Speech by Mr R. J. L. Hawke, A.C., M.P. on Governor-General's speech
Address-in-Reply From the 'Parliamentary Debates'
26 November 1980
Mr HAWKE (Wills) (8.53) - Mr Deputy Speaker, at the outset I congratulate you on your appointment and ask you to convey the same sentiments to the Speaker. As one of the tardier maidens to appear before you I express the hope that I shall do nothing in the future to upset unduly the even tenor of your ways. I also express my appreciation of the untiring efforts of my predecessor in this place, Gordon Bryant, and thank him for handing over an electorate in such fine and impregnable shape.
I come to this House after 22 years with the Australian trade union movement, an organisation often denigrated by our opponents in this Parliament when it suits their perceived political purposes but the existence of which is a sine qua non of a free and democratic society as I have had occasion to say before. The only societies where one does not have such movements with the right of men and women freely associated together to withdraw their labour are the dictatorships of the Left or the Right. That movement in Australia has been extremely generous to me in providing unique opportunities to develop whatever intrinsic talents I may possess. I place on record my appreciation for being given those opportunities.
I have become increasingly conscious that in such a democracy ultimately it is only in and through the parliament that decisions can be made which will fashion for all our people the opportunities to release their talents in work and in leisure - the opportunities, to be well-rounded, constructive human beings, the opportunities for happiness for themselves and in relation to others, which seems to me what government should be about. I am grateful, therefore, to the people of Wills for having elected me to this House as their member. One would have hoped, of course, that it had been as part of a transition which would have had us sitting to the right of your chair. That is not the case. In the circumstances, I thank all my colleagues who have now given me the responsibility and the privilege of representing our party in respect of industrial relations, employment and youth affairs in this place. In that respect I pay particular tribute to the tremendous work done by my predecessor in these shadow portfolios, my good friend and colleague the member for Port Adelaide (Mr Young).
I wish to assure my electorate, my colleagues and you, sir, that I shall discharge these obligations of membership and of the shadow portfolios with a very clear perception of the appropriate role of the Opposition in this House at this time. That role, I believe, has two aspects. First, and by definition, is the duty to oppose - to oppose the actions, decisions and proposed legislation of this Government where analysis reveals such actions, decisions and proposals to be against the interests of the Australian people. When an Opposition through paucity of numbers, a lack of will, or allowing itself to be seduced by a specious invocation of the concept of mandate resiles in any way from this task, to such ari extent is the efficient functioning of a parliamentary democracy diminished.
That same view of the interests of the Australian people should similarly provide the basis for discharging the second aspect of the role of the Opposition; that is, to establish positive and constructive alternatives to what we see as deficiencies in the positions adopted by government. Mr Deputy Speaker, I can assure you that I will rigorously play my part in this role with a view to ensuring that in 1983, or whenever the next election is held, we shall indeed be occupying the Treasury bench and giving the country what it has so grievously lacked for the past five years - compassionate, competent government concerned with the welfare of all Australians.
There is no doubt that we live in a troubled country. The facts are attested to by bodies who surely cannot attract the contempt and disdain of this Government. In its publication Poverty Power and The Church released on 8 September 1980, the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace said:
Poverty in Australia is often ignored because the poor tend to be hidden away or concentrated in specific areas. But poverty is real. In the mid·1970s it was estimated that there were over a million poor in Australia. At the end of the 1970s, another estimate put the number at almost two million-that is, one person in seven in Australia has seriously inadequate access to housing, medical services, employment, education and even food and clothing.
Mr Deputy Speaker, these are the figures used also by the Brotherhood of St Laurence which just last month released 14 ‘Selected Indicators of Community Hardship and Disadvantage 1975-80'. Clearly not all our economic and social problems can be attributed to the policies of this Government. Other governments of different political persuasions in other parts of the world are not without their problems at this time. What is singularly characteristic of this Government, and particularly this Prime Minister (Mr Malcolm Fraser), is, on the one hand, its blatant misrepresentation of what it is about - in yesterday's speech the Government referred to its concern to 'strengthen the family and through it the basic social fabric of this country' - and, on the other hand, its callous indifference to the dimensions of the problem.
