Community service and Australian values

by Andrew West

Australia Day Address presented by Andrew West as Australia Day Ambassador to Cowra.
26 January 2004
Cowra, New South Wales

Australia is a team effort.

While it is a country of sometimes rugged individuals -- such as Steve Erwin -- it is not a country of rugged individualism. In this way, it is very different from the United States.

The great American historian John Gunther writes of how when the pioneers pushed west into the fertile plains that are now Iowa and Kansas and Oklahoma and Nebraska, it was possible for them to plant some seed and survive as loners. They were settling verdant lands.

But in Australia the land was not so hospitable. In fact, it was downright brutal. It was almost impossible for the loner to get by. The land was drier, harder and, as that wonderful American travel writer Bill Bryson recorded in his book, Down Under, this country has more things that can kill you than any other place on earth.

For the Europeans, at least, this was a terrifying land. Most of the time if the settlers did not stick together and work as a team -- one equal with the next -- you died -- and many did. We learned in our infancy as a European colony that co-operation was the only way to survive, let alone prosper.

And in the 200 years since, we have evolved as a largely co-operative, one might even say communitarian (which is very different from socialist) culture.

We have not suppressed the individual initiative for original thinking or hard work, but even the brightest stars in sport, business, entertainment and the academic world would acknowledge that their success is due, in part, to their communities.

No chief executive can claim that his company makes big profits because of his actions alone. Everyone from the shop floor up makes a business strong.

The community helps makes sporting champions in this country by funding the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra, which trained 321 of the Australian athletes who took part in the Sydney Olympics.

Even in something as individually creative as the arts, where raw personal talent is essential, the community, acting through its elected government, plays a strong supportive role. Nicole Kidman, for example, has acknowledged that she would never have gotten her start in acting had it not been for a policy of the government -- a policy that presumably reflected the public's desire -- that required Australian television networks to produce a certain amount of home-grown drama.

Many of our great intellectuals, such as Jill Ker Conway, the girl from Coorain, got their start in either public schools or public universities. (Conway attended Abbotsleigh school and Sydney University on a public scholarship.)

One of the reasons we enjoy such a generally high standard of living, one of the reasons we have such a big middle class, is that for most of the last century working people realised they could get proper wages, an eight-hour day and four weeks holiday by getting together in trade unions.

Our farming communities also realised they could get a better deal for their hard-earned produce by forming co-operatives and establishing sensible regulation through egg boards and wheat boards.

And in hard times, of course, we used to believe in the equality of sacrifice, a value we seem to have lost today. No communities know more about having to shoulder the unequal burden of economic change than country and regional Australia. They have made the sacrifice of jobs, public services and the loss of their young people to the employment centres of the cities, while many in the harbourside suburbs have prospered and partied.

The point is, we do our best when we all feel part of the same community, the same Australia; when we're all in it together.

I think the time has come to give some structure to this team spirit. I think the time has come for Australia to have a form of national service.

I do not necessarily mean military service. Some people may choose- and I emphasise choose -- to serve in the military but many others may want to perform civilian service or work overseas in developing countries.

The key point is that while the form of service would be a matter of personal choice, the service itself would not. It would be compulsory for all Australians between the ages of 18 and 25 to spend just ONE year of their lives giving something to their local communities, their nation or representing their country overseas and making Australia a great world citizen again; the kind of world citizen that was at the centre of the action in 1945 and 1946 when we were building the United Nations.

Some people who call themselves progressive -- and that certainly includes me -- will be aghast. They will say this is an infringement on personal liberty -- and indeed it is. Just like compulsory school education infringes the liberty of 14-year-olds; or paying taxes infringes the liberty of chief executive officers (although they seemed to have escaped this obligation over the past 20 years); or obeying the speed limit infringes the freedom of all us to drive as fast as our cars will go.

But we accept these infringements because they contribute ultimately to a better society.

And what better program could there be than one that repairs and extends this country and boosts its place in the world?

What could be better than a program that sees the daughter of a merchant banker from Bellevue Hill working side by side for one year with the son of a Vietnamese immigrant greengrocer from Cabramatta and the niece of a wheatfarmer from Cowra?

Some of the most progressive, industrialised and educated countries in the world -- countries with the highest standards of living -- already have national service: Sweden, Norway, Germany, The Netherlands, Italy, Greece.

