Centenary Of Federation, House Of Representatives Sitting

This is the text of the speech delivered by Kim Beazley, Leader of the Opposition, to the House of Representatives, Sitting in the Victorian Legislative Assembly on the occasion of the Centenary of Federation.

On behalf of the Australian Labor Party, I rise today in support of the Prime Minister's motion.

What this motion says about our hundred years of achievement, about those who died to defend our country, and about public service, multiculturalism, and the future, are sentiments we can endorse, and we will be voting for the motion.

We would, of course, have expressed our core values in a very different way.

We would have paid more attention to those who suffered hardship, or who merely looked on, as the new nation grew to prosperity. In particular, we think of the dispossessed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders; women barred from full citizenship, and from educational and employment opportunities; and those against whom the White Australia policy was directed for so many years. And I will have some more to say about those matters later.

Our difference is not with what is there, but what is not there - including a real sense of urgency about the future of this country, and the real purpose of this legislature as the agent of change.

This has been a week for looking with fresh eyes on our history, our people and our institutions.

Every so often we need to re-examine our origins, to find out how our forbears created this peaceful haven. It has been, for the most part, and with important exceptions, a beacon of decency, liberty and egalitarianism to people from so many different parts of the world.

There are many layers of celebration occurring this week. The Australian Labor Party celebrates one hundred years of representation at the national level. As the leader in our Centenary year, I have been able to look anew at our core values, at our commitment to equality and democracy, values we have shared from our earliest days with the working men and women of Australia.

We celebrate one hundred years since Federation - that act of courage and hope by the separate British colonies of this island to forge, through negotiation, consensus and persuasion, a new nation one hundred years ago.

We mark also the written expression of that Federation in our Constitution -a document whose long life and flexibility is a testament to the foresight of this nation's founders.

And we mark the centenary of this Parliament - the great clearing-house of national tensions - an institution whose stability has ensured an unbroken democracy through a century of wars, economic upheavals, and huge technological and social change.

How marvellous it would be if the spirit of enthusiasm, and commitment and excitement that surrounded the birth of our nation and our democracy in 1901 could be translated to our meetings today.

I love the story of William McKell, the future Premier of NSW, then a ten-year-old from the Sydney slums, watching the splendid Federation procession winding its way through the city streets to Centennial Park on January 1, 1901.

One banner that he saw in the procession on that day, McKell was later to say, 'became a part of me'.

It read, simply: 'This day a Nation is Born."

When you read the accounts of the events of 1901 around the country there is that profound sense of being present at the creation of something special; a nation that did not have to inherit the class wars or religious hatreds of the old world; a nation that could find its own solutions, at its own pace, in this beautiful land.

You find that spirit at work in the accounts of the first meetings of the Parliament here in this grand Victorian building.

The three major groups, the Protectionists under Barton and Deakin, the Free Traders under George Reid, and the Labor Party under Chris Watson, swap amiable gibes across the chamber, as they discuss the pros and cons of direct taxation, the impact of a large tariff on the price of tea and cotton for the poor, the urgency of extending the vote to women.

Their enthusiasm for their mission is reflected in their willingness to air their differences openly, developing a consensus through negotiation in this very chamber, and through changing alliances.

It is no secret that Labor in many parts of Australia had initial doubts about our Constitution as the blueprint for Federation, and for the creation of our national institutions. Labor was particularly concerned about entrenching States' rights in the Upper House.

Nevertheless, once the people had voted to accept the Constitution, Labor was quick to seize the opportunities to promote social change in the national Parliament. Our members had already learned that the industrial strength of working men and women counted for little without political representation.

Our early leaders believed that the Constitution would be an evolving blueprint for this country's institutions and political deliberations.

In the event, Australians - by and large an informal, flexible and open-minded people - have proved remarkably conservative about changing their Constitution. Only 8 out of 44 attempts at change have succeeded by referendum since 1901.

And yet within its constraints, our Constitution and its key institution, this Parliament, have proved adaptable as well as stable.

Within these guidelines set out in the 1890s through persuasion, consensus and negotiation, we have seen this nation grow to maturity and shed many of its early convictions and prejudices.

The Parliament has been able to both lead as well as move with the nation's shifting attitudes, values and sociology.

Up until the First World War the nation's people, by and large, clearly identified with British Empire values and aspirations. After the sacrifice of the ANZACs, the terrible bloodshed in Europe and the Middle East, the great schisms over conscription, a much more identifiably Australian ethos was seen in our writings, our artistic expression, and our national symbols.

