CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY EMBARGOED UNTIL DELIVERY
SPEECH BY THE PRIME MINISTER
EVATT FOUNDATION 10TH ANNIVERSARY
SYDNEY 17 NOVEMBER 1989
In celebrating the tenth birthday of the Evatt Foundation we
are celebrating a decade of achievement by an organisation
that, with broad community support, has expanded our
understanding of public policy and has made a very valuable
contribution, in particular, to the training and education
of young Australians.
I congratulate all those involved in the Foundation and I
wish you well for another decade of good work.
on this occasion we also honour a man who, whatever some may
perceive as shortcomings, was a great Australian who made an
enduring contribution to the Labor movement and to his
country: Dr Herbert Vere Evatt.
Dr Evatt was a leading figure in that magnificent era of
Labor in Government in the 1940s our ' light on the hill'
era, when under the leadership of Labor Prime Ministers John
Curtin and Ben Chifley Australia successfully navigated the
hardships of war and met the great challenges of post-war
reconstruction.
Evatt's contribution to those Governments as External
Affairs Minister and Attorney-General as well as his
period of service as a Judge of the High Court, and his body
of legal and historical writings by themselves stamp him
as a significant figure in the history of our movement.
Later, as Leader of the opposition, he campaigned
successfully against Menzies' referendum to dissolve the
Communist Party Australia's ugly flirtation with
McCarthyism and in doing so made a landmark contribution
to the defence of civil liberties and political freedoms in
this country.
In the international sphere, culminating in his Presidency
of the Third Session of the United Nations General Assembly
in 1948, H. V. Evatt became not only one of Australia's most
influential international statesmen but truly, one of the
architects of the emerging post-war global order.
In the very month when the Berlin Wall is being torn down
symbolic of all the breathtaking changes in Eastern Europe
and the Soviet Union it might seem that a figure from the
earliest days of the Cold War would have little relevance to
us now.
Certainly, there is much that would surprise Evatt in world
affairs today.
The superpower dialogue at Yalta was very different from the
dialogue about to take place at Malta.
In a different sphere, the emphasis placed in contemporary
diplomacy on issues of economic cooperation and
environmental protection would no doubt surprise him.
And he would hardly recognise the dramatic changes that have
made our own region the most economically dynamic part of
the globe, posing challenges and opportunities that could
not have been clearly foreseen at the end of the Second
world War.
But in one area Dr Evatt would be entirely at home. In one
respect, the global changes that we are witnessing in the
late 1980s are fulfilling the dreams that inspired men such
as Evatt in the late 1940s.
I refer of course to the resurgence in multilateralism and,
not least, to the positive role that Evatt's beloved United
Nations Organisation has started to play once more in the
resolution of global and regional conflict.
In Namibia, in the Gulf, in Afghanistan, the United Nations
has begun again to live up to the high hopes with which it
was invested by its creators more than 40 years ago.
Evatt in foreign policy sowed the seeds for a modern
Australia one that was vigorously outgoing and positively
engaged in an interdependent world.
Unfortunately, Chifley's defeat in 1949 ushered in an era of
insularity and introspection in Australia.
The Liberals presided over the decades when we were seen as
the lucky country years when the world paid us a good
living for shearing sheep, cutting wheat and mining iron ore
while we sheltered behind the walls of protectionism.
But the world was not prepared to pay us a living forever.
So the post-49 conservative Coalition years were years of
tragically wasted opportunities years in which were
entrenched the bad habits of protectionism, the attitudes of
insularity, the deliberate neglect of competitiveness and
the erosion of national self-confidence about our place in
the world.
Those years set in train the very problems that Australians
today have to correct and to pay for.
And it is ironic that the conservatives' long years in
Government left them with a crippling historic legacy.
Labor learned its lessons about Opposition, hard but well.
The Liberals never learned their lessons about government
they still bear the scars of their failures in office from
the 1950s through to the
Because they governed then in easy economic times, they have
never acquired, since, the policy skills and disciplines to
manage more difficult economic challenges.
