E&OE.................................
My Lord Mayor, your Royal Highness, Lord Chancellor, Lord Chief Justice, the Chief Justice of Australia, your graces the Archbishops of Canterbury and Brisbane, to the Ministers of the British Government, and the Leader of the Opposition, to the Premiers of the States of Australia, and the Chief Minister of the Northern Territory and especially do I acknowledge the presence of two former Prime Ministers of Great Britain, Baroness Margaret Thatcher and Sir Edward Heath, and I acknowledge of course the presence of my predecessors John Gorton, Gough Whitlam, Malcolm Fraser and Bob Hawke.
Mr Lord Mayor you do our country and those who have come to London this week in a very bipartisan fashion to represent Australia, to commemorate that great event 100 years ago, you do us great honour in this banquet that you have given tonight. Because today is the day 100 years ago that the Act of the British Parliament establishing the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia passed through the House of Lords. And it followed the efforts of five then colonial, soon to become Australian, statesmen of that era. Barton and Deakin and Fysh and Dickson and Kingston. Two of whom were to become Prime Ministers of Australia.
They didn't come in anger, they did it in terms of the essential quest to obtain the approval of the British Parliament for a constitution which had already been approved by the people of the colonies at successive referenda. They did not come in anger and they did not leave disappointed. And it's a matter of interesting historical record that the principle point of dispute between them and the then Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain was about the circumstances in which an appeal might lie on certain matters from a decision of the High Court of Australia to the Privy Council.
And that of course in a sense summed up the character and the relationship between the people of the emerging Commonwealth of Australia and successive governments of the United Kingdom. At every stage of our constitutional development it had been the wish of successive British governments to give us what the people of the forming Australia wanted.
And as I speak to you tonight I try and think of those things that crystalise, not only the Australian achievement because it has been an immense achievement of the last 100 years, but also to think of the character of the relationship between our two great societies.
We have so much in common and it is impossible in a gathering such as this, in a place such as this, at a time such as this, not to think of the great inheritance that the people of Australia have with from the people of Britain. The rule of law, the sense of civic duty, the robust political discourse, even exchange, the great gift of Parliamentary democracy, the wonderful inheritance of the English language and all the culture that surrounds it. We owe a great deal to the people of Britain and we owe a great deal to the British inheritance.
But of course, it has been a two-way partnership. The people of Britain as the Lord Mayor was kind enough to acknowledge owe a great deal to the people of Australia. We Australians never forget the contribution that Australian servicemen made in defence of liberty alongside the service men of the United Kingdom. In 1914, a nation of just on 2.5 million males contributed a volunteer army of almost 400,000. It is an extraordinary demonstration of the commitment of the people of our nation at that time. And that was to be repeated in World War II. And if I can think of perhaps the greatest moment of shared achievement of the people of Great Britain and the people of Australia it was the way in which they stood alone but for a few other societies of common values at the time in defiance of Nazi Germany in the darkest days of World War II. And it will always be one of the greatest..[applause]
But of course, as the Lord Mayor has acknowledged, it is not only a relationship that is steeped in history and some tradition and a reverence for a shared culture and a shared inheritance, it is also a vibrant, contemporary relationship. Like any good relationship you need a combination of shared values and history and also a touch of mutual self interest. And both of our societies recognise that. The commercial links between our two societies are great indeed. And Australia is now surpassed by France only, in terms of wine exports to your country. And although it is properly understood that Australia's great export customers are to be found in the Asian region, it is nonetheless a fact of life that 70% of the outward foreign investment from Australia goes to a combination of the United Kingdom and the United States.
But of course with all relationships it is the people to people links that are the most important. And they have developed changed over the years in a quite fascinating fashion. It was commonplace for Australians of my age to come on a working holiday, often for a year or two base yourself in London and in the process, do Europe on as cheap a budget as possible. It was my experience when I had a working holiday in London in the early 1960's, it was my experience that the travel horizons of young Englishmen at that time did not extend much beyond the continent and occasionally to the United States. Yet as I was so sadly and grimly reminded when I went to that beautiful Queensland town of Childers just a couple of weeks ago, to go that very moving memorial service for those fifteen backpackers who died in that terrible fire, I was reminded just how much a rite of passage the young of this country is it becoming to go on a backpacking visit to our country. It is estimated that some 30,000 young British men and women at any given time are in our country. And the way in which that, those people to people links have turned around in that generation represents a maturing and a burgeoning and a changing of the relationship.
It is of course a fact of life and a fact of history that the thing that in the end that will bind two countries together more than anything else are the values that we share in common. We can have our differences as we do on trade. You can have as you do a great emphasis on your links with the nations of Europe. We can have as we properly do, a great emphasis on our links with the nations of Asia. In many ways, Australia occupies something of a special cultural and economic intersection in the world. We are in so many respects a projection of western civilisation in our part of the world - we share an inheritance together. We have great and enduring links with the people of Britain and the rest of Europe. We have very close associations with the people of North America. But there we are in the Asian Pacific region. Some 800,000 Australians speak an Asian language, and we have a very rich history over the last one hundred years of absorbing people from 140 nations in the world. And one of the great boasts of the Australian achievement over the last one hundred years has been our capacity to take people from every corner of the earth and to blend them into a united harmonious community. A community that respects the different cultural characteristics and inheritances of the people who comprise the modern Australia, but nonetheless a society that binds them together with a set of common values.
But it is ladies and gentlemen, the values that bind us more than anything else. And what I would like tonight to be seen as, not only a celebration and a very gracious honouring by the people of this magnificent city in this magnificent setting of the contribution that Australia has made to the world over the last 100 years and the scale of the Australian achievement during that time. An achievement which of course must be put against our share of errors - the way in which we have on so many occasions mishandled the treatment of the indigenous people of our country. We are like any other nation not without our errors and our blemishes. But it has been a hundred years of great achievement.
It has also been a one hundred year journey between Australia and the people of the United Kingdom. A journey which has taken many characteristics, shared and often vigorous encounters on the sporting field, vigorous political and trade disputes, but the common thread I think that has kept us together during all of those years, has been the values that we share in common. There aren't too many societies, ladies and gentlemen, that can look the world in the eye and say we were continuously democratic through the whole of the20th century. You can count those societies on the fingers of your two hands. And we the people of Australia, and you the people of the United Kingdom comprise two of those societies.
So can I say to our British friends tonight that we thank you for the honour that you have paid to our country. And we in Australia honour the contribution that the British inheritance has given to our society. We think of the values that we have in common.. We reflect upon the way in which we have together defended those values in moments of great challenge and great crisis. And we rededicate ourselves to a pursuit of those common values of political liberty, of individual freedom, of the rule of law, of freedom of the press, a respect for the strength of the Parliamentary system, and an importance in our lives of civic duty and civic commitment. They are great values, they are ageless values. They are values that are as relevant to this part of the world as they are to any other part of the world. And they are values that I believe the people of Britain and the people of Australia will always have in common. And they will always act as a binding and a cement between the people of our two societies.
Ladies and gentlemen, may I in conclusion invite you to join me in honouring a toast. And that toast is to the Lord Mayor and the corporation of London.
[Ends]