We need to be lifters, not leaners, if our nation is to thrive
Adapted form Cassandra Wilkinson
article in Weekend Australian 10.3.12.
Sir Robert
Menzies delivered his revered speech “The Forgotten People” on May 22 1942. He
was concerned that after the war, Australia would be “deeply diminished in
human capital and shaken to the foundations of its social structures”.
There was a
risk of ‘levelling” or socialism as the State would need to step in and play a
part in helping rebuild people’s lives. He said; “What really happens to us
will depend on how many people we have who are of the great and sober and
dynamic middle-class – the strivers, the planners, the ambitious ones.
The middle
class is always the measure of how the people ‘lift’ and become self-dependent.
It is the extension of the government into the mainstream or middle-class
Australians’ that has driven rising government expenditure and increasing
political control into our everyday life.
He told
listeners: “The great vice of democracy is that for generations we have been
getting ourselves onto the list of beneficiaries and removing ourselves from
the list of contributors, as if somewhere that was somebody else’s wealth and
somebody else’s effort on which we could thrive.”
Today, to
every problem, the government’s response is a new tax, a new regulation or a
new bureaucracy.
Menzies had
set out to solve this problem by forming the Liberal Party to promote ideas
that would give future population the strong arms of ‘lifters’ instead of the
flabby bellies of ‘leaners”. He wanted people with a strong liberal spirit.
So many of
the things we relied on a middle-class family to do for itself now have a role
for government - from feeding children correctly, to building a granny flat or,
for that matter, deciding what newspaper column is acceptable to read.
It is the
middle-class itself that has insisted on its own enfeeblement with continual
demands for the regulation of daily life and for insisting on the elevation of
concerns such as animal rights and the environment as if nobody would have to
pay or as if there were a source of unlimited wealth to draw on.
One day the
mines will be empty and our descendants will rightly curse us if we have
misused our national bounty to abdicate our responsibility to be industrious,
self-reliant and ambitious.
These are the
qualities on which success in an unknowable future depends. We undermine them
at our peril.
http://www.liberals.net/theforgottenpeople.htm
- The Forgotten People speech link
Mario Calanna
CEO Calanna Pharmacy Group
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