/ 0
EMBARGOED: 6pm, 12 September 1992
SPEECH BY THE PRIME MINISTER, THE HON V. 3. KEATING, MP
CHIFLEY MEMORIAL LECTrURE, 12 SEPTEMBER 1992
It is a privilege to be asked to speak to you tonight in
honour of one of the very great men of Australian Labor
one of the great men of Australian history.
It is a particular privilege to speak here in Bathurst,
the town with which the name Ben Chit ley will forever be
identified. It is a privilege to come after him, and it is with a
sense of some humility that I find myself standing here
in the town where an author of our ambitions lived.
Labor's ambitions. Australia's ambitions.
For me this occasion is the more momentous because Just
now we Australians face a decade in which the fate of our
ambitions hangs in the balance.
Ladies and gentlemen
Let me preface this address by saying something very
simple. I believe that Australia is a Country of extraordinary
achievements and equally extraordinary potential.
I believe Australians are people of rare quality.
And I believe that in the next few years, despite the
difficulties and the unc~ rtainties, Australia will
triumph. I feel the need to say this to counter the doomsayers on
the other side of politics who seem determined to
belittle both our achievements and our prospects.
That's why I feel the nead to say it at a time when wQ
have both a need and a right to feel confident, it is, to
say the least strange to hear our altern.. tive leaders
call Australians " lazy" and " embarrassing".*
That's why I feel the need to say it.
74 2
And I know I am right whben I say it.
I will tell you why.
I have watched this last decade as Australia grasped the
nettle as no other developed country did.
I have watched Australians radically transform their
industrial culture, vastly increase their productivity
and pull the country up to levels of competitiveness
unimaginable a decade ago.
Internationally competitive levels.
I have seen them accept the necessity for structural
change. That is what has convinced me that we will succeed.
SU. cs is what convinces mne.
Never have we worked harder and made more progress
towards the reali-Sation Of our ambitions than we have in
the last decade.
Never have we had such an opportunity to reap the rewards
and deliver them to future generations than we have in
the next decade.
And never has all this work and all this hope been so
threatened as it is now.
I am talking about our ambitions for an enlarged and
enlightened social democracy.
An Australia in which energy and opportunity flourish,
where faith in oursslves and our country abounds, and the
nation's capacity to care for a11 its citizens is
paramount. It seems to me that if the last is not true the first two
must also be false.
These, Ben Chifley said, were the things worth fighting
for. The primacy of social justice, social cohesion,
equal opportunity the fair go.
They seem to me to be immutable facts of our nature.
Nothing has moved them in 100 years.
War, depression, booms and busts, outbursts of imperial
jingoism, cold war, cultural invasions of various kinds,
have all at times challenged these beliefs: but they hL~ ve
always re-emerged often in the shape of men like Ben
Chifley.
The longer I stay in public life, the more Australians I
meet, the more I am convinced that the values of this
country were written by the people, by working people.
And that is their strength.
That is why they won't be sold. Those people who
presently want to change them will find implacable
resistance. As a Labor Government, we believe that so long as we
honour those principles, and push on towards our social
democratic goals, even in the face of this recession and
the damage it has caused, Australians will stay with us.
Whenever the duties of his office allowed him, Ben
Chifley used to drive up here from Canberra.
Modern Prime Ministers might envy him both the contact
with the natural landscape and the chance it gave for
reflection. If a man was ever going to see a Light on the Hill this
was the way to do it.
As he drove along and the sun set over the western plains
the " vision splendid of Australia Unlimited" must have
seemed as good as real.
Many things have changed. The Australia Chifley knew was
a vastly different country.
But moro than four decados on, Son Chifley's vision
remains, to a remarkable extent, our own.
He was a nation builder.
As we are nation builders.
His great projects in the national interest, like the
Snowy Mountains Scheme, are our One Nation: our $ 500
million National Standard Gauge Rail Highway linking
Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth, and
linking ports, rail and roads; our $ 2 billion dollar
development of the nation's roads: our reforms to
aviation: our National Electricity Grid.
The immigration policy developed in Chifley's time the
most profound social undertaking in our history is
continued in the multicultural policies developed in
ours, the most successful policies of their kind anywhere
in the world.
Chifley was a social reformer.
AS we are social reformers.
His reforms to the health system and social security, are
our Medicare, and our broad network of social programs
developed in the past decade which are at least the equal
of the most advanced nations on earth.
Ban Chifley believed there was a role for government.
So do we we assert it.
His car industry is our car industry.
Much more modern, changing but the same one.
Ban Chifley saw an Australia which was too dependent on
its primary products, too dependent on Britain for its
trade, too short of capital and skills.
