISTER, THE HON P J KEATING MP
-SPEECH TO THE AUSTRALIA REMEMBERS NATIONAL YOUTH FORUM,
BRISBANE GIRLS' GRAMMAR SCHOOL, BRISBANE, 15 AUGUST 1995
E& OE PROOF COPY
Can I say I am delighted to be at Brisbane Girls' Grammar School and to say
how pleased I am that so many young Australians have taken up the theme of
Australia Remembers and have engaged themselves with it.
I think it is apparent to you, if it wasn't earlier, that most of the things we
celebrate and the people we remember were young Australians in the main,
young Australians as you are today young Australians and that they had all
the hopes and aspirations that you have. They were very much at the point
in their own lives, as many of you are at today, and yet at this level of the
emotional development they carried the brute force of an assault upon
themselves, upon their life, upon Australia and it was belief in this country, a
belief in what we have created here, of what have we represented and faith in
themselves and those around them that let them fight the fight against
tyranny and oppression to a hard won victory which has given us all liberty
and peace. I mean that is what we remember. Remember that faith and
remember that belief.
Perhaps it came home to me most when I was in Kokoda in 1992 on that
same little green square that exists today, that existed then, where the first
shots by Australian combatants against the Japanese marines in defence of
Australia were fired. And that morning at 6.00 am, with the mist low over the
village as it started to clear, young Australian men in shorts and singlets
some 18 years of age, fought the best the Japanese Imperial Army could
throw at them.
Now that is people at Year 12 age, or approaching Year 12, to be sitting there
in that tropical environment facing the strongest and the best combat troops
the Japanese could throw at our country. So you had to believe in something
and you had to have faith in something to carry on and they did and they
fought a valiant fight for Australia and the rest is the history we know.
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That is who we are remembering and we see the diggers, now in their
late 60s or their 70s or even the First World War diggers older than that, and
you are prone to think about them, but you must think about them as young
people because it was their young lives which were disrupted and it was the
younger lives, the lives of even younger people, who were lost.
I remember walking through the cemetery at Kanchanaburi in Thailand, not
far from the Burma railway, looking at the number of young men, young
Australians who died, the day that I was born 18 January 1944. And you
know that it makes the point poignantly to you, they died so that your life
could be complete and I said in the speech for the Unknown Soldier, when we
buried the Unknown Soldier, that he was all of them, one of them, but one of
us. And they all of them were one of us.
I know we think today that we being the people of democracy and liberty, that
of course we would have won the war. We will back it up that the right side
won, the good people won, the good guys won. But it didn't necessarily have
to go that way and in the war in Europe which is so inextricably linked to the
war in the Pacific, that had Hitler made an assault on Britain in 1940, had he
not attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, had the Russian people not held out
Leningrad from 1941-1944, then we might have faced a completely different
world. With a successful Nazi Germany, with the Russians not in the war, where we
faced the Japanese with the United States, and the toe-hold in Normandy
might just simply have been that a toe-hold and been simply as we
remember Gallipoli from the First World War.
The fact that we succeeded and had we not it would have been a race
between Hitler and the United States to develop the nuclear weapon and it
might not have been Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but it could have also been
British cities and American cities. So it was close and I have no doubt that
the United States once that great machine finally wound itself up, under the
leadership of Franklin Roosevelt, that we would have defeated the Japanese
in the Pacific. But it might have been a different war. The whole environment
may have been different. But notwithstanding our sense of democracy and
liberty in our righteousness we may not have been at least the early victors.
So Australia was a more innocent country then and a small country.
A smaller much more innocent place than today, where we are perhaps less
naive and more worldly and so the assault and the affront was greater and
one had to have that deep sense of democracy and that clear installation of
the values to actually run a fight like this and to win. And so when we see our
relatives, our dead relatives, laying around the battlefields of East Asia and
Europe, we know that they were there confronting with some substantial
uncertainty that period in their lives which may have seen a different world for
them and for us.
So it had to mean something. 50 years on, we can't say oh well that was just
something in the past. This sort of stoicism, this sort of bravery, heroism,
belief in Australia, belief in what we created here, belief in our values, had to
mean something. And so I am exceptionally pleased that so many
Australians remember and so many young Australians remember and have
learned about the period.
Now today the Prime Minister of Japan made a statement and one that I think
will bring substantial pleasure to many of us in this country and many of you
I think all of you. And I will read some of it because I think it is a testimony to
the battle that we fought. And he said, and I am reading part of it, " our task is
to convey to younger generations the horrors of war so that we never repeat
the errors in our history." This is what we have always asked of the
Japanese. That they teach their children what happened. And he is saying
that " our task is to convey to younger generations the horrors of war so that
we never repeat the errors in our history. Furthermore I will continue in all
sincerity to do my utmost in efforts being made on the issues arisen from the
war, in order to further strengthen the relations of trust between Japan and
those other countries. Now upon this historic occasion, the 50th anniversary
of the war's end, we should bear in mind that we must look into the past to
learn from the lessons of history and ensure that we do not stray from the
path to peace and prosperity of human society in the future. We do not
stray," he says. " During a certain period, in the not too distant past, Japan
followed a mistaken national policy. Advanced on the road to war only to
ensnare the Japanese people in a fateful crisis and through it colonial rule
and aggression caused tremendous damage and suffering to the people of
many countries, particularly those of Asian nations. In the hope that no such
mistake be made in the future, I regard in the spirit of humility, these
irrefutable facts of history and express here, once again, my feelings of deep
remorse and state my heartfelt apology. Allow me also to express my
feelings of profound mourning to all victims, both at home and abroad, of that
history. Building from our deep remorse on this occasion of the
anniversary of the end of the war, Japan must eliminate self-righteous
nationalism, promote international coordination as a responsible member of
the international community, and thereby advance these principles of peace
and democracy." He finishes, amongst other things, by saying " it is my
conviction that in this way alone can Japan atone for its past and lay to rest
the spirits of those who perished. It is said that one can rely on good faith
and so, in this time of remembrance, I declare to the people of Japan and
abroad my intention to make good faith the foundations of our Government
policy and this is my vow.'
Now that is a powerful statement and one that acknowledges for many
Australians the hurt that happened, the wrong that was done, the nationalism
which was invested wrongly, mistakenly and the sorrow that it expressed.
( tape break)
We should never be at any stage sanguine about liberty and democracy.
Those of you who are studying modem history will know that probably one of
the shots that started the First World War was in Sarajevo in 1914 where a
member of the then ruling royal family was assassinated and yet now, in
Sarajevo 80 years later we saw the force last week of 2700 people machine
gunned and buried in mass graves, the sort of numbers that we as a country
lost on the death march in Sandakan, which we now remember the detail. I
think all that means to us is that we must be eternally vigilant about
democracy and liberty and about the value of each human person and about
human rights and it underlies again why we should remember, if not simply to
remember the fight for liberty and democracy by those young Australians
years ago. But, to remember how we need to be vigilant to preserve those
liberties today. Thank you for being interested in this remembrance program.
ends k