OFFICIAL OPENING OF GOODWJIN HOMS
CANBERRA, 22ND JULY, 1961
Speech by the Prime MinisterI the Rt. Hon. R. G. Menzies
Mr. Freeth, Your Excellencies and ladies and gentlemen:
This is, I think, a very remarkable community effort. There
is a lot of self-help fi this matter; and there is some help by the
Government. Now that is as it should be. W~ e must marry these two
elements together. I ought to tell you, as I have told other people
on similar occasions, how this practice arose of the Government
subsidising such enterprises first œ E for and later on for œ 1.
We were approaching a Budget Session of the Cabinet, quite a
few years ago, and my wife had a very cold look in the eye at the
dinner table which is not unusual for wives but this time it had
a particular sort of frigidity about it. She was looking at me as
much as to say, " Well I can't ask you what you are doing about the
Budget, but I would like to say something". Understanding this I said,
" Now what have you got on your mind?" She said, " Do you know the
greatest problem, socially, that you have?" She paused for an answer.
I wasn't game to make one. Then she said, " The greatest problem is
the problem of housing people who are now old, who ought to be looked
after in circumstances that make them feel that they are living in a
home of their own". This was, I thought, a magnificent sugagestion. It
was translated into cold, financial terms; and so the Act was
introduced and the scheme has gone on. As you know the contribution
by the Government has been doubled.
What I like about it is this: when I was a schoolboy in
Ballarat I lived with an old and rather dour Scots grandmother, in a
house in which the only two books available for my consumption, apart
from such as I might smuggle in at the ripe age of about 13 or 14+, were
the Bible and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Not a bad library if I may
say so, not at all bad. On the other side of the road, enclosed in a
corrugated iron fence, and housed in the most gloomy horrible looking
building was what was then called " the Benevolent Asylum". Even as a
boy it gave me the horrors. It was so " institutional" as we now say;
ihad a rusty look, and a rusty flavour about it. There were old
men, elderly men, and old women or elderly women who sort of sat around.
Such a condescension on the part of the communityl
Those days, I am delighted to know, have gone. All of a
sudden we have discovered that after all it isn't a crime to reach the
age of 65 I'm $ 6 myself and Iregard that as the smallest of my
crimes. But it is not given to everybody to be able to live in the
old family home, to live with the family in normal circumstances.
This is not easy. To be able to go, not into a sort of conglomerate
mass in which everybody feels organised, but to go into a place which
is one's own home there it is, the bedroom, the little sitting room,
the kitchenette, the garden outside this is of the essence of human
dignity. And I believe that one of the great things that our
generation has done and it has done dome pretty silly things in one
way or another has been to realise that you have to produce
circumstances in which people feel that they are living in their own
home, under their " own vine and fig-tree", in the old phrase, able to
live to themselves when they want to, able to move around and entertain,
or be entertained by their friends when they want to be. This, I
think, is magnificent. I have no doubt that in another 50 years time
what is being done in places like this will have been far excelled in a
thousand places all around Australia.
It is a very, very happy occasion for my wife who, as I say,
gave the initial -the word is " nudge" the initial nudge on this
matter some time ago. It is a * great pleasure for us to go around and
see places that strike one as not being the least that can be done, but
as the best that can b~ e done. There is such a difference, isn't there,
of atmosphere in all this? Not something done grudgingly, but
something done with a full understanding of human beings, and of human
values,
Nov the last thing I want to say to you is this. References
have been made to the Department of the Interior which has done
magnificent work, and the Department of Works, to my expensive friend
Mr. Overall, the Chairman of the Commission Oh, by the way I wilil
interrupt myself. I must tell you something about Mr. Overall, do you
mind? Occasionally if you say to a Minister, or to a Department, * Yes,
we'll approve of that", nothing much happens for a month or two. But
when Mr. Overall has some proposal up, and it is usually a very
expensive one, before the Government and he knows it has been considered
in Cabinet that day, he will ring up the secretary to the Cabinet before
midnight and say, " How did my proposal get oh?" If the answer is " It
was approved", he has the bulldozers on the site at 8 o'clock next
morning. ( Applause) This dynamic drive has meant a great deal to
Canberra, and I am sure has meant a great deal to you.
But you may talk about the Department of the Interior you
may talk about Government policy, you may talk about the Capital
Commission, but there is no Government Department that administers
humanity. There is no DepartW nt of Humanity. There can't be. You
can't deal with kindness and goodwill and human understanding by
regulations or rules, or by a Department. Wihat you need to convert to
a place like this from being a collection of bricks and mortar, into
being a collection of individual homes is human understanding. And it
is on that side that those for whom Mr. Sautelle speaks matter so much:
people who have maintained their interest. I see a dozen of them here
this afternoon who as I know, have devoted a lot of their time and a
lot of their atteniion to this matter. This is where humanity comes
in, and escapes through the red tape , escapes through the specifications
escapes through the Statutes or regulations, and converts the whole
place into your home, somebody' else's home, the home of your friend,
in which you are not ordered about, but are assisted to live your own
lives in the happiest possible fashion.
Sir, it is because of all these things that I have the
greatest pleasure in the world in declaring the building Open.