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Brett Mason,
Senator for Queensland
First Speech - 25/8/1999Just a couple of kilometres north of where we sit today lies the
Australian War Memorial. Charles Bean, Australia's great military historian, conceived,
inspired and helped to create this, perhaps our most original national institution.
While designed to be complete in every detail, significantly Bean had no place
in his memorial for attention to decorations and to awards. He would not even
single out for special attention those awarded the Victoria Cross. They were well
earned, he believed, but for each person so honoured another dozen might have
been selected. It was so much a matter of chance, he insisted. So too is the opportunity
to serve one's country in parliament, but I hope, as Sir Paul Hasluck once said,
to `make the most of the chance of politics'. I thank the people
of Queensland for giving me the opportunity and the very great privilege to serve
them in Australia's national parliament. I thank my family for their love and
their values. I thank my party: I hope to give you as much as you have given me.
To all my friends: I cannot thank you enough for your support and your confidence,
particularly during those times that test and then temper all of us. Looking
around this chamber, one cannot fail to be awe-struck and perhaps even humbled
by the atmosphere, the surroundings and most of all the memory of the great senators
this nation has produced. I am very conscious of the distinguished Queensland
lineage of my Senate seat. Dame Annabelle Rankin, the nation's first female federal
minister, was succeeded by Neville Bonner, the first Aboriginal in federal parliament
and later Australian of the Year. He in turn was succeeded by David MacGibbon,
one of the Senate's great authorities on defence and the first to realise the
futility of Australia's two-airline policy. I salute them and acknowledge that,
in very different ways, their dreams and their ideas for our country have become
our challenges and our guideposts for the future. We have all
experienced defining moments in our political lives. For me, it came at the end
of a half-hour motorbike ride from the centre of Phnom Penh. I remember stopping
in the countryside amidst Cambodia's killing fields and contemplating the righteous
madness that in the space of just three years extinguished over two million lives
in an insane attempt to create an egalitarian utopia. A deep scepticism of collectivist
ideology was capped by a pyramid of white skulls. Our century
has seen politics emerge as the greatest force for moving people and for moving
nations. The collectivist ethos that governments can perfect man is the greatest
lie our time has known. In its name we have seen Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung
and Pol Pot commit countless atrocities. As the distinguished British historian
Paul Johnson writes: The experience of our century shows emphatically
that Utopianism is never far from gangsterism. We have learnt
that the destructive capacity of the individual, however vicious, is small; of
the state, however well intentioned, almost limitless. We now know that the good
life stems much more from individuals caring about their community than from the
state caring about its individuals. Hindsight is a wonderful
thing. Yet all the horror, all the tragedy and the deprivation of the last half
century was widely known at the time. That it was ignored, whitewashed, romanticised
or excused is one of the greatest moral failures of 20th century political life.
When I was at school and at university, the world was seemingly in love with those
who rebelled, who claimed that capitalism was immoral and that socialism was the
future, who questioned everything except their own dogma. My lecturers spoke of
the `moral equivalence' of Australia and the Soviet bloc. Totalitarianism, I was
told, was simply an aspect of cultural diversity. Criticism and derision were
seemingly reserved only for our Western society and its values. The
young men and women who were patriotic, who believed in individual responsibility,
trust, encouraging excellence, pride in our history and tradition and the importance
of families and liberal democratic institutions, were thought somehow not to be
on the future's wavelength. There were many people like me at universities and
in the world at large who were taught that we should feel ashamed of ourselves,
our attitudes and our country's achievements—ashamed of the Australian way.
This, sadly, was the political education of so many of my generation at the hands
of a perennially indignant elite. At no time in the history of humanity have so
many well-meaning and well-educated individuals so misjudged the major issues
of the day. With a legacy of appalling judgment, it is hardly surprising that
historical amnesia has set in. Very few have the courage to own up to the moral
responsibility for their past allegiances and past mistakes. Today we see so many
others caught in the shadows who still are unable to understand that it is not
possible to have praise without blame, law without guilt, reward without responsibility
and a free society without moral institutions. The landscape
of the 20th century—our century—is littered with the wrecks of social,
moral, economic and political experiments. Australia, while luckier than most,
was also affected by the schemes of progressive social engineers—often well-meaning
but too often misguided. Nowhere, perhaps, is this failure more evident and more
painful than in the area of Aboriginal affairs. Reconciliation
with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians is a great test for our
parliament and for our nation. As someone passionate about our country's future,
I am very conscious of my obligation to future generations to ensure that the
nation they inherit from us is truly united. Nothing from recent years will so
test the limits of our moral imagination. There will never
be a common understanding if the conversation is merely black elites talking to
white elites. That is the conversation of the expedient and the fashionable. All
Australians seek reconciliation that unites their country around a common future—not
a mediated settlement born of guilt and anguish but rather one born of mutual
respect and mutual understanding. It is only then that we can fully experience,
as the Draft Declaration for Reconciliation so beautifully says, `the gift of
one another's presence'. This is a project in nation building
too important to be left simply to political leadership and at the mercy of an
uncertain political process. Ordinary Australians, black and white, must own reconciliation,
not the politicians and not the bureaucrats. I welcome the
idea of a landmark statement from this parliament that reflects national aspirations
for reconciliation. But we must go further. Reconciliation has to change beliefs
and relationships. A mediated document, however artfully drafted, is but a first
step. For ordinary Australians, reconciliation is a matter of the heart. As we
pursue this great project we should be mindful not to let the burden of reconciliation
fall solely on rural Australians while we in the cities take all the benefits,
including the moral satisfaction and self-congratulation. To pander to fashion
or expediency will be to betray all Australians. The recent
debate about the need to change the role and the nature of welfare is vital to
the future of all Australians and particularly of indigenous Australians. Indigenous
Australians need the same things that everyone else does: access to good health
care, education, jobs and, most importantly, hope for the future. We all recognise
that, ultimately, the only way to lift many indigenous people out of the cycle
of welfare dependence is to increase their economic independence. The government's
job may be to provide assistance but only where it is matched by responsibility
for achieving certain outcomes. Perhaps nowhere in Australian social and economic
life is the government's ethic of mutual obligation so important, so uplifting
and so in conformity with the right of indigenous Australians to take responsibility
for their own lives. Success stories are already springing
up on Cape York in my state where communities are slowly and often painfully teaching
themselves about the value of responsibility, the benefits of enterprise and the
liberating spirit of selfsufficiency. They need our help as they turn despairing
and troubled settlements into vibrant and healthy communities. Isolating Aboriginal
people and showering them with money is the failed old remedy. Helping them to
rediscover pride and dignity, a hand up and not a handout, is the true reconciliation. No-one
is better placed than our side of politics to take this debate forward. We are
more interested in achieving results, not because they are trendy or fashionable
or politically correct but because they are fair, just and moral. We recognise
individual responsibility as a core belief. We have always believed that individuals
are much better placed than governments to make decisions about their own lives.