The terrible scourge of the worldwide Depression in the 1930s threw us back on our own resources even more. Values of adaptability and resourcefulness became more important. We had to reassess in a fundamental way the basis of economic activity. And we learnt from bitter experience the dangers for a small, exporting nation when big countries close their markets to others.

World War 2 saw this nation fighting for its very survival, a country small in population, large in land mass and resources, no longer able to rely on Imperial protection. John Curtin's turning to a new Pacific ally, as the country fought for its life, demonstrated again our native clear-sightedness, and our undoubted courage.

It was a very different nation that emerged from that war. No verity remained unchallenged. A country that had once extolled purity of race, now opened itself to people of many war-torn places. We welcomed the world to our shores, and we built the sinews of a much stronger people in the process, with even more to offer the world.

Ultimately and inevitably this, and our comprehension of colonial peoples striving for independence in many continents, changed our definition of what it was to be an Australian. We were proud to play a leading role in the early days of the United Nations.

We wanted this international role, but it challenged us to confront the long-standing race issue in several ways. While opening ourselves to immigration, we had also to find a role for ourselves among the emerging and changing nations in our region, and we had to face the call for justice and equity from indigenous Australians.

The last twenty years have seen Australia undertake even more radical changes. We have opened our markets to the world, and deregulated our financial institutions. Our workplace relations have changed fundamentally, while commercial competition both within Australia and with foreign nations has become fiercer.

Along with these often painful changes, we have seen some remarkable opportunities opening for women in education, work and politics. As a father of three daughters, I must applaud these openings, while continuing to see a role for government in trying to reconcile work and family life, trying to ease the burdens of child care and long hours on working parents.

We now face another great challenge, this time a challenge for our minds and intellects: just as our hearts and our national identity were challenged in the past. A great knowledge revolution is sweeping the world, and the new communications and technological marvels go hand in hand with unprecedented global capital movements.

Our people and their leaders are once again asked to face up to a new reality, in which our prosperity will depend upon the investment in the minds of our people, rather than in our physical resources. We will be mining our brains and thought processes, not just our countryside, in this new technological gold rush.

I believe that we only made the necessary changes to our economy and society just in time over recent decades. For a country as small as ours, as dependent on world markets, as exposed to international risk, there is no room for complacency.

I know that today is an occasion for focusing on positives in our past, and we are right to take sustenance from a century's achievements. But this nation was not born, nor did it grow to maturity, by its people closing their eyes to dangers and challenges.

Precisely none of our achievements were the product of complacency. They were, and are, the product of courage, vision, and application. They were, and are, the product of risk, and daring, and creative leaps of faith. So it will be in the coming century.

The history of the world we live in is not typically kind to smaller nations such as ours. History teaches us that nations -- like empires -- tend to fall rather than persist.

This is why I have always said that we as a nation must be concerned with the terms and conditions of our national survival in the century that lies ahead.

We face massive challenges -- some external, some domestic. We face the prospect of ceaseless global economic change, and the constant struggle for national prosperity in the face of that change. We face the challenge of technologies not yet invented, which will change our lives for the better or for the worse, and sometimes both. And we face the challenges of keeping our own society united, drawn as it is from so many different backgrounds, including the original owners of our land.

The knowledge revolution, and global forces driving it, will not wait for Australia to hop on board. If we do not harness the talent and energy of all of our people, the brilliance and drive of our best academic and scientific minds, and the leadership and energy of business and government, we may well face a very different century than the one we are celebrating today.

We cannot put our relations with our Asian neighbours on some sort of pause button, just as we cannot afford a relaxed attitude to world affairs and international negotiations, or any barriers at all to a clear-cut national Defence strategy.

Energetic leadership is needed more than ever in challenging times like these: leadership to establish first-class research and development initiatives; to transform the educational and training options for all our people; to boost the abilities and morale of our teaching professionals; and to face the explosion of new ways of doing business, new products, new processes, new ways of thinking.

I believe that this means we must approach this century not with complacency, but with urgency born of the great tasks that lie before us.

I said yesterday, and I repeat today, that our starting point in this endeavour must be this: that everyone in this nation matters to this Parliament, and to the governments formed on the floor of this House.

Nobody is dispensable in the process of change -- nobody. And if we have given that impression in the past, we must never give it again. This country is too small, and our challenges too big, to allow anyone to be left behind.

In all these challenges, the members of this Parliament, and particularly this House in which Governments are made and broken, will be asked to lead

And yet, Mr Speaker, we confront all these stresses at a time when the confidence of our people in the established institutions of this nation --not least this Parliament -- is perilously low.