And because they enjoyed political success then while
fudging or ignoring fundamental economic realities, they
have never acquired since the political skills the guts or
the wisdom to put the national well-being ahead of their
own, short-term, short-sighted electoral interests.
That's what we saw when they were last in Government,
between 1975 and 1983: the conservatives still governing
for the easy times; still ignoring and indeed inflaming the
real and urgent problems in the Australian economy and the
Australian community.
And that's what we have seen more recently with the Liberals
in Opposition. Andrew Peacock's so-called Economic Action
Plan confirms it starkly: they are still incapable of
governing for all Australians; still unwilling to put the
Australian people ahead of their own attempts to get back
into power.
That is why I reject as nonsense the suggestion that has
gained currency of late to the effect that there is no great
difference between Labor and Liberal in this country that
two parties occupying the centre are arguing over peripheral
matters. Let me tell you that the ideological gulf between Labor and
Liberal, always a wide one, has never been wider than it is
today. That is not some assertion I make lightly or without
evidence. It is rather a statement that can be proven and tested by a
rigorous analysis of the ideology and policies of Labor and
the conservatives in every key aspect of modern government.
In every area where the Australian people properly look to
government for leadership and constructive involvement,
Labor and the conservatives stand on opposite sides of a
vast chasm.
SWe are fundamentally at odds on the basic and critical
question of how employers and employees should relate to
one another in the workplace on how those in the
community who are engaged in the process of creating
economic prosperity deal with each other.
SWe are fundamentally at odds on the equally basic
question of how economic prosperity is to be distributed
within the community.
SWe are fundamentally at odds on how we make decisions
not only for the voting community of today, but also for
those who have no vote the very young and the unborn
generations of the future.
SAnd we are fundamentally at odds on how we view
Australia's role in the international community.
I would resist the temptation to remind you of the ideology
and performance of the conservative parties on these scores
when they were last in government if their ideology and
policies now were different. But t-EHey aren't.
So, for instance, in looking at the area of workplace
relationships, the confrontationism that so damagingly
characterised the Fraser years has not only survived it
has been stengthened by the ideologues of the New Right who
now set the pace for industrial relations in the
conservative ranks.
By setting Australian against Australian, by allowing the
strong to exercise their industrial muscle while the weak
fell victim to the consequent wages explosion, the Coalition
in the early 1980s wreaked upon this country the
historically unique achievement of simultaneous double digit
unemployment and double digit inflation. In an economy
which they reduced to negative economic growth they threw an
additional quarter of a million Australian workers onto the
unemployment scrapheap. They destroyed Australians in jobs
and devastated the legitimate aspirations of the youth of
Australia. Nothing has changed in their attitudes or approach.
The Liberals abhor the centralised wage fixing system and
the role of the trade union movement under Labor.
They give aid and comfort to the Pilots' Federation in
pursuit of a 30 per cent pay rise.
Their ideological obsession about deregulating the labour
market would destroy an industrial relations system that
under Labor has created jobs in Australia nearly five times
faster than the Liberals did, and twice as fast as the rest
of the Western world.
They promise a return to industrial warfare where the weak
are crushed and the strong get the spoils. Theirs is a
prescription for another wages explosion, a plunge in the
dollar, double digit inflation again, spiralling interest
rates and the consignment once more of hundreds of thousands
of Australians to the unemployment scrapheap.
But Labor offers continued productivity improvements through
award restructuring, and sensible wage outcomes secured by
improvements in the social wage.
I can find no common ground between Labor and the
conservatives on industrial relations there is only a
policy chasm.
And just as the conservatives would produce massive social
inequities on this issue of creating prosperity, so that
outcome, and those inequities, would be reinforced by their
philosophy on the distribution of prosperity throughout the
community. Redistribution has two elements the raising of revenue
through taxation and its disbursement through measures of
social assistance.
The conservatives in government increased the tax burden on
PAYE earners, and allowed the well off to exploit the
absence of capital gains and fringe benefit taxes.
As Professor Russell Mathews indicated, income tax ceased to
be a matter of obligation for the well-off and became a
matter of choice.
