Transcript of campaign speech by John Curtin, 1937
Transcript of campaign speech by John Curtin, 1937Ladies and gentlemen, it is my privilege this evening to make to you a last appeal in respect to the elections on Saturday.
I say to you first that we seek a mandate at your hands. A mandate for both Houses. It is not only desirable and necessary that Labor should have a majority in the House of Representatives in order to form a government, but it is also of equal importance that there should be elected to the Senate a sufficient number of Labor men to ensure that our policy will be given that due consideration which it will merit in the Upper Chamber.
Labor intends to govern. It will not contemplate or allow any drift or cling to portfolios while its program is being emasculated. The conditions of our country are such as to imperatively call for action and the government which I hope to have the honour to lead will be a government of work and not of talk. We will expand the social services of the Australian people; provide pensions for widows who have dependent children; we will deal with the problem of the sick soldiers; we will also provide allowances for those who are unemployed. Basically, however, our purpose is the uplift of the masses of Australia by providing them with full-time employment at a reasonable standard of wages. For without proper incomes the people in their homes cannot provide for themselves or for their children those conditions which make for a healthy and a happy community.
The health of our people is now a matter of national disquietude. It is idle to talk of building more hospitals, or providing more doctors, if we are not at the same time assuring to our people proper and good food and decent homes to live in. Therefore our problem is to furnish the means whereby this community can get for itself, as the result of the work that it will do, the means of life in abundance. There is no reason why, with a country such as we have, there should be any degree of poverty whatever. And the Labor government will make proper and immediate preparation to ensure the capacity of the country to defend itself. That is why I preceded this part of what I have to say with a reference to our intention to give Australia robust citizens.
The defence of Australia requires that we shall make a proper preparation for it and that means that inside this country we should have all the requirements and essentials to enabling ourselves to be independent of external supplies. None of these things can be done without there be effected a change in monetary and in banking policy. This, as you must now realise after the years of the Depression, is indispensable to the employment of the people and to an attack being made upon poverty. In every country, let alone in Australia, the masses suffer avoidable misery; they suffer avoidable unemployment; they live in dwellings which could be much better than they are if the whole energies and resources of the nation were used in order to make them better.
But you can't get from antiLabor governments great changes in social practice. Their main purpose is to resist innovation, to delay reform, to prop up vested interests, to maintain the existing order. Labor challenges all this. It challenges poverty. It challenges the causes which lead to war. Its purpose is paramountly humanitarian and it seeks to promote the widest possible scope for men and for women so that they can live happily and contented. I have said to you that we ask for the mandate.
In the Senate at present there is not one Labor man but, regardless of how you may vote on Saturday, there will be 17 antiLabor men in the Senate for the next three years. Thus, if you do not give to Labor proper representation in the Senate you will have a one-sided representation of the people in a country in which at least half the people always vote for Labor. I urge you therefore to take this into account when determining how you will vote on Saturday in connection with the Senate as well as for the House of Representatives. The present character of the Senate is entirely unrepresentative of the views of the Australian people. I urge you not to allow the Senate to remain a bulwark of reaction.
I urge you also to make certain that when you do go to the poll you mark your ballot paper so that it will reflect your wishes. You have to vote with numbers - give number one to the Labor man for the House of Representatives; two, three and so on for the other candidates as you prefer them. For the Senate you have to vote with numbers also. Select one of the Labor men whom you think the most competent and give him number one vote; give number two to the next Labor man of your choice; number three and number four as may be the case with respect to the number of Labor candidates who have nominated. Then, when you have marked your Labor votes preferential, proceed to mark the rest of the paper so that there will be a number in sequence opposite the name of every candidate who is on the ballot paper. Unless you do this the vote will be informal.
October the 23rd is a momentous day in the life of this nation. You will put in office a government of your choice. That government in the nature of things must be either a Labor government or an antiLabor government. For six years Mr Lyons has been the Prime Minister, and at the end of six years he can do no better than to make unjustified attacks upon the ideals and the people of the Labor movement. It is an extraordinary phase of the evolution of those who leave the party of Labor, that when they are chosen, as invariably they are for that is the price that is paid, as representative spokesmen for the party of antiLabor they engage in propaganda of a type which, during the time that they were in the Labor movement, they treated with contempt and regarded as utterly irrelevant.
On Saturday then you vote to keep in office a government that hasn't built a house although it talked about a home building policy three years ago; that has done nothing for the youth of Australia; that has not made a start yet with unemployment insurance; that has pursued provocative policies in respect to international relationships; that has bungled and muddled the great opportunities which it has had during the past three years. If you do that you will not do a service to Australia. But if you change the government, if you elect Labor to power and entrust to myself the leadership of the Party of Labor, I pledge you, as an Australian, that we will stand for great Australian purposes; that we will not involve you in overseas wars; that we will safeguard you against attack; that in regard to the economic life of Australia we will build up our resources. We will provide the basis upon which there will be assured to each of you a better state of affairs than has previously been the case.
Poverty is the great evil, the great internal evil. War is the great evil, the great external evil. These twin devils which threaten our civilisation have to be met and grappled with. The Labor Party is not only opposed to the conditions which make for poverty but it is also opposed to the conditions out of which war emerges almost inevitably. We offer you then peace and security; we offer you a better social order; and we offer to you a more sustained, and - I venture this statement - a more honourable administration than that which has marked the last few years in the Commonwealth sphere.
Vote Labor then on Saturday. Vote Labor for the House of Representatives. Vote Labor for the Senate. Vote Labor for Australia.
© Copyright Curriculum Corporation and , 2006, except where indicated under Acknowledgements |