In the United States, Bill Clinton introduced Americorps and Teach For America as voluntary schemes, building on John F. Kennedy's initiative of the Peace Corps. I say let's go one step further and make service central to Australian citizenship.

Think of what we could achieve.

Young Australians could use the program not only to serve their country, but to develop their talents and interests.

If you're good with kids, you could work on a scheme that provides not only after-school supervision but help with homework.

If you care about the natural environment, you could throw yourself into bush regeneration and the fight against salinity.

If you're an arts-oriented person, you could work in community theatre or community radio.

And because you could complete this year of service anytime between the ages of 18 and 25 -- either before or after university, TAFE or an apprenticeship -- you could share the skills that you have learned:

our young medical graduates working in rural health centres or in the shockingly neglected Aboriginal communities;
our newly graduated engineers working to get the rivers flowing again;
our computer-programmers working to connect the most remote outback schools to the internet;
our business school graduates teaching personal finance to people moving off welfare and back into work;
our smart young lawyers, before they take off for the corporate world and the big dollars, working with juvenile offenders to teach them responsibility and give them one more chance.

The possibilities are limitless.

And for those who believe, as I do, that Australia's power in the world comes from what we contribute to it, there would be the chance to be ambassadors for friendship; to work throughout Asia, the Pacific and Africa, in villages and city slums that need clean water and medicines and teachers. When President Kennedy farewelled the first group of Peace Corps volunteers in Rose Garden of the White House in 1961, he told them they were embarking on a great mission of friendship and love for humanity.

Now, this is idealistic -- very much so -- but it is also very do-able. We can afford it. Just do some basic sums.

Every year between 1971 and 2001, the number of Australians who have turned 18 years old was between about 125,000 and 140,000 (except for one year in the mid 1980s when it reached 151,000). So that would be approximately the annual cohort, although given that you would have seven years in which to complete this national service, some years would have fewer participants, others more.

If you paid each person a tax-free allowance in today's terms of $20,000 the annual cost would be about $2.8 billion. Add another $200 million in administration costs and you have a total of about $3 billion a year.

A lot of money, you say. Sure.

But so too is the $2 billion the federal government has spent on consultants; or the $665 million it has spent on advertising telling us how good it is; or $195 million spent on ethanol production subsidies, of which 96 per cent goes to just one company (Manildra).

The Australian Council of Social Service estimates that we give away about $3 billion a year to the most fortunate in our community through tax loopholes that 90 to 95 per cent of us don't get; such as private consultants on huge fees being taxed at 30 per cent less than the average wage earner. That alone costs us $1.3 billion.

We could also redirect some of the money we spend on training programs for the young unemployed because, for one year at least, they would be gaining on-the-job experience in the most creative way.

And we should not be afraid to ask our major corporations to contribute because they, more than any other group, would benefit from a better-prepared workforce.

Fellow Australians,

This is not manifesto. It is not really even a detailed policy. It is no more than an idea from someone who has thought, just a little bit, about how we can all feel more Australian.

It is an idea that realises, in a concrete way the value of egalitarianism, often expressed but rarely practised.

It is a suggestion for building friendships across the country between Australians who otherwise would never meet; and friendships across the world with countries that want to be as lucky as ours.

It is about saying that no matter how rich or poor you are; no matter who your parents are; no matter where you went to school or where you will go afterwards, for this year we are all Australians with a common purpose and a common future.

It is about saying that we are all on the team.

Thank you.

John F. Kennedy's remarks to the first Peace Corps volunteers in the Rose Garden at the White House before their departure for service in Ghana and Tanganyika (now Tanzania), August 28, 1961

'There are of course a great many hundreds of millions of people scattered throughout the world. You will come in contact with only a few, but the great impression of what kind of country we have and what kind people we are will depend on their judgment, in these countries, of you. You will be the personification of a special group of young Americans, and if you can impress them with your commitment to freedom, to the advancement of the interests of people everywhere, to your pride in your country and its best traditions and what it stands for, the influence may be far-reaching and will go far beyond the immediate day-to-day tasks that you may do in the months ahead.
So I hope you realize - I know you do - that the future of the Peace Corps really rests with you. If you do well, then the Peace Corps will be developed and more and more Americans will go abroad and will find a greater and greater response to this idea of serving our country.'