To be asked to deliver the Robert Nestdale Oration is a particular privilege in this year of notable occasions, the year when Australia celebrates its centenary as a nation. This also marks an opportunity to consider the direction of the Liberal Party after a period of sustained attack on the Young Liberal Movement in recent years. It is also a chance to reflect on the values held by Robert Nestdale and how they fare in today's party.
I am very conscious of the young heritage we recognise in tonight's gathering and of the contribution made by previous orators including my former staff members Catherine Cusack and Joe Hockey, and other federal politicians like Marise Payne, Peter Baume and the first Nestdale orator Phillip Ruddock.
The Young Liberal Movement which I joined in 1968 had amongst its rising stars Phillip Ruddock, Chris Puplick and Robert Nestdale. Even then John Howard was the acknowledged trailblazer, the first NSW President of the Young Liberal Movement and had already won an entrenched position on the NSW State Executive of the Party. While Phillip Ruddock and Chris Puplick were also to go on to careers in Federal Parliament — with Phillip Ruddock still in the front line — Robert Nestdale was never to serve in any Parliament.
Regardless of that, we remember Robert today as well we should. Personal legacy is not merely a product of a high position held but is more importantly a matter of values and aspiration. People join the Young Liberal Movement and the Liberal Party to make a better life for all Australians. That path is one which needs to be lit up at a time when detours and obstacles proliferate.
Robert Nestdale's contribution as a liberal was not through the Parliament but through the networks he established in political circles and in the community at large. There could be no more important reaffirmation of the relevance of Liberal Party membership than the example set by Robert Nestdale.
As one who knew him, I immediately recall his sense of style, his humour and his insight. Good looking, intelligent, witty — Robert Nestdale was like a political Bryan Ferry, a name probably lost on younger members!
I do not recall any occasion with Robert that did not include laughter. It was an ingredient which disarmed people and put them at ease, usually so Robert could then either win his point or get what he wanted. An immaculate dresser himself, he would often lighten up proceedings by a disparaging aside about someone's shirt not matching their tie or the like. Before smiles had disappeared, Nestdale would come quickly to the point. Even his enemies had to like him.
Very much a child of the 1960's, Robert Nestdale liked to quote John or Robert Kennedy, not in a slavish, sycophantic way but as one who picked up the message of hope and of universal human values. While this identification with non-Australian role models may seem distant today, it represented membership of the "global village" a term coined by 1960's media guru Marshall McLuhan.
That spirit which pervaded the 1960's — that one person can make a difference — certainly captured Robert Nestdale as it did the generation of baby-boomers both here and around the world.
The politics of compassion, intervention and involvement captured the baby-boomers as they studied and entered the workforce only later to be confronted in mid-career — 15 years later — by the politics of Thatcherism with its Market Forces and User-Pays ideology. But for Robert and so many others, compassion always came first.
Robert was keenly interested in a cause which I drove strongly in the forums of the Liberal Party in the late 1960's. I proposed the establishment of a civilian alternative to military National Service along the lines of the US Peace Corps which sent young American volunteers to work on aid projects in underdeveloped countries. This could be one of a range of non-military alternatives for young Australians who were then being conscripted during the Vietnam War. Robert Nestdale proposed a Youth Corps — along similar lines — to work on overseas aid programs.
This concept was ultimately to lead Robert into a new personal crusade and to the National Directorship of UNICEF in Australia. Robert's vision was not limited by constitutional boundaries. In less than five years, Robert's drive grew UNICEF funding in Australia to an unprecedented $14 million annually. This benefited 40,000 children per year in staving off malnutrition and preventing disease. These were practical results and Robert pursued them relentlessly, stylishly. None of his friends could forget his coup when actor Audrey Hepburn came to Sydney to help praise UNICEF funds. It was classic Robert Nestdale.
Robert abhorred racial intolerance. That much at least he had in common with Malcolm Fraser whose government he had slammed at the 1981 National Convention of the Young Liberal Movement in Hobart. The Australian newspaper had highlighted Robert Nestdale's vigorous criticism of the Fraser Government as one of the "most hard hitting ever delivered at a national Young Liberal Convention". Nestdale had said that criticism of the Liberal Party for being insensitive to the poor, the young, the black, the ethnic, the sick, the jobless, the disabled and the homeless had some justification. This speech did not endear him to Prime Minister Fraser or his government.