Like us, he believed we had to diversify our industry,
look to new markets for our products, raise our capital
and skills base.
We have done these things like no government before us.
Were he here now, in 1992, the Superannuation Guarantee,
the creation of the Australian National Training
Authority, the enormous growth in universities and
secondary education retention rates, would all be music
to his ears.
So too would be the rapid growth in the last decade of
our manufacturing exports which, for the first time in
our history, now exceed the volume of our exports of
minerals and primary produce.
Ben Chifley would be pleased to see that we are making
things for the world to buy, for he knew that this was a
great measure of our progress.
Chifley believed in the principle of gathering all our
strength and all our resources towards a common national
purpose. He had served in that wartime government which, through
cooperation with business and the unions, and through
calling on the best feelings of Australians, set and
achieved national goals.
One Nation is in that tradition.
The Accord is in that tradition.
The lowest number of strike~ s in thirty years is in that
tradition.
In that tradition we have called on Australians to adopt
the principle of partnership between the various tiers
of government, between businass and unions and
communities so that all Australians may participate and
all their energies go toward the common national cause.
Our guiding philosophy is social democratic, by which I
mean democracy of the broadest kind: the maximization of
rights and liberties, the extension of both individual
opportunity and social justice.
In this we are right. Look at the world. The successful
countries are those which have followed this path.
The successful economies have been free market economies:
the successful societies have been those which have
combined this with democratic freedoms and sophisticated
integrated csniaI programs.
They have invested in their own ciuItura. 1 development.
They have cushioned the impact of economic change by not
losing sight of their responsibility to people.
Communism has failed. Less spectacular but no less
emphatic has been the failure of monetarism and laissez
faire economics: under all its appellations
Thatcherite, Reagan and Rogernomic.
It's no accident perhaps that they have both gone down
the same historical chute.
Both have a strain of fanaticism. Both are regressive
and both regress to nineteenth century pseudo-scientific
ideals. Both have failed and if the Liberal Party thinks that
it will succeed in the 1990s in the hands of a Social
Darwinist with new batteries they are wrong.
Desperately wrong. Again.
And we might ask ourselves why it is that the past has
such a magnetic attraction for our conservatives.
Why it is in their nature to frequently advance to the
rear. Why Bob Menzies was drawn to the British Empire long
after it had turned up its toes, and John Howard in turn
is drawn to Menzies and the torpor, wastod
opportunities and withering of our culture in the Menzies
era.
Recognising that Menzies was a bit of a socialist by his
own radical right standards, John Hewson finds he must go
even further back for his ideals to the economic and
social thinking of early industrial capitalism albeit
re-constituted and disgorged in the textbooks of the
business schools of the late seventies.
Why is he attracted to these models which caused such
damage to the fabric of the societies in which they were
applied?
Why, for instance, in a society with one of the most
sophisticated social security systems in the world, does
he want to introduce measures characteristic of societies
in decay?
Why does he say that if we reach back to help the
underprivileged they will rdrag Lis down?
Why, in the last decade of the twentieth century does he
utter the sentiments of the first half of the nineteenth?
Why, if not because he holds ordinary Australians in
contempt?
Why does he paint the efforts of Australians as feeble?
Why do they embarrass him? Why does he paint our
progress as the opposite of progress?
Why does he attack successful Australian businesses as if
they were failures?
Why, as Australians march bravely toward the future does
Dr Hewson point back toward a wasteland and shout
There. Go therel?
Why, if not because he has no vision, only ideology?
Why, if not because he is fanatical?
I have always believed that the Labor Party and Labor
Governments should keep their shoulders against the door.
Reform is what we are here for.
But we are for change anid continuity.
We press forward, but we take society with us.
We build, but we don't destroy.
In the last decade we Australians have learned something
about the art of gathering our resources, about
cooperation, partnership, working together. Principles
which have been fundamental to the success of other
countries, and fundamental to the successas we have had.
In this decade I think we must take those principles
further. I think that we owe it to this and succeeding generations
of Australians to see that an identity entirely our own
has a chance to flourish.
To see that we give these generations the opportunity to
choose those institutions and symbols which reflect their
sentiments and their reality, and not those of a bygone
era. To see that faith in this Australia this liberal,
democratic, tolerant, diverse, independent Australia
has a chance to grow.
I believe we would be derelict in our duty to the future
if we did not give the Australians of this post-imperial,
multicultural stage in our history the same opportunity
as those of a century ago.
I believe it would energise us, I believe it would give
us new faith and inspiration, I believe it would
guarantee the life of our best traditions and
institutions.
And I think we should have the courage to open the debate
on the institutions and symbols of our nationhood.
