Blueprint For A Nation - First article in The ABC Weekly, 1945
A series of three articles written by Professor W. Murdoch (Chancellor of the University of Western Australia) on the nature of Australia and its future relations to Democracy. These three articles and an introductory editorial were published in The ABC Weekly Journal way back in 1945.
- Blueprint For A Nation by Prof. Walter Murdoch - Editorial
- Blueprint For A Nation by Prof. Walter Murdoch - 1st Article
- Blueprint For A Nation by Prof. Walter Murdoch - 2nd Article
- Blueprint For A Nation by Prof. Walter Murdoch - 3rd Article
Blueprint For a Nation - First Article
By Professor W. Murdoch (Chancellor of the University of Western Australia)
(July 21, 1945 - The ABC Weekly)
This is the first of a series of articles by Professor W. Murdoch, who claims that "a spiritual re-birth, the kindling of the flame of a common faith, a general turning towards higher standards of living in the true sense of that much-abused phrase" are needed to save democracy in Australia.
On the morrow of the resounding victory in Europe, Australia is bowling along very merrily.
True, a rather essential part of Australia is being blown away — the top soil, the productive part; but nobody cares. The Government is sure to do something about it.
Anyway, it does not matter very much; our birthrate is going steadily down; in a hundred years enough of the soil will be left to produce food for what's left of the Australian people.
The Commonwealth Department of Public Health has lately published a report on the causes of the declining birthrate; have you read it? Of course you haven't; you haven’t learnt to read such things. In fact the vast majority of Australians haven't learnt to read at all. They've learnt the alphabet, but they haven't learnt to read, except, of course, the sporting pages,
The rationing business is a nuisance, or at least it was until a friend showed us the back lane leading to the black market.
When there was some discussion about how we were going to celebrate V-E Day, the one thing that occurred to the minds of our statesmen was that the pubs must be closed. Picture theatres were also to be closed; I haven't yet been able to think why.
Some of us fell back on another luxury: we had a few strikes. Mind, I don't say that the strikers were in the wrong, or that the employers were in the wrong; but I do say that a strike in wartime is a crime, whether employers or the employees are the criminals.
The moral atmosphere in Australia to-day is an atmosphere of
complacency, of indifference, of apathy, of selfishness.
As long as horse-racing and our other amusements are not interfered with, we don’t care whether this Australian nation is climbing to the heights or drifting to the abyss.
I think of those 20,000 good Australian men now enduring slavery to inhuman masters and living on their faith in us, their confidence that we are doing all we can to rescue them.
When they come back, broken in body and some of them broken in mind, these men whom so many of us seem to have forgotten, what will they think of the jolly life we've been leading? What will they think of the strikes by which their rescue has been delayed?
And I think of the many thousands of men, young, but veterans, now at the fighting front; don’t you think they will be somewhat embittered when they come back? I fancy some of them will say, “The Nazis were right after all — democracy is a failure.” This must not be.
What are we to do? Are there any definite agenda for Australia?
I must remind you of certain truths which have become truisms. The first is that this war is not just another war, more terrible than other wars because science has put in our hands more terrible weapons and more appalling methods of destruction.
Why have we been fighting Germany and why are we fighting Japan? If anyone answers that question with an answer drawn from international politics, or from economics or from racial incompatibility, he is talking as childishly as the people who put it all down to the wickedness of a lunatic named Hitler.
To see this war in true perspective we have to realize that it isn’t just a war, but a revolution, by far the most tremendous in human history. We have to look on the slaughter and devastation and agony of to-day as the birth-pangs of a new world.
Whether from the torn and tormented womb of humanity a monster or an angel is to come forth is a question which the optimist and the pessimist will answer each after his kind. But I think we know enough to predict some of the inevitable features of the new era.
In the first place, planning is going to be a feature of it — planning to an extent undreamed of before. Gone for ever are the old, haphazard, pleasant ways — pleasant, at least, to the lucky few, but far from pleasant for the vast mass of mankind.
Once for all, the free world, in the sense of the unplanned world, has got itself into such a mess as is intolerable to gods and men. The day of the planners has dawned.
It would seem that we have not been caught short of planners. Just as the Allied leaders met at various places to plan the grand strategy of war, so the strategy of peace has been planned by experts In conference. Already, before the German surrender, starving people in Greece were being fed and clothed by UNRRA, the result of a gigantic piece of planning.
The plans have to be made by experts without our having any say in them; and they will have to be carried out by experts, who will not consult you or me. Where do we come in? And we don’t come in at all, where does democracy come in? Shall we have broken the tyranny of the militarists of Germany and Japan only to suffer under the tyranny of our own experts?
I do not think so, but I do think we have got to take thought and see what it is that we really value in democracy.
More than ever before, Cabinet Ministers will have to recognize their own amateurishness and their need of expert advice. Our rulers will be ruled by the experts; that, I think, is inevitable.
We shall see in our midst a huge army of officials, and the danger to all that we used to mean by freedom and democracy is obvious.
Victory will still be a matter of rejoicing; it will have saved us from unspeakable horrors and humiliations, but it will not have brought us all our fighting men have fought for and died for if it leaves us to live as tame sheep in the flock of bureaucracy.
It will not mean that out of the ashes of the old world of master and slave has risen a new world of free men. It will have been a victory for the democracies, but a defeat for democracy.
When the cease fire is sounded at last, the reward of it all must not be a return to the old world of self-seeking and exploitation and uncontrolled greed; but neither must it be a world of comfort and ease and security, with every house furnished with every good thing — except freedom.
What is needed, before we can save democracy in Australia, is a spiritual rebirth, the kindling of the flame of a common faith, a general turning towards higher standards of living in the true sense of that much-abused phrase.
(To be continued)