Vew from the chair: Speeches of Richard WL Austin

In Queensland there are now over 12 000 widows and children of servicemen, and Brisbane Legacy spends more than $1 million a year on their welfare. Legacy is another uniquely Australian concept, of which we should all be proud. And so, after the War, we were the 'good country' as well as the 'lucky country'. We played hard but we worked hard; we showed compassion and we achieved much. We produced great men and women of letters, of science and of politics, great authors, great painters, and great sportsmen. We became the 'inventive country', the 'creative country'. We were responsible for the secret ballot, women's suffrage, the eight-hour day, and the widow's pension. We gave the world the stump-jump plough, the pilot's black box recorder, the lnterscan landing system in aviation, and the fax machine. But in the 1960s, while still the 'lucky country', we became the 'wasteful country'. We lived off our abundant fat. We discovered vast resources of minerals and we sold them to Japan; we sold our wool to Europe. We failed to enter the world of value adding; we gave those profits to our customers with all the misplaced generosity of an eccentric millionaire. We allowed government policy to destroy the manufacturing sector, and we fooled ourselves into believing that it could be replaced by tourism. We began paying ourselves too much and failed to see that we were pricing ourselves out of the market. We did not care. It was the era of the 'she'll be right, mate', 'no worries' syndrome. We wanted to live the easy life-two or three cars in the garage, a boat at the moorings, long weekends in the sun and on the golf course. The 'wasteful country' soon became the 'greedy country'. We began to ask ourselves the question: 'What could a man get away withl'. The so-called eleventh command– ment, 'Thou shalt not be found out', began to take precedence over the other ten. We, the ordinary Australians, watched with ever-increasing concern and distaste, a continuing and widespread picture of malfeasance in high places--politicians, police officers, businessmen, bureaucrats, barristers, doctors, even judges all caught in snares of their own making. We watched, too, the unedifying spectacle of our political leaders jockeying for position, not for the good of the country, but for the sordid trappings of personal power. In the meantime we had become the 'over-governed country', the 'over-regulated country'... 1 We began to risk becoming the 'slack country'. I expect it was the sum total of all these things that induced Peter Robinson to write as he did a year or so ago. Since then, we have now become, as well, the 'uncertain country': • Are we Asian? • Are we European? • Did the British let us downl • Is Kokoda more important than Gallipoli? • Should we change the flagl • Should we become a republid One irrelevant question is piled on another, like Pelion or Ossa, but there is no attempt to give honest answers and no attempt to solve the real problems with which we are faced. 157