The absence of a capital gains tax meant the well off could
hire smart accountants and lawyers to convert their income
into non-taxable capital gains. They could avoid tax on a
scale so massive that the conservative Government's own
Royal Commissioner described the tax avoidance industry as
the fastest growing industry in Australia in their period of
office. The Labor Government introduced a capital gains tax, and we
closed down the other tax shelters and the rorts. And now
those with the greatest capacity to pay are paying their
fair share of tax. There is now economic efficiency,
fairness and decency in the tax system.
At the same time on the other element of redistribution,
the provision of help to the needy the conservatives
freely allocated the nation's resources to those who had no
justifiable call on them.
They paid the pension and family assistance to millionaires
no questions asked.
Labor stopped all that and as a result we have
concentrated more resources on low and middle income
Australian families.
By reforming the tax system, better targeting welfare
assistance, cracking down on welfare abuse and reducing
unemployment, we have given ourselves the capacity to boost
expenditure on social justice programs by a massive
$ 9 billion per annum.
Nothing is more fundamental to the creation of social
justice of real equality of opportunity than education.
Under the conservatives, obtaining a good education was
mainly the prerogative of the wealthy. The conservatives
did not require a fair contribution . to the public revenue
from the wealthy, so they did not have the budgetary
capacity to provide access to education for the less
privileged. In the year before my Government to office, only 36 per cent
of our children stayed on through high school. That was one
of the lowest retention rates in the Western world; it was a
blight on Australian society. Today, under the Labor
Government, 60 per cent of children are getting a high
school education and we will have that up to 65 per cent
by the early 1990s
and in their seven years, they only increased that
rate by a miserable two per cent
I repeat: 36 per cent under them, with an increase
of two per cent; 60 per cent under us, with an
increase of 24 per cent.
The Labor Government has doubled high school education
allowances for children from low and low-to-middle income
families.
And by the end of the current three-year education funding
period, my Government will have created 150,000 new higher
education places, compared with just 26,000 new places under
the conservatives.
Again, I'm not making this point as a history lesson.
Rather it is a portent of things to come if the
conservatives were to gain office again.
Peacock's promise after he resumed the leadership of his
party to make " a fairer, a more compassionate Australia"
was exposed as a fraud by John Elliott's candid statement
that the Liberals would take from the " bludgers" and give to
the " workers".
In their minds, as revealed in the Economic Action Plan,
Aborigines, the long-term unemployed, newly arrived migrants
and those who benefit from Australia's overseas aid are
" bludgers". And those who pay Labor's capital gains tax are
" workers".
L
By the abolition of the capital gains tax the conservatives
intend to hand to their supporters to their President,
this same John Elliott to the one per cent of the
taxpaying public paying any capital gains tax literally
billions of dollars in revenue.
By the revenue we have derived for the people from the
reform of the tax system we have kept our kids in the
education system. We put the kids of Australia before
John Elliott and his ilk.
Under Labor, with a capital gains tax, business investment
has reached the highest proportion of GDP since records have
been kept. In economic terms, abolishing the capital gains
tax would pervert the rational allocation of resources by
diverting investment out of productive, job creating areas
into the maximisation of non-taxable capital gains.
Let there be no misunderstanding: the conservatives, in one
fell swoop, would bring about the most massive
redistribution of income from the poor to the rich in this
nation's history.
This is grand larceny being paraded as responsible public
policy. The redistribution equation is clear:
Labor: fair taxation, allowing massive assistance to
the needy, new opportunities in education, higher
pensions, more help for low income families.
Liberals: unfair taxation to benefit the well-off few,
paid for by withdrawing the assistance now extended to
the less privileged.
I say none of this to suggest Labor can rest on its laurels
in the creation of genuine social justice.
There are challenges that still lie ahead and problems that
must be confronted and resolved not just by one level of
Government or by one group of people but by us all.
In the 1970s Labor in government was concerned to ensure
basic improvements to our overall standard of living,
particularly in terms of water and sewerage.
In the 1980s we have been concerned to ensure basic security
of income, particularly by building a far stronger and
sustainable economic base and removing the scars of long
term unemployment.