Given Fraser's direct and personal condemnation of South African apartheid laws some of this criticism was highly objectionable. But Robert knew that such views were not an article of faith in the Liberal Party. He was determined to make the strongest possible point.
In a profession where talk comes cheap, Robert Nestdale spoke with sincerity, conviction and credibility. While some of his methods may have been seen as unorthodox, he returned an unswerving loyalty to an often unhearing party. He was prepared to talk out but did not talk down the Party.
Since Robert's death in 1989 much has changed yet much has stayed the same.
When Robert Nestdale died, Nick Greiner was Premier of NSW and I was Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party and Health Minister. After some Wran Government efforts to improve public accountability in the mid-1980's (including the emergence of the Public Accounts Committee), Nick Greiner set about a reform agenda for NSW consistent with those taken by Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom a few years earlier.
NSW under Greiner was the first Australian State to fundamentally address the issue of core services; to sell off government businesses and, to open the public sector to competitive tendering. The Greiner/Fahey State government divested itself of interests in banking, insurance and printing. Maintenance and cleaning were outsourced. Major transport initiatives — rail and road — were brittle and operated by the private sector.
Although each step was vehemently opposed by an ideologically paralysed Labor Party, what followed was without precedent. Labor put on the very mantle of privatisation which it had initially rejected. For Labor only one thing stood between condemnation and acclamation: that was simply being in government.
While NSW was the first wave, Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia soon followed with their State economies left much the worse by defeated Labor governments which had earlier speculated with massive sums of taxpayers money. Queensland was an exception with the replacement of the Bjelke Petersen National-led era by the new look, new Labor Wayne Goss who had far more in common with Nick Greiner than Joh ever did.
Both the end and culmination of this political cycle occurred in 1996 with the election of the Coalition led (again) by John Howard to Federal Government. With a relatively short run-up, the veteran former Treasurer saw the political landscape turn from uncertainty and hesitation to a resounding win. Howard's experience stamina and resilience demonstrated above all that the Australian electorate wants substance over style; sustained performance over flashiness.
Paul Keating had, as Prime Minister, already privatised government owned institutions like Qantas and the Commonwealth Bank, but the Howard Government continued down the list selling off a substantial part of Telstra (after being stopped from selling all of it), and a list of other government businesses such as Australian Defence Industries.
Undeservedly, instead of praise for doing what was long overdue, the Liberal Party has been blamed for starting it all, starting the sell-off of government developed assets. For its part, Labor has generally been adept at accentuating the negative and eliminating the positive elements of privatisation.
A serious shift in the way we describe things happened during this period. During this period passengers, patients, clients, subscribers, recipients, beneficiaries, dependants all became customers. Safety nets became business plans. Basic services paid for by taxes and designed to help the poor became Community Service Obligations (CSO's). The language changed. Collateral damage was sustained in some sectors of the economy.
Take rural and regional Australia. Job loss across the small towns of Australia has taken a toll unimagined by Ministers of all political parties who have signed off on downsizing and closure proposals from their Departments. The reduction of hospital staff, closure of local rail maintenance facilities, the scrapping of agricultural advisory positions have all whittled away at the towns and villages of Australia. Static or plummeting produce prices, losses to overseas markets as a result of so-called "free-trade" have seen many of our farmers go to the wall as the hidden government subsidies paid to their own farm sector opens up export opportunities. The result is the emergence of a rural under-class, many of whom leave the land, leave the town and head for the city.
The Robert Nestdale I knew would not have ignored this issue. His crusade for UNICEF was bringing results and saving lives in third world countries. His outrage over the killing of Australian newsmen in 1975 in East Timor has been vindicated by the Australian led intervention in what is now a newly emerging democracy. But what of our own poor and marginalised? What has happened to them would trouble Robert Nestdale, as it must trouble us.
I can imagine Robert just back from country NSW or outback Queensland resplendent in a crisp Oxford blue shirt wearing white moleskins (still with the creases in them) and lightly dusted RM Williams boots. After copping the jokes about his country rig, Robert would talk about the people who were doing it tough and the need for us, we Liberals, to do something to help them hold on and peg out a claim - like the rest of us - in the future.
