The Occasional Address
at a Graduation Ceremony on the conferral of an Honorary Doctorate of the University of South Australia
Adelaide, 13 May 1998
Chancellor, Dr Hetzel
Vice-Chancellor, Professor Bradley
Associate-Professor Michael Rowan
Sir Zelman and Lady Cowan
Dame Roma Mitchell
Other distinguished academics and guests
I thank you Chancellor and the University for the invitation to deliver this address on a day which is a matter of importance and pride for the University, for your graduands of the Faculties of Nursing and of Humanities and Social Sciences and those who are close and dear to them.
It is a matter of particular satisfaction to me for three reasons.
First, because you have this day honoured me by conferring on me an Honorary Doctorate of the University. On the basis of my last academic achievement in this State - I think I topped my last year at Maitland Primary School in 1938 before I moved with my parents to Western Australia in 1939 - this is a very generous gesture. But then I understand that in these matters, the University takes into account other considerations. I am proud that you have adjudged me worthy of this high honour and I give you my commitment to do whatever I can to bring further distinction to this institution which, although relatively young, has already brought further lustre to the tertiary education system of this State.
Second, as you all know, the University has also done me the great honour of establishing The Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre - I thanked you Chancellor and the University yesterday and I repeat my expression of gratitude today.
Third, this is the State of my birth and it has always had, and will continue to have, a warm place in my heart. I was born in 1929 in Bordertown a fact which gave rise to a very ungenerous comment from one of my more politically extreme colleagues during my days as President of the ACTU. We were engaged in a serious national dispute and some of the officials, who were Communist Party members, were pressing for an outcome which I believed to be excessive and unjustified. During the dispute there was a function at which I was the guest speaker. The person who was introducing me, starting from the very beginning said that I was born in Bordertown - at which one of those disgruntled officials interjected from the audience: "Yes, and hes been sitting on the bloody fence ever since."
Witty certainly - but untrue. One thing of which I have never been in any doubt is the fundamental importance of education. My parents, particularly my mother, who was a State schoolteacher before her marriage and resumed this career when my father became an Army chaplain, had a passionate belief that we all had a responsibility to develop to the full the talents we possess. She coached me to success in winning a scholarship to Perth Modern School - and then my parents helped to support me through nine years at University in Western Australia, Oxford and the Australian National University in Canberra.
When I left the ANU and went to the ACTU as Research Officer and Advocate I realised at first hand what a difference the opportunity of a formal education can make. I was befriended and given the benefit of advice by a number of men - and they were all men in those unliberated days - who through the financial circumstances of their parents had not had the opportunity of finishing a secondary, let alone tertiary education. They had turned their intelligence, and given their lives, to the trade union movement. If they had had my opportunities they could have prospered as professionals in a range of occupations. They were not bitter but it did reinforce my commitment to do whatever I could in the future to create an equality of educational opportunity in this country.
I am proud of the fact that as Prime Minister, under my government we transformed Australia from having one of the lowest retention rates in the developed world - less than one-third of young people stayed on to Year 12 in 1983 and by 1991 this had been lifted to 75%. More financial assistance was made available to help students from lower income families undertake University and technical education courses.
And what of your experience in this fine University? Montaigne, the great French essayist who died just over four hundred years ago, said: "We should rather examine who is better learned, than who is more learned." I trust that you and those who taught you are not susceptible to his indictment which he framed so elegantly: "We only toil and labour to stuff the memory, and in the meantime leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void. And like birds who fly abroad to forage for grain, and bring it home in their beak, without tasting it themselves, to feed their young; so our pedants go picking knowledge here and there out of several authors, and hold it at the tongues end, only to distribute it among their pupils.What good does it do us to have the stomach full of meat, if it does not digest and be incorporated with us; if it does not nourish and support us?"
I hope, indeed, that while you have acquired the basic academic accoutrements for your future careers, you do leave this University with your conscience and your understanding more furnished, more nourished than when you entered. You are going out into a world which more than ever before needs men and women not just with trained minds but with conscience and understanding that are fully furnished.
For it is a world where so many are perplexed and frightened by a rapidity and impact of change unprecedented in history. The technological revolution, particularly in the fields of computers and telecommunications, has created an almost unimaginably different world from the one they knew even a generation ago. No one has better captured this truth than the American sociologist Kenneth Boulding who put it this way: "I was born in the middle of human history. The world today is as different from the world in which I was born, as that world was from Julius Caesars."
As you take part in and make your way in this world, where feelings of insecurity are felt by many of your fellow-citizens - and, no doubt, by some of you - may I suggest three necessary elements of that furnishing of your conscience and your understanding.
The first is a non-negotiable commitment against discrimination on any grounds of race, colour, creed or gender. In a lecture in the University last evening I repeated something I said earlier this year and I urge its validity and relevance for you again today: in the eyes of the Gods of the worlds great religions there is no prejudice of colour or race nor should there be in the eyes of men or women. No person on this earth is intrinsically of greater or lesser merit because of their colour, race or creed. I ask you to embrace that truth and practice it in your relations with your fellow men and women.