I am concerned about the way this great institution has slipped in public regard in recent decades. It should be a matter of concern to this House that politicians are not respected in the way they were in the earlier days of this democracy.

This House is where the nation's government - as chosen by the people in a free ballot - is formed, where the government proposes laws to give effect to its policies, where it is held to account most directly, and where it must stand or fall.

I have no doubt that it is a good thing in a democracy for people to show healthy skepticism for political discourse. Our larrikin spirit, our convict origins, our well-known and often lamented 'tall poppy syndrome' are probably good for this country. This attitude has stopped in his tracks many an aspiring dictator.

It is hard to imagine a Hitler or a Mussolini ever surviving the dry wit of an Australian pub crowd.

Nevertheless, it cannot be healthy for our democracy that there has been such a decline in regard for our major institutions.

How often we hear a hostile view of the theatrical aspect of our debates. It is regularly expressed at community forums and on talkback radio in comments such as "all they ever do is argue". We, in this place, know that the life force of democracies such as ours is contention - over values, ideas and policies. Contention is the very sound of democracy in action.

Nevertheless, the very way in which modern politics communicates itself -often through the seven-second sound-bite seen on the nightly TV news -drives elector dissatisfaction in a world of fast information flows.

There is little we can do to change the way the media cover politics. In a free country, the media must have liberty. Our democratic institutions, whose origins are much older than the mass media, must and will adapt.

I firmly believe we should take one important step towards regaining the trust and respect of citizens and that is to commit ourselves to standards of conduct against which we are prepared to be judged, and to adhere to them. Codes of conduct are an obvious and important means of accomplishing this. I do not claim they are the be-all and end-all. But they do serve to demonstrate to the electorate our awareness of their concerns and our commitment to address them.

Arguably, the need for a code of conduct is greatest among those elected representatives who exercise the prerogatives of government. The high ethical standards expected of ministers and other government office-holders reflect the fact that they are entrusted with considerable privilege.

As you know, I have been calling for an independent Auditor of Parliamentary Allowances and Entitlements to address the public concern over entitlements.

We believe such a position, combined with the twice yearly tabling of expenditure on all entitlements by each Senator and Member, would go some way to addressing public concerns in this area.

These are some of the ways we can stem the unhealthy and unhelpful hostility to politicians and the Parliament.

I am even more convinced that if we can persuade the Australian people that we have a real vision for the future, we will re-establish their faith in the institution of this Parliament. And in doing so, it will arm us mightily for the struggle ahead

Mr Speaker, it is the prerogative of the government of the day to write this motion. We recognise that the government has gone as far in some parts of this motion as it believes it can go.

Our concern, Mr Speaker, is this: This motion fails to give indigenous Australians the recognition and respect they deserve at the end of a century of terrible trials and injustices for them.

It does not recognise the greatest achievement of indigenous Australians this century -- their victory in the battle to have their rights of original ownership of this land recognised by the Parliament and the courts.

We believe it is a tragedy that this House cannot today unite simply to recognise what is an undoubted fact - the prior occupation and ownership of this land by Indigenous Australians.

It does not surprise us, but it should be remarked upon, that this motion goes no closer to delivering that profound apology that we as the official body responsible for the governing of this country should deliver to those whose lives were so blighted by decisions and omissions in this very place.

The motion does not even express a hope for the reconciliation process that the government itself has said is ongoing and important to this nation.

These are matters for real regret today.

All these issues must be addressed in this House, and I have faith that in time they will be.

The real matter before us must be how we will spend the political capital of this great institution in the century that lies ahead.

At the beginning of this second century of the Australian Commonwealth, let me state very clearly the vision of my party, this country's oldest political party, for the future.

We look to a time of greater prosperity for all Australians -- those who live in the cities, and those who choose less-travelled roads;

We look to a future in which our people's health care is provided by virtue of citizenship, not their wealth;

We look to a future of quality education for all, not just the privileged;

We look to a future as one of the world's leading Knowledge Nations, harnessing the new age of progress for the benefit of all our people;

Mr Speaker, we look to ennoble the soul of our nation and all our people through genuine reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians;

We look to the necessity of repairing and protecting from harm our fragile countryside and forests, our waterways and our sunlit skies.

And finally, we look to a time when we can bring our Constitution home, and win agreement for a proud Australian republic, with one of our own as Head of State - a point made so well by young Australia through Hayley Eves.

What a great future that will be, Mr Speaker, and how proud this generation will feel for having been a part of it.

Thank you.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------