In his election policy speech of 30 September the Prime Minister in describing a situation where over 100,000 kids between 15 and 19 could not find work found it sufficient to say of those who leave school: 'Some move smoothly into a job; others have difficulty'. Even more insidious is the attempt to blame the victims, to make them appear indeed the victims of their own inadequacies. This was perhaps best typified by the comment of the Deputy Prime Minister (Mr Anthony) reported in the Australian of 2 October 1980. The article reads:
He said the young needed to be bold and have heart. 'In the first place they might not get the job they really want. But if there is a bit of go and a bit of spirit in them they will get the job', he said."
A Government supporter-Hear, hear!
Mr HAWKE - 'Hear, hear', they say. In other words those 100,000 - plus young Australians without any job really have only their own lack of go and spirit to blame, according to this Government and according to that interjector. Such attitudes and statements by the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister are part of the consistent and persistent attempt by this Government to create divisions and confrontations, to set Australian against Australian. They do this when the crying need is to create cohesion, a sense of common purpose leavened by a constructive compassion for that growing body of our fellow Australians who are underprivileged, whose existence is characterised by a relative poverty not only of the material things of this life, but also perhaps more importantly, by their inability to see for themselves and their children any brighter horizon where they can hope to break free from their demeaning circumstances of poverty.
As we have moved into the 1980's under this Government, we have moved inexorably towards that destabilised and dangerous position described by Disraeli as "two nations', the nation of the privileged and the nation of the poor. There can be room for legitimate argument between competing policies when the country is confronted with times of economic difficulties. But there can be no room for the attitude of this Government and its leader who have accepted with complacency this increasing division in our society and indeed have done so much to foster divisiveness. Even more, there should now be no room after five years of all this, for the hypocritical charade of what in fact were the Prime Minister's words yesterday when he said: "The lives of ordinary people are in danger of being obscured if not lost sight of altogether' and that his Government 'cares deeply about the quality of life lived in Australia.' This was Alice in Wonderland stuff. Indeed the Prime Minister is the Humpty Dumpty of Australian politics, for honourable members remember the response in Through the Looking Glass when Alice objected to his abuse of words: "When I use a word" Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less'.
One would have hoped that considerations of morality would have been sufficient to move this Government from the courses which have helped to produce this condition of two nations in our country. But this is of course an unreal expectation. For the emergence of this condition has not merely been the inevitable residual of a conservative philosophy which frowns on the undue intrusion of redistributive concepts upon the position of the privileged. More than this, it has reflected the greater obscenity of five years of fiscal double standards whereby the already highly privileged have been allowed further to enhance their privilege by escaping their obligation under the law to pay tax while the relative tax burden has been remorselessly increased upon members of the middle and low income groups who have little opportunity to evade their obligations. I do not use the word 'obscenity' lightly. What other words are adequate when the position has led to the following independent observations? First, the Melbourne Age of 2 July 1980, after deriding the Treasurer's piecemeal approach of which we have the foreshadowing of yet another example said:
The wealthier you are, the more you can choose how much tax to pay. The size of your tax bill reflects how moral you are, not how much you earn. The rich can choose tax schemes to suit their greed knowing that the mass of wage and salary earners will be paying for the nation's roads, for the hospitals, and schools. The tax avoiders are not stealing from the Government, but from the average tax payer who must pay like it or not.
Secondly-if the Prime Minister wants to denigrate the Age he cannot denigrate Professor Russell Mathews whose name he used in his 1975 policy speech-Professor Mathews earlier this year, and it is reproduced in The Politics of Taxation at pages 106 to 107, said:
. . . the essential problem is not to make the rich pay higher rates of tax, or even more tax, than the poor, it is to make the rich pay any income tax at all. There has recently been some discussion about the potential for tax revolt in Australia. It must be recognised that a massive tax revolt has already taken place; but it is a revolt of business tax payers against wage and salary earners, of the rich against the poor.
Is that not an obscenity, Mr Deputy Speaker, and is it not an obscenity made more sickening by the fact that it will be precisely those who avoid the law to their own great financial advantage who will be loudest in their condemnation of these wage and salary earners who may take some direct action merely to maintain their previous real incomes? They will call for new and stricter laws to punish such workers and their unions and they will always find a responsive chord in this Prime Minister who is so myopic in his professed concern for adherence to law and order.