In the 1990s we should be concerned as to how we further
improve on those gains by addressing the contemporary needs
of Australians living and working in our communities.
Anyone who visits the fringes of our larger cities such as
the outer western suburbs of Sydney where new homes and new
suburbs are being built or the outskirts of our provincial
towns must recognise the special problems caused by social
isolation: the difficulties of distance to and from work; the
need for access to necessary services such as child
care; the education needs of our children; and the
health risks of drug dependency and alcoholism.
I am not talking about governments providing a program or
service to deal with a problem when it reaches crisis
conditions. It is a matter of providing what people need before problems
become entrenched and reach unacceptable levels.
Marriage counselling, drug and alcohol rehabilitation,
recreational activities after school, family planning,
financial advice are just a few examples of what people may
require but at a level and location that ensures their
accessibility. In essence, I want to see an approach that recognises the
potential vulnerability which people can face throughout the
life cycle birth and family formation; marriage and the
potential for separation; work and the possibility of
injury; ageing and the threat of redundancy.
We have recognised this explicitly in our policy thrust to
date. It needs to be reinforced and widened as we strive to
improve the services that people need and that are made
available. This cannot be done by the Federal Government alone. It can
only be done by all three levels of Government working
together to meet the needs of what we all require to live
and work in better communities.
It is this complex web of problems the issues. of social
justice in the 1990s that I referred to when I addressed
the ACOSS Congress in Melbourne a few weeks ago.
I said that I wanted to see what more can be done, including
by and with ACOSS, to build further on the gains we have
made.
As a result of those comments, ACOSS's new President,
Merle Mitchell, has recently written to seek a meeting with
me to discuss some of these issues.
My office has today replied to set up a meeting for early
December and I look forward to discussing these issues as
one of the first steps in the task of setting our social
justice priorities for the 1990s.
Ladies and gentlemen,
All these issues are of concern to those who currently make
up the population of Australia. But our responsibility also
embraces those who will inhabit Australia in generations to
come. The decisions we make today will profoundly affect the life
those future Australians lead.
If we open the doors of opportunity now to women, to new
migrants, to those who lack the privileges of wealth, we
will be helping those immediate beneficiaries but, just as
importantly, we will be creating a society that is
enduringly fair and open.
If we encourage citizenship, build the institutions and
attitudes of multiculturalism, maintain the racially
non-discriminatory character of our immigration program, we
will be ensuring the Australia of the future is dynamic,
free, diverse and yet united in commitment to our nation.
But if we slam shut the door of opportunity, if we aspire to
turn the immigration clock back to the attitudes of our
unacceptable past, we'll be committing not just a morally
repugnant act but an economically insane one.
In the same way, where Labor practises ecologically
sustainable development so as to bequeath to our children
a rich natural heritage the conservatives explicitly
pledge economy with virtually no regard for ecology.
We have created jobs at twice the rate of the Western world
but the World Heritage Bureau has also said recently that
no country has done more to advance world heritage values
than Australia. It's not a matter of economy versus
ecology. We can have both. We must have both.
Just look at the short but brutal environmental record of
the Government here in New South Wales if you want to get
any idea of how a Coalition Government would operate in
Canberra driven by the ideologues of the Right: the
Blunts, the Stones, the Morgans.
This is merely. a reflection in New South Wales of the
Liberals and National Party at the federal level. They have
vehemently opposed our significant environmental decisions
at every point the Franklin, Kakadu, Daintree, the forests
of Tasmania and Wesley Vale. There is no limit to their
capacity for environmental vandalism.
Ladies and gentlemen,
Let me finally return to the international responsibilities
of Government to which I referred in my introductory
comments about Evatt.
For here again the difference between Labor and the
conservatives is stark.
I believe Evatt would be immensely gratified to see the role
Australia is playing today in the UN and in other
multilateral forums in leading the Commonwealth's campaign
against apartheid; in leading the Cairns Group's efforts to
liberalise world trade; in initiating the moves to establish
a vehicle for closer Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation; in
hosting the recent Government Industry Conference against
Chemical weapons; in seeking to protect the Antarctic from
mining and to have that continent recognised as a natural
reserve and land of science.