This leads me to four points I want to make about this new divide, the people on the other side of the sandstone curtain we know as the Blue Mountains.
First, it is imperative that the Liberal Party develop a plan for Australians who live outside our coastal cities. New technology, for the first time, makes decentralisation of bureaucracy and ancillary services a genuine possibility. The private sector has recognised this with the establishment of call-centres in country areas.
Secondly, the time has come for a benchmark, whole-of-government study on the cost-benefit of closing country services and its flow-on effect. On arrival in more-expensive metropolitan areas, the costs of new public housing, hospitals, schools and other services well outweigh the benefits of salary and employment maintenance in regional areas. Such a study should preferably be done on a national basis but could, failing that, be left to individual States. The savings made by closure in one government agency are almost certainly outweighed by larger costs in other agencies at the metropolitan receiving end.
Thirdly, abandoning the orthodoxy of the last 15 years, governments may need to pick regional "winners" ie regional growth centres exhibiting the capacity and determination to survive and grow. These centres, regional cities, would need to be resourced to offer education, health, communications and transport services comparable to those found in the suburbs of our coastal cities.
Fourthly, additional funding will be needed to achieve such a regional revival. In the case of NSW, a substantial quarantined fund could be established from the proceeds of electricity privatisation - a plan which disappeared without trace when the Liberal Party pulled the plug on itself at the 1999 State election. Nothing has been heard of it since.
I say here tonight that the last major State privatisation for NSW to tackle is actually the one which offers the greatest benefit across the State and could bankroll a new era for the Bush. Three billion dollars pumped into a dozen chosen regional centres would turn the tide. Two people who know this are Premier Bob Carr and Treasurer Michael Egan but no one is saying a word, least of all within the Liberal Party in the NSW Parliament.
Robert Nestdale was not one to be cowered into silence. He spurned getting by on cliches about "caring and listening". For him, Liberalism was something to proclaim as he did sometimes to his personal career detriment. He was less concerned about lining his personal pockets than being an instrument for constructive social change.
The chasm between rich and poor is worse now than it was in the 1980's. There is a real poverty cycle again. Our Party has always been about breaking the poverty cycle. Menzies believed in a "fair go" and set about providing it. Menzies knew that political strength was about the middle ground not bi-polar growth with the rich growing their assets, and the poor simply growing.
All of this takes me back to the point where Robert Nestdale and I first met: the Young Liberal Movement. Some of you here tonight will be surprised to know that back then — when I first joined the Liberal Party — I was regarded as belonging on the Right of the Party. That presumption stemmed from my strong and abiding interest in the Defence portfolio and my service in the Reserve Forces now spanning 37 years.
In politics, people like to be able to label those who might ever aspire to elected office. It is important, in the Young Liberals and in life, not to label people too soon. As Phillip Ruddock proves, it is possible to take a hard-line on illegal immigration and be deeply concerned about genuine oppression and poverty.
It is consistent to take an open-minded approach to victimless crime as Robert and I did in the 1960's and, simultaneously, a hard line on violent crime. It is both credible and desirable to take a strong stand on the defence of Australia but an open and flexible attitude to our lifestyle.
Ours is a party which emphasises individualism for better or, sometimes, for worse. Individual achievement has, on the other side of the coin, the isolation of failure. Labor has always been, and remains, more tribal than our own Party — more tribal in looking after their own, more tribal in covering for each other.
It is no accident that during my twenty years as a Member of the NSW Parliament, I have employed more State Young Liberal Presidents than any other MP, State or Federal. Chris Crawford, Catherine Cusack, Don Harwin, Joe Hockey, Andrew Maiden, Gladys Berejiklian, Louise Asher have served on my staff.
Although serving on the backbench since December 1998, I have continued to employ Belinda Lawton who is now Policy Vice President of the NSW Movement.
Above all though, the Young Liberals have overall been the pathfinders in compassion and innovation. By no means always right, but usually driven by optimism, generosity of spirit and a sense of hope — all qualities found in Robert Nestdale. All qualities which I believe should guide Liberals of any age through any age.