For too long, governments have taken that right away from the first Australians.
Here, more than anywhere, our government should provide the incentives by which
people are empowered and encouraged to look after their own wellbeing. I
readily acknowledge that, increasingly, my Labor colleagues recognise the importance
of fundamental change in Aboriginal policy. I am optimistic that the next few
years will see as fundamental an acceptance of this shift in consensus on Aboriginal
affairs and welfare as we have witnessed over the last 20 years in economics. My
generation has never known economic security. And for today's young people the
challenges are even greater. When I was growing up, I thought I was competing
for jobs with other students from my university—and perhaps a few from Sydney.
The students I taught at university are increasingly not only competing with each
other or those from nearby towns or cities but also with the children of Osaka,
Berlin, and Singapore—and, perhaps soon, Moscow, Hanoi and Budapest. Today's
young people, the young people I taught at university, are more sober, observant
and conservative than those who taught me. They also have fewer places to hide.
No longer will a burgeoning public service and large corporations afford opportunities
for security. Today's young people will have to make their way through their own
entrepreneurial skills. It will be the most street-smart and astute generation
since the 1930s. Yet, unlike their grandparents, young Australians today are much
more confident of their place in the sun. No longer burdened by self-doubt nor
limited by narrow horizons, they have taught me that there is no limit to what
Australia can achieve. They love Australia not only for what
it is but also for what it can be. While many of their self-proclaimed spokespeople
remain forever frozen in the time of the protest movement and free love, my young
students have moved on to embrace the challenges of the future. They are much
more interested in realising work than in reliving Woodstock. I
am proud to be part of a government that has had the courage to take some tough
decisions today so that young Australians might have more opportunities tomorrow.
Success is not a birthright, but it is the duty of those elected to this place
to ensure that hope remains a birthright. Australia's economic performance is
one of the strongest in the developed world. Low interest rates, low inflation,
low industrial disputation, high jobs growth, high levels of investment and increasingly
high productivity are a great foundation stone for our future. Indeed, it is a
great national achievement—perhaps even better than retaining the Ashes or
beating the All Blacks! My state of Queensland is at the forefront
of this national achievement. It is a great example of the Liberal vision for
this country. The creative and bold policies of the Howard government will ensure
that shortly after the turn of the century Queensland is not only still Australia's
best and most prosperous state but also a leading regional economy in its own
right and trading globally in all its many and growing areas of excellence and
expertise. In facing the Asia-Pacific, Queensland faces Australia's future. The
Pacific Rim, its opportunities, its challenges and its rewards will all be Queensland's
before they are anyone else's. Queenslanders will ride point for Australia's destiny.
Our Prime Minister has recently said that there are fewer limitations now on what
Australia can achieve than at any time in the 25 years that he has spent in public
life. I know that he is right. I for one would not trade my place for that of
any other generation in our nation's history. Madam President,
the testimony of this century is not mute: it proclaims certain truths in a strong
and clear voice. A society not based on individual liberty, democracy and the
rule of law invites tyranny. An economic system not based on free market, private
initiative and enterprise ends in ruin. A community not respecting its traditions
and its history, and not celebrating and preserving its institutions, degenerates
into chaos. These ideas of liberal democracy blossomed in the world of the nineteenth
century and they were almost buried in the twentieth. But throughout all the tyranny,
the zealotry, the madness, the social experiments and the despair, conservatives
argued harder than anyone else the case for political and economic freedom. And
we were right. Now, a hundred years later, liberal democratic values are again
ascendant and our hopes are undiminished. As we wrote the last words of the 19th
century, so we will write the first words of the new century. As
we celebrate the victories of the past and contemplate the challenges of the future
at the dawn of the third millennium, I am very grateful for being given the opportunity
to be a member of the Australian Senate. I count it as the greatest privilege
that I am now able to express my love for our country not only through words but
also through deeds. In less than 18 months we will be marking the centenary of
Federation. For now, we are the authors of the next chapter in our nation's history.
It has been said that it is only for God and for angels to be onlookers in life.
The rest of us must participate in our communities, be involved and engaged and
seek to make a difference. With God's help, I hope I can do just that.
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