Address by Senator John Faulkner
Cabinet Secretary
Special Minister of State
9 May 2009
First, let me acknowledge the traditional owners of this land, and pay my respects to their elders past and present.
Let me also acknowledge:
We are here today at the opening of the museum of Australian democracy. This is not to say that Australian democracy belongs in a museum! Our democracy is vital, and very much alive.
But then, this museum is not the kind of museum that pins history to a board. It is about being engaged in, and involved in, the rich and living tradition that makes Australian democracy what it is. It is a living, interactive celebration of not just our past, but our present and our future.
And Australian democracy is certainly worth celebrating.
But there have been times in our history when our democracy has been partial and flawed, not encouraging or allowing the full participation of the original custodians of our country.
With this new museum, we celebrate the peculiar, resilient, pragmatic and very Australian way in which we govern ourselves, the parliamentary and political process that we use to resolve our differences – peacefully; and, we remember how far we have come and recognise how far we have to go.
Democracy itself is not Australian. The principle and idea of government by the people is far older than Australia’s first parliaments. It is indeed far older than the countries our founding fathers looked to, and drew inspiration from, when setting up our system of government.
But while democracy is not remarkably Australian, Australia is remarkably democratic.
Ladies and gentlemen, Australians’ commitment to democracy is deep, longstanding, and even radical. We have been world leaders in democratic innovations such as women’s suffrage, secret ballots, and compulsory voting. Australia’s temperament is instinctively democratic, egalitarian – and pragmatic.
The federal framework of our democracy, which this building so powerfully embodies, is part of that pragmatic tradition. Yes – the structure of Australian democracy has been criticised – for lack of efficiency, complication, and duplication.
But its origins lie in the difficult process of making ‘a nation for a continent’. Making a nation from disparate and competing colonies. Needing to protect their distinctive rights and interests within a unified nation.
Those who undertook that task were democratically elected by the people of what would become the Commonwealth of Australia. Democratic politics is, at its best, the way a society peacefully resolves competing interests and conflicting imperatives. I think it says a great deal about Australia, and the strength of the idea of democracy in Australia, that at the end of a difficult and sometimes heated negotiation over the finicky interrelations of multiple jurisdictions, competing agendas and different sized railway gauges, the compromises hammered out were endorsed by popular vote in every colony in what was an orderly and profoundly democratic process.
Ladies and gentleman, many of the most dramatic moments in Australian political history happened in this building in the more than sixty years it was the ‘provisional’ home of Australia’s Federal Parliament.
That is something well worth reflecting on. Unlike so many other countries around the world, the nature of our government has never been determined on a battlefield. Ballots, not bullets, change Australia’s government. Votes in the parliamentary chamber, rather than violence in the streets, is how we settle our civic disagreements.
Sometimes Australia’s lack of enthusiasm for popular uprising is attributed to sheer laziness. If Australia had a revolution, the joke goes, no-one would bother to turn up.
But I think it is instead a deep-seated and healthy scepticism of extremism, an aspect of our national character that makes parliamentary democracy an excellent fit.
This new museum, the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House, will provide an opportunity for all of us, in all our diversity and with all our rich histories to celebrate, to learn more about, and to engage with that strong democratic tradition.
To mark today, I am pleased to have the opportunity to present to the Museum a fountain pen used by Andrew Fisher, who was Prime Minister of Australia three times, and in 1910 became the first Prime Minister to gain a majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, and, I might add, the leader of the first majority labour government anywhere in the world.
Ladies and gentlemen, this pen was presented to the current Prime Minister last year, the centenary of Andrew Fisher’s first government in 1908. The Prime Minister has agreed that the Museum of Australian Democracy is the most suitable home for this memento of the early days of Australia’s democracy. I understand that it will be displayed in the Prime Ministers of Australia exhibition alongside the miner’s ‘crib’ – or lunch box – used by Andrew Fisher in his early life as a miner.
(Pen presentation)
And now ladies and gentlemen, to open the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House I would like to introduce someone who led his party to victory in four consecutive federal elections in Australia. He served as Prime Minister of Australia from March 1983 to December 1991, which of course gives him the unique distinction of having been the only Australian Prime Minister to have served in that capacity both here, in this building, and in the new Parliament House.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Bob Hawke.
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