PRIME MINISTER
STATEMENT BY THE PRIME MINISTER, THE HON P. J. KEATING, MP
AUSTRALIA DAY 1995
ADDRESS GIVEN TO THE AUSTRALIAN OF THE YEAR AWARDS, SYDNEY,
JANUARY 1995 CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY
* EMBARGOED UNTIL 8. OOPM, 25 JANUARY 1995*
This last year has been a good one for Australia and for Australians.
Think of the individual success: in sport, the unprecedented triumphs at the
Commonwealth Games, great performances at the World Championships,
Kieran Perkins, Cathy Freeman, the Kangaroos, the wallabies, the cricket team;
and in the arts, the Australian Ballet triumphing in Washington, the Australian
Opera in Edinburgh, Priscilla and Muriel's Wedding in Cannes, Toronto, New
York, everywhere.
Meanwhile the Australian economy grew faster than that of any other developed
country.
And whatever necessities of careful management such growth may impose upon
us, growth is without question what we want.
We want it to get unemployment down and employment up; and we managed to
do that, too. In fact we have seen 450,000 jobs created in the past eighteen
months, and long term unemployment has fallen and fallen much faster than
after any other recession in our history.
Our obligation to unemployed Australians and those who will be seeking to enter
the workforce in the next few years obliges us in turn to keep the growth going.
We must also remain true to those principles of fairness and equality which we
have always held to be definitively Australian.
The truth is Australians do hold to them and that fact continues to shape the
way we are. It shapes policy. The Australian community would not let an
Australian government leave the unemployed behind: the radical steps that
were taken to bring them with us in last year's White Paper, Working Nation,
were taken in response to that sentiment.
This remains one of the great things about Australia: the weight of public opinion
continues to come down on the side of that broad set of values we summarise as
the " fair go".
Through all the changes in the shape of our economy the imperatives of
international competition, and against the ideological tide of unrestrained selfinterest
which pervaded the 1980s, in Australia the notion has persisted that the
pursuit of personal success ought to be balanced by care for others, self-interest
by the common interest.
We have had a perfect example of this in the last year.
The extraordinary public response to the drought was a heartwarming reflection
of Australia's national consciousness; it was also a persuasive reply to anyone
who believes that individualism and materialism, or global mass culture, or state
parochialism, or multiculturalism has replaced our sense of belonging to one
nation and with it our national identity and national feeling.
It was also reassuring'evidence that a common sentiment continues to flow
between the city and the bush, that the legend lives on, that the bush and its
recurring themes her beauty and her terror, as someone once said still grip
our imagination.
The bush is undoubtedly one of our great challenges: probably our most
profound duty to the Australians of the next century is to leave the land both
more productive and intact.
That means we have to establish a regime of sustainable development across
the country: the process has started and, what is most satisfying, the impetus is
coming in large part from farmers and farming communities from the regions.
Sustainable development clean profitable Australian industries for the twentyfirst
century allied to a concerted effort to conserve and restore the natural
environment will need to be a national effort, and between now and the end of
the century that is what we can make it.
Regional Australia has an essential role to play.
In fact, this seems to me one of the most significant contemporary developments
in the life of Australia: the regions are developing a life and identity of their own.
They are developing futures of their own.
They are defining themselves in terms of their unique advantages and the niches
they can find in the modern Australian and international economies.
It is a development we certainly should encourage; not only because it will be to
the nation's economic advantage, but because the more varied and vibrant the
regions become, the more people will be drawn into our national life and the
richer and stronger will be the cultural and social fabric of Australia.
A revitalised regional Australia has the potential to enliven and enlarge our
national life in ways comparable to the role played by immigration and
multiculturalism.
The lesson is the same there is strength in diversity: and in the tolerance, care
and imagination required to build and maintain it; in the mixture of mutual aid
and self-reliance on which modern multicultural Australia has been built; in other
words, in our best traditions.
It seems to me that in this era of unprecedented and necessary change change
which we must make ourselves and changes which will inevitably be foisted on
us it is essential that we hang on to these traditions, remind ourselves of them,
teach them to our children.
Nothing has ever served us better, and or will serve us so well in the future, as
these things which are grown from our own experience.
I need hardly say that that is why, I think, we should be teaching these values in
our schools; why Australians of every generation and every national and cultural
background should know something of Australian history and tradition; why our
national symbols and institutions should more unambiguously reflect them; why
we really must, before the end of this century, appoint for the first time an
Australian as our Head of State.
There has always been a dark side to Australian egalitarianism, of course: we
have had this tendency to hack at tall poppies.
It is hard to say whether in general this thwarts ambition or makes it burn all the
fiercer. Those Australians I mentioned who have succeeded so brilliantly in the
past year, suggest the latter.
Better still, perhaps it means the tendency is fading.
The crucial thing is to keep up the ambition of Australians, encourage their
creativity, delight in their invididual efforts and acheivements and not just in
sport and the arts, but in science and technology, business, in service to the
nation and its people and yet maintain the ties that bind us to this country, to
our communities, our families, our human values.
In the next year, as in every other one, we may expect to hear daily examples of
where we are failing, where we are going wrong, where we should do better.
In all this criticism there will be one consistent theme the voice which, in
various guises, urges us to abandon our collective egalitarian values in the
name of liberating the forces of rugged individualism.
We will hear it in debates about unemployed Australians, Aboriginal Australians,
Australian women. We will hear it in debates about the economy, the
environment, the arts, health and education.
We should of course heed all reasonable criticism and never lapse into
complacency. But nor should we forget that very few countries have managed so well in the
difficult art of balancing individual freedom with collective responsibility and
collective strength. And we should not forget that, largely as a result of this, few
countries are so good to live in and have so much potential to get better.
That might be the lesson to draw from our commemmoration this year of the end
of World War II. For all the countless individual acts of initiative, heroism and
sacrifice, what we remember most of all is a great collective effort a communal
effort in a common cause.
I think that is always the way in the end real success depends on finding what
we have in common, because in the end it depends on all of us.
So in congratulating the Young Australians of the Year and the Australian of the
Year I am inclined to say that perhaps tomorrow all Australians might take a bow
and resolve to make this year even better than the last.