David Scott, the widely respected Associate Director of the Brotherhood of St Laurence, has recently estimated that the expenditure of $600m could eliminate financial poverty in this country. If this Government had been possessed of a vision of one nation, if it had in fact, as distinct from the saccharine rhetoric of yesterday, really cared for the lives of all Australians, if it had been determined by appropriate amendment to ensure that the laws in respect of taxation applied equally to the rich and to the less rich alike, then the revenue would have been available to effect this great purpose without any increase in the rate of tax. In fact, using the precise reasoning Professor Mathews employed as an indication of the way in which personal income recipients other than wage and salary earners have increasingly avoided their tax obligations, the enormity of this Government's double standards becomes starkly apparent. If in 1979·80 taxes paid by the non-wage and salary earner category of personal income recipients had kept up the same proportion to taxes paid by wage and salary earners as they did in 1975-76, the public revenue would have been higher by $715m. But no, the priorities of this Government are to maintain privilege rather than eliminate poverty.
If it is then a barren expectation that considerations of morality will divert this Government and its supporters from their disastrously divisive course, one can only express the hope that the more persuasive element of self-interest will prevail to produce this result. By this I clearly do not mean that perception which, to this point, has simply equated self-interest with the capacity to avoid or minimise a contribution to the public revenue. Rather, I refer to a deeper perception and a longer perspective of self-interest. Nothing is more certain. I believe, than that in these tortured times of compounding economic complexity no free society founded on the concept of the liberty of an individual can proceed on the assumption that it has some automatic or divine right of survival. In our time we are witness to the insidious forces of the extremes of the Left and of the Right which, by various tactics, would persuade the underprivileged and the oppressed. of the haven and solace awaiting in whatever branch of totalitarianism they may be espousing.
We delude ourselves if we believe we are immune from the corrosive impact of such forces in this country. In particular we delude ourselves if we believe that the frustration, the despair, the hopelessness, the increasing cynicism of the unemployed and others in a condition of poverty do not provide receptive ground for. the seductive nonsense of such extremists. In a dynamic free society there is and of course should be room for differential reward for the productive exercise of skill, initiative, imagination or effort. And there should be some capacity for those who have benefited from the exercise of such talents to share those rewards with the immediate objects of their beneficence. But those people who have so benefited should comprehend that if they wish the society to survive in which these things can happen then they must contribute meaningfully to the release of the talents and to the opportunities for satisfaction of those less privileged than themselves. Privilege derived in this way is not reprehensible. But privilege without concern, without compassion and without a real contribution to others less privileged is not only an obscenity but also will ultimately be self-destructive.
I would not wish to leave the impression that the problems of our society are to be seen in some simple one-dimensional terms. We all now live in times far different and more complex than those in which our assumptions, expectations and aspirations were framed. There will be a need to expand the time-scale of some of those expectations and aspiration - and that requirement will extend to the trade union movement as well as to others in our community. The essential ingredient in securing a sensible approach to our problems is to have as wide a degree as possible of understanding of the nature and dimensions of those problems. This has not and will not be achieved by the confrontationist tactics of the Prime Minister of this country. Indeed that approach has been and will continue to be counter productive. If the Government seeks to make the trade union movement a scapegoat for its own inadequacies of policy and lack of planning and if it condemns and uses its influence against every claim the trade union movement makes on the resources' of this country while applauding the -appropriation of those resources by industry, local and foreign, which does not have to back its claim by direct action, then it is creating the classic conditions of conflict.
Australia is a country almost uniquely blessed with vast areas of land, resources under the land and in the oceans around our continent. Particularly we are a country blessed with a population which has been enriched since the end of the Second World War by one of the great migration waves of history-a population to whom the path of political resolution recommends itself and to whom the tactic of terror is still alien. We face an enormous challenge to combine those human and natural resources in an economically and socially productive manner, in a manner which will eliminate the pathetic spectacle of the importing of skilled and semi-skilled labour while our young in growing numbers are untrained and unemployed, and in a manner which will eradicate the canker of poverty in the midst of affluence.
To meet that challenge requires a preparedness on the part of government to plan, to co-ordinate and, on the basis of mutual understanding, to bring the legitimate elements of our society cohesively together. If that were to be done our capacity as one nation to provide decent standards for all our own people and support for others less fortunate than ourselves would be almost unlimited. Our tragedy is not that we, as Australians, do not have the capacity to meet this challenge; it is that we have a Prime Minister and a Government whose natural instincts are not for cohesion but confrontation, not for truthful exposition to serve as a basis for mutual understanding but for partisan propaganda calculated to set Australian against and apart from Australian. We on this side of the House do not feel ourselves powerless in the face of that tragedy. We will, from this day, work to provide Australia with an alternative government which will match not only the resources and the challenge but also what we believe to be the innate sense of fair play of the great majority of the Australian people.