As I have said, many of the things we have done Ben
Chifley would have hoped to do.
But we have done more than that we've done things in
social, industrial and economic policy beyond the compass
of his imagination.
We have developed policies to benefit Australian women
which have put Australia back in the vanguard of
international progress where we used to be in the days
when Australia was regarded as perhaps the most socially
advanced nation in the world.
Labor has put increasing opportunity and choice for women
back in the centre of social reform.
For example, since 1983, of the 1.5 million new jobs
created 64 per cent or about two thirds have been filled
by women.
And Labor has supported them.
In the last few years our equal pay strategy has narrowed
the gap between men's and women's earnings.
On average women now earn 83 cents for every dollar
earned by men a marked improvement on the 67 cents when
we came to power.
Our affirmative action policies are encouraging employers
to increase women's job opportunities.
Labor has supported women through a fivefold increasa in
the number of child care pieces; through improved access
to superannuation; improved access to education;
increased income Support for families; special programs
addressing women's health needs.
Labor has legislated to protect women against
discrimination. In fact, the United Nations Commission on the Status of
Women declared this year that Australia leads the world
in the implementation of programs to eliminate
discrimination against women.
We will build on these achievements we always build.
Our opponents want to undo them they always want to
undo thoem.
They will abolish the Affirmative Action Agency and the
Equal Pay Unit.
Through their consumption tax they will tax the household
budget for which women are generally responsible. it is
a tax on food, clothing and pharmaceuticals just for a
start. They will tax child care, and they make no commitment to
maintaining fee relief, nor to expanding the number of
places. And under the Coalition's enterprise bargaining system,
women in the workforce can expect their earnings to
erode. Without the protection of the Tndustrial Relations
Commission, which our workplace bargaining system
guarantees, women workers will see their pay relative to
men reduced to the levels existing when we came to
office. That is what happens in the United States, where a
decentralised wages system has kept women's earnings to
less than 70 cents for every dollar earned by men.
The Coalition will reduce support for women. They will
take away eligibility for their family allowance from
100,000 families. Stop paying wives' pensions where the
spouses of disability support pensioners are under
Take away the sole parents' pension when the youngest
child turns 12.
I could say a great deal more about the differences
between Labor and the Coalition. They are as the last
few weeks have clearly demonstrated quite profound.
Week by week over the next few months you will see the
differences grow clearer in every field of economic and
social policy.
Dr Hewson's Fightback, is, after all, a comprehensive
document. The most comprehensive thing ever devised, he
says. It is the Bible of his brave new world.
Nothing escapes it with the possible exception of aged
care which doesn't get a mention.
I will refer to only a couple of areas tonight.
They didn't miss health.
Medicare a quality, affordable, universal system will
be pushed towards the American model which offers care to
only 80 per cent of the population at 50 per cent greater
cost. They will cut the rebate from 85% to 75% and they will
abolish bulk billing except for those with health cards.
Speaking of benefits, the Coalition promises to cut
unemployment benefits after nine months; cut employment
programs; privatise the CES; introduce longer waiting
periods for assistance; and pay young people $ 3 or $ 3.50
an hour for work.
Unemployment is the greatest social problems of our time.
It haunted Chif ley, as it did all those who lived through
the Great Depression.
The high levelu uf unemployment we afe now experiencing
are anathema to a party whose creed has always been full
employment. The disappointment is all the greater because we had done
so phenomenally well to grow 1.5 million new jobs in the
1980S. It is entirely unacceptable that a tenth of the work
force should basically bear all the burden of structural
change and the recession.
The principal aim of all our efforts in the past six
months has been to reduce un~. mployment, to get
Australians who have fallen out of the system back into
it. That is why this year we will spend S1.1 billion on
labour market programs. Why we've spent one per cent of
GDP or $ 4 billion to stimulate the economy and boost
employment.
It's why we held the national summit on youth
unemployment, out of which came a universally applauded
package of employment and training programs for Young
Australians. It's why we established this year, in an educational
revolution, the Australian National Training Authority
to lift the quality and status of technical and further
education to the highest level: the level it must be if
Australians are to have the skills they will need for the
well-paid and interesting jobs, and if modern Australia
industry is to have the skilled workforce it will need.
That unemployment is also why we are determined on a path
of economic growth.
we must have growth. It's the only way we can sensibly
re-structure and~ create jobs.
To survive today as a well-employed nation we have to
trade. To trade we have to be productive.
To be productive means more product from fewer people.
The remedy to this redundancy can only be mnr
production. Our aim then is two-fold greater efficiency and greater
production. Both depend, we say, on mutual understandings on
national agreement about the direction of national
income. Growth of the order we require can only be achieved in a
framework in which business, labour and the Government
agree on these directions.