Each of these activities stands alone as a significant and
creative piece of Australian diplomacy. Together they prove
our commitment and capacity to contribute to the resolution
of critical global problems.
At the same time we have urged the superpowers to abandon
the attitudes of confrontation, and to work together towards
a world at peace. In every available forum since 1983 we
have been speaking to our allies, the United States, to the
Soviet Union, and to China, urging them to work together
towards peace.
Nothing has given me greater pride as Prime Minister of this
country than being told in Geneva by the Secretary-General
of the Committee of Disarmament that if other governments of
the world had done as much as my Government for the causes
of peace and disarmament then those causes would be further
advanced than they are.
Put quite simply I am able to say to you tonight: the voice
of Australia is heard in Washington, in Moscow, Europe,
Africa, the Middle East, in the Commonwealth and in the
United Nations, with a respect unequalled in our history.
Against this proud fact, the conservatives have no vision
for dealing with the international challenges and
opportunities which face Australia.
Their response to the Asia-Pacific economic challenge is the
utterly impractical one of creating a trading bloc, although
we have the authority of Mr Peacock's office for the fact
that he does not know what a trading bloc is.
Faced by the challenge to international decency posed by the
apartheid system, Peacock has turned his back on
Malcolm Fraser and on the rest of the Commonwealth. In
rejecting " punitive" economic sanctions, he rejects any
effective sanctions, notwithstanding the tremendous impact
those sanctions are having on South Africa a fact
acknowledged by South Africa's political and financial
leaders. It is not hard to imagine the impact on
Australia's international standing if a Peacock Government
were to seek common cause in isolation with Mrs Thatcher.
11.
The attitude of the conservatives in the face of the
astonishing developments in the USSR and Eastern Europe has
been paralytic. Whenever this Government has sought
dialogue with the USSR, we have been greeted with a chorus
of 1950s platitudes from the other side.
As a former Foreign Minister, Andrew Peacock might have been
expected to abandon the time warp which his predecessor
produced as a so-called Foreign Policy platform in March
this year, but it is unfortunately only too clear that he
does not have the intellectual energy or the political will
or clout to do so.
Just as confrontationism has been, and remains, the
characteristic of their domestic policies, so has it been in
international affairs. Indeed they always see the
international arena as a platform for projecting
divisiveness at home. Vietnam was the classic illustration.
So, my friends, the Federal Election to be fought within the
next six months will determine whether Australia will revert
to conservativism, conflict, injustice, the dog-eat-dog
mentality of the early 1980s, where the privileged are
rewarded for supporting the Liberals and the underprivileged
are trampled under and labelled as bludgers or whether
this country is going to continue its progress towards a
prosperous, just and compassionate society, one with a rich
environmental and social heritage, a country that plays a
constructive and positive role in meeting the challenges of
the modern world.
The choice is stark.
The stakes are huge, for our Labor movement and for the
people of Australia.
we simply cannot afford to let Australia succumb once more
to the distorted priorities, the lost opportunities, the
neglected challenges, that inevitably follow whenever the
conservatives take over the reins of power.
For the Liberals, fairness and equality of opportunity
stability and productivity in the work place preservation
of the best of the natural environment enmeshment with the
challenges of the modern world all these are expendable,
second-best goals, subsidiary to their main ambition of
winning, and retaining power and exercising it for the
benefit of their well-off supporters.
For Labor they are goals that define the very purpose of
power, values that are vital to our existence as a political
force, priorities that must be achieved in the deepest
interests of all Australians.
By the time the next election is fought I will have been
Prime Minister for some seven years longer than any Labor
Prime Minister.
1
ft 12.
I had a fulfilling life before Parliament and I will after
Parliament. But let me say this. I will fight the next election harder
than any in my political career.
For that election will be the most important since 1949.
It will determine the nature and quality of the Australia we
take into the 21st Century.
I want that Australia to be a prosperous, competitive,
compassionate and cohesive society, enmeshed in this dynamic
region of the world and respected throughout the world.
These things are worth fighting for.
And let me reassure you when the time comes next year we
will fight for them.
And we will win.