Occasional Address at Graduation Ceremony, Monash University, 8 October 1997
Mr Chancellor, fellow graduates, ladies and gentlemen.I congratulate each of my fellow graduates on your achievement in attaining the high standard necessary to be admitted to a degree or awarded a diploma of this University. It is with deep gratitude that I say how honoured I feel to have become an honorary Doctor of Laws of this great University. I address particularly those with much potential to influence the future of this community — my fellow graduates.
The recognition you have received today identifies each of you as a person who in your own way, in your own chosen area and level, is capable of leadership within your generation and your community. At the end of the day your worth as a citizen will be assessed on what you have done in the family field, the occupational field and in the public life of the community of which I speak today.
It is the good fortune of us all to have one of the oldest, most stable and best democracies in the world. We did not create it. The Australians who went before us took the basic features of British democracy and over the years adapted and added to them so as to suit the needs and potentialities of this country, culture and federation. Because democracy belongs to the people, so does the responsibility for preserving and improving it and ensuring that it works well.
In a democracy there is no-one who stands over you and forces you to exercise this responsibility. We have a good democracy only if its citizens understand and value it and voluntarily choose to accept the responsibilities necessary to sustain its quality. These are some of the most important of the responsibilities in which the community looks to you for leadership.
A democracy which enables its people to live a fulfilling life with a high degree of freedom and self-esteem needs the basic constitutional structures such as free elections, Parliament, government and courts. Constitutional structures of themselves are not enough. Democracy depends ultimately on the attitudes of its citizens. It is necessary that the great majority have confidence in their community and its democracy: and that they have a respect and concern for others and their rights and interests and a readiness to accept and comply with their own responsibilities and the decisions of the democratic system.
For those of my generation the most traumatic experience, which left the deepest impression on our minds, was the war of 1939 to 1945 when the democracies faced the aggression of fascist Germany, Italy and Japan. It would be hard for your generation to know the danger that we felt of being invaded and losing the war. I remember when I was a High School student sitting down alone and considering whether we would win or lose. On the information available I thought we would lose. I never told a soul of my conclusion for that would have been disloyal. The people of this country were united in their determination to win the war as I have never seen them on any other occasion. Eventually we won the war but at the cost of great loss of human life and happiness in all countries involved.
Human affairs are never settled. Each generation faces its own trials. Probably in your time this community will face a challenge as threatening as ours did. In predicting its nature I am not expressly or implicitly referring to any situation or any leaders or aspiring leaders in Australia today. I think the main challenge you will face will again be fascism but fascism seeking to arrogate power from within rather than to impose itself by armed force from without.
One of the leading thinkers on the essentials of democracy in the modern world was a Japanese political scientist, Maruyama Masao, who died in 1996. See Rikki Kersten, Democracy in Postwar Japan: Maruyama Masao and the search for autonomy, Routledge, London 1996. He studied and analysed why Japan, although having the constitutional structures necessary for democracy, had not become a democracy and had slid in a disordered way into its wars of aggression. Japan had operated as a fascist system with Japanese features. He concluded that the cause was the failure of Japanese citizens individually and within organisations to exercise the responsibility essential to a democracy.
The exercise of the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy requires first, a readiness to decide independently for oneself what courses should or should not be followed by the community and by government and country. The decisions are independent only if you decide according to your own values of what is right and wrong and not in accordance with values imposed on you by the state or any ideology. To make effective decisions involves learning about and understanding a problem and giving it careful thought.
The second requirement of responsibility is that you be prepared to act, either alone or more often with other members of a group or organisation, to influence what is done. To do that you need to have the confidence that comes from realising that in a democracy people can influence the course that will be taken by the community and its democracy. Although Marxism has little support today, many people still hold to its theory that the course a community takes is utterly determined by underlying conditions and forces and people cannot influence it. That flies in the face of the lessons of history. The great strength of democracy lies in the fact that people can be convinced and if enough are convinced that influences governments to act accordingly. There is real intellectual arrogance in thinking that while you yourself can see the right course to take, the majority favour another course and there is no way they could be persuaded away from it. Ordinary Australians, whatever their education, are very perceptive when they put their minds to a political or constitutional issue. On the other hand it is the mark of a democracy that complete unanimity is reached on very few issues.
Fascism is difficult to define and takes different forms but, in essence, instead of the people controlling the government and state as in democracy the people become controlled by them. The values of the state are imposed on all individuals and the capacity alone or with others to influence the courses taken by or within one’s country is lost. When fascism takes over from democracy, usually there is a charismatic leader who heads a dominant mass political party and claims to represent the whole community but rules as a dictator. Although its constitutional structures may remain, the people are influenced to have contempt for traditional parliamentary democracy. Usually there is a continual building of resentment and encouragement to hate people of particular races or countries. A totalitarian state results, in which people lose the protection of the law and individuals opposed to the policies of the state cease to matter.
Having outlined to you the nature of the challenge quite likely to face democracy in your time I feel that my generation owes you an apology. We did not fulfil our responsibility of ensuring that your education provided you with the knowledge of our system of democracy and its history which you will need to meet the challenge. In most cases you will have to acquire that knowledge yourselves.
Your leadership will occur in a time when it will be more difficult than it has been in our time to have a full appreciation of the priceless possession we have in our democracy. As humans we have an unquenchable thirst for information which shocks, alarms or entertains us. A modern democracy cannot function without a free media to provide information. The media has reached a high pitch of efficiency. We must know what occurs in public life that is wrong and the media tells us. We have no real interest in hearing of the creditable things that happen there. There is no demand for that information and we learn little of it. It is not the media to blame. It is our human nature. The result however, is that during my lifetime there has been a great reduction in community respect for and confidence in Ministers and Members of Parliament. Having worked closely with them while Governor I have a much higher regard for what they do, than is generally held within the community. That applies regardless of the part of the political spectrum to which they belong. I consider that today’s politicians are much the same as those who in my boyhood had much higher community respect.
In assessing the worth of our system of government it is vital not to compare it with a system which could exist in a perfect world inhabited by perfect people. It is to be compared with other systems actually existing in the past or present in the real world peopled by fallible humans.
Another problem for your time, in resisting the charismatic leader of a fascist movement, will be the great popularity which can be enjoyed through extensive media exposure by a person who becomes a celebrity through being notorious and well known.
It has been a privilege to pass on to you some of the things that life has taught me. Your knowledge and skills as a result of your university education are such that people will come to rely on you and your views. If I have passed on to you something of my feeling for Australian democracy and your responsibility for it as leaders of your generation, I am well content. I have every confidence in you.
Good luck.