To an extent that would astonish Ben Chifley who lived in
the long era of habitual conflict, that framework has
been established.
It is generally agreed in Australia now that we can't
have hard-won growth frittered away in senseless price
and wage rounds.
You can't do it without the lower interest rates and low
inflation which an incomes policy alone can harmoniously
provide. Equally we can't have efficiency in a culture of
conflict.
The speed with which this understanding has come to
management and unions alike has surprised even those who
promoted the idea.
The speed of the revolution in work practices has
surprised everyone.
The speed with which our export of elaborately
transformed manufactures has grown, even through the
recession, has surprised them too.
It is why I say that I believe in our future. I believe
in the capacity of the Australian people. I believe in
the path we are taking.
We have done the fundamental things, the brave thi ngs,
and the Australian people have responded bravely.
We have given Australia a chance to grow.
And Australians have seized it.
A decade ago, as we came out of recession we had double
digit inflation. Today we have entrenched our competitive
advantage with one of the lowest inflation rates in the
industrial world.
A decade ago our work and managerial practice was
notoriously bad. Today Best Practice is not just a
catchword, but increasingly a reality and its helping
us to export in ways we never thought possible. In 1992
Australia is exporting motor vehicle engines to Japan.
Both our manufactured exports and service exports have
tripled over the past decade.
A decade ago we imported more goods and services than we
exported. Today we export more than we import.
And increasingly we export goods with high levels of
value adding like motor vehicles atnd motor vehicle
parts, computers, scientific equipment, industrial
machinery, telecommunicati ons equipment.
These goods recorded growth of 216 per cent since 1983
twice the growth of mineral exports, nearly six times the
growth of rural exports.
In that period motor vehicle exports have grown from M2
million to $ 414 million.
Office machines and computers from $ 19 million to $ 41S
million. Industrial machinery from $ 235 million to S' 199 million.
To name a few. And the greater part of the growth has
been in the past two or three years 57 per cent growth
between 1988 and 1991.
Most of the exports been into Asia where so much
potential for Australia lies.
We are making progress on all the important front&
including the wharves where productivity has doubled.
We are developing a food processing industry, estimated
to be worth $ 7 billion by the end of the decade.
There are opportunities for similarly huge development of
our construction industry, our finance and tourism
industries.-These are the reasons why I say that even in these tough
times there is great reason for hope and confidence.
And why I say it is Australians who give us reason for
that confidence for these achievements are due to their
work, their skills, their imagination, their belief in
Australia. In recent days you may have noticed that the Opposition,
which for so long has been saying we are the antithesis
of everything they stand for, have begun to say that on
certain key issues there is very little separating us.
Well, as John Dlawkins reminded them the other day,
imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
But it's a very poor imitation.
It shouldn't fool anyone.
They're doing the chameleon on tariffs but ask the car
industry if they're fooled. Ask the sugar industry.
There is a fundamental difference on tariffs.
Our starting point is that there shomuld be a car
industry. That there should be a sugar industry.
There's is simply " restructure or perish".
There's is to quote Mr McLachlan, " if we are wrong that
will be a tragedy."
Like I said tell that to the working people of
Adelaide, Geelong and Melbourne.
There's a also fundamental difference on the most basic
relationship in the economy industrial relationS.
Already we have 300 registered enterprise agreements.
By early next year we will have half the workforce
covered. But we also have and this is the great difference the
Industrial Relations Commission setting minimum rates in
awards, and so providing a safety net through which
employees cannot fall.
There is a basic difference on education. It's expressed
most eloquently in these simple figures under the
Coalition, if you want to send your children, or
yourself, to university it's going to cost you $ 24,000
for an arts degree up to $ 150,000 for medicine.
There are basic differences on health policy, women's
policy, environment policy, policy on arts and cultural
development. There is a profound difference about what sort of
community and nation Australia can be.
It is a difference in philosophy we start from
different beginnings and seek different ends.
We start with the Australian people and they will get us
there. Really, no one ever put it better than Ben Chiflep.
" I try to think of the labour movement, not as putting an
extra sixpence in someone's pocket, or making somebody
Prime Minister or Premier, but as a movement bringing
something better to the people, better standarde of
living, greater happiness to the mass of the people. we
have a great objective the light on the hill which we
aim to reach by working for the betterment of mankind."
That is the base, the sentiment from which we begin.
But our ambitions are now greater and so are our
achievements. The light on the hill does not symbolise where we are
going any more. We are past that stage.
It does not symbolise where we have been. We look
forward, not back.
it symbolises why we have these ambitions, these goals
for the Deople, for the nation.
Thank you.