Vew from the chair: Speeches of Richard WL Austin

And now, ladies and gendemen, I am going to move away from the sheltering chrysalis of academia to the harsh world outside, which the emerging butterfly will have to face. This is the eternal challenge facing all graduates, for if graduation day is a day of happy remembrances of the recent past, it is also a day of stocktaking when they must look around at the daunting present, and a day of vision when they must look forward to the beckoning future. We live in a unique country, endowed by nature with most of the riches of this earth, but, despite this, it is, sadly, no longer a 'lucky country', nor is it yet a 'clever country'. It may not quite be a banana republic, as one illustrious wordsmith once suggested, but even if the fruit is still hidden from sight, the plantation itself is often plainly visible. To put it blundy, Australia is in a mess. The mess is both institutional and individual. I will not call it economic, because the economy, in my view, should be seen as a symptom of a country's malaise, not its cause. Iwill, therefore, spare you any further reference to the man once described as 'the best Treasurer in the world', and turn instead to a man of a very different calibre-– the great Duke of Wellington, the victor of Waterloo and a distinguished statesman. In an age of sudden change, after the succession of Queen Victoria, when the Reform Bill and the repeal of the Corn Laws were causing many Englishmen to feel that the whole fabric of society was falling apart, he prophesied: 'We shall not have a commotion, we shall not have blood, but we shall be plundered by forms of law'. How right he was-not only for England then, but for Australia today: • too many laws; • too many politicians to make them; • too many bureaucrats to implement them; • too many lawyers to dispute them; • too many committees of enquiry to re-interpret them; • too many trade unions to take advantage of them. As a result: • too much interference with the individual and his way of life; • too many taxes. As a further result of all.these things: • too little incentive; • too little initiative. So much for the institutional symptoms. What of the individual onesl Here the picture is no less depressing. Ill fares the land to hastening ills a prey Where wealth accumulates and men decay wrote Oliver Goldsmith of the England of his time.' His words equally well fit the Australia of today. 152