It is particularly important that Australians today should furnish their conscience with this conviction, for as we know, unfortunately, there are those amongst us who, as so often in the past, seek to create scapegoats on whom to lay the blame for our problems, real or perceived. I refer, of course, especially to Pauline Hanson who would attribute responsibility for these problems largely to Aborigines and Asians.
As I have said before, this is both morally repugnant and economically insane. One of the many reasons I am proud to be associated with the University of South Australia is that it, like so many other educational institutions in Australia, attaches importance to providing places for students from Asia. It is estimated that last year some 130,000 young people from Asia were studying in our schools, technical institutes and universities. This is the human face of what will be the single most important factor determining the economic well being of this and future generations of Australians i.e. the level and the quality of our enmeshment with Asia.
Already sixty percent of our exports go to the region and more than fifty percent of our overseas tourists come from there. That is why we are feeling the effects of the melt-down which commenced in July of last year. Some people are suggesting this is the end of the era of the Asian dynamo. Let me tell you, briefly, why I think this view is wrong and why Asia, as far as we can see into the future, will continue to be of central importance to Australia.
It was always a nonsense to describe the earlier, admittedly remarkable, economic growth performances of East Asia as a "miracle" for that phrase implies that the performance defied rational economic analysis. In fact these success stories - in the decade up to 1997 the East Asian economies grew at an average annual rate of 8-9% - are to be explained in terms of certain fundamentals which have operated in the region. Without being exhaustive they comprise high savings rates, a commitment to education, an openness to foreign capital and technology and an increasing commitment to liberalised international trade.
Those fundamentals did not all suddenly fly out the window in the second half of 1997. The basic weakness that erupted then was the incapacity of the banking and financial structures to handle prudentially the enormous inflow of capital that was a feature of the period. This weakness was characterised all too often by the fact that governments were not sufficiently at arms length from the lending decisions of the system. Asset values were artificially stimulated by the belief that government guarantee was virtually inexhaustible. The bubble burst when the fallacy of this assumption was exposed and dramatic currency depreciations made it generally impossible to meet huge debt obligations denominated in US dollars.
Internal and external pressures are now forcing these countries to rectify this situation. The international community, for reasons of calculated self-interest as much as any moral considerations of good-neighbourliness, are insisting on strict conditionality on the massive bail-out assistance being provided. There can be legitimate argument about the fine detail of that conditionality but there can be none, I believe, about, the basic requirement for banking and financial reform.
If this reform is carried through - and I think it will be - and it is then superimposed upon the fundamentals I have mentioned and which are still in place, then there is no reason to believe that high rates of economic growth will not be resumed. The reform process will not proceed uniformly in each country but, in general, I believe it is reasonable to expect this scenario of the resumption of high growth within something like two years. There will be glitches and difficulties on the way but all of us, Asians and the friends of Asia, have a vested interest in making the achievable the reality.
I trust you can understand therefore why I emphasise the convergence of morality and sane, pragmatic, considerations of national self-interest on this issue of racism. As a frequent visitor to Asia I can assure you that our Asian friends are keenly watching the debate in Australia. I hope that those of you from Asia who are here with us today, who have got to know this country, will understand and take back to your countries the message that the overwhelming majority of Australians do not subscribe to the discriminatory garbage of the Pauline Hansons and her kind. Take back the message that we value our friendship with you and know that our destiny is inextricably interwoven with yours.
The second element I would recommend for the furnishing of your conscience and your understanding, is to have compassion, a genuine concern, for those less fortunate than yourselves. I have referred to my indebtedness to my mother for instilling into me the importance of education. I am equally indebted to my father for his wisdom in imparting this message to me as a young man: "Belief in the fatherhood of God, necessarily involves believing in the brotherhood of man." He based what, for him, was a belief he carried out in practice, on a deep commitment to the Christian faith. I do not think that decent men and women need to share that same faith to understand that, with the privilege we enjoy goes a responsibility to help those less fortunate than ourselves.
And, third, I would say to you - do not be afraid of change. I do not believe we should be frightened of the fact that we are getting smarter at producing goods and providing services that can lift the standard and the quality of our lives. But I do suggest that you should be worried about the asymmetry of human genius and endeavour.
On the one hand we seem to have an almost exponential capacity as scientists and technicians but we have not come close to revealing the same capacity as social engineers. It is as though we have suffered a collective lobotomy with one side of the brain working furiously and the other almost insensitised. We see this, domestically, in the neglect of social infrastructure and it is becoming more apparent internationally. Markets and production are increasingly globalised but this is not being matched by the creation of effective international structures to deal with problems that, similarly, are becoming global in their dimensions - nowhere is this more true than in regard to the environment.
And so, to you on the threshold of your careers, I congratulate you on your achievements thus far. It is an exciting, difficult, potentially uncomfortable, even dangerous, world out there. But essentially I remain an optimist because I have faith in young people like yourselves.
Furnish yourselves with good conscience and good understanding so that, together with the talents you have been privileged to develop in this University you can play your part in making that world not only more prosperous but a better place for all its people.