E&OE…
To all the staff, officials, parents, families and most importantly the students – this is a really important anniversary, I didn’t get the chance to learn about things like this when I was your age, and I think it is fantastic that we are engaging younger Australians in some of these great traditions of our democracy.
It is hard to understand how an 800 year old document written in Latin that has very few catchy phrases or quotable quotes relates to how you grow up in this country. But think of some basic rights that you have, Tim mentioned a few and the video went through a few others. Think about the fact that you can go to a court, or your mum or dad, or older brother or sister can go to a court to contest a speeding fine, the fact that the Government can be taken to court on an issue, whether it is about the neighbour building an extension or a new road being built, or any issue that comes up at any level of government.
They are key principles that 800 years ago were first established in this document: the idea that the most powerful force in our land is the law.
Now it wasn’t particularly democratic at that time, we were not talking about every person, every man and woman getting a vote, as the video outlined it was really about the feudal lords – the people who had serfs, the people who ruled the land. The point they established was that no one individual had absolute power. The point they established was that the law, established by common consent, would actually bind everyone in the land. Over the course of the next 300 to 500 years the people who decided what that law was got wider and wider, until we got to the point where everyone gets to vote.
Now that’s a fantastic achievement and Australia has inherited so many things from these movements. The fact that under Commonwealth law in Australia if you are being tried for a serious offence our Constitution guarantees you the right to be tried jury. The fact that the Commonwealth Parliament cannot pass any law that it wants, it cannot decide what the speed limits are because they are for state parliaments. Power has been divided so that one member of parliament, one chamber, one prime minister, one premier cannot decide everything.
The fact that the Commonwealth Parliament cannot pass a law to say everyone in Australia has to be a Christian or a particular denomination of Christianity. This idea, these rights that we have, expressed in the American Bill of Rights for American citizens and some of those things I have mentioned for Australians, all flow from this idea that law is the most important force in our society and that since that point when the consent of some established that law was necessary, we have spent 800 years widening that so now that everyone gets a say.
This is where it comes to Australia, because one of the things that we teach now which we didn’t teach a couple of decades ago is how important Australia was in this democratic experiment.
The secret ballot was invented in Australia, the idea that your boss can’t stand over your shoulder and look at who you vote for. Because, believe it or not, in many places around the world in the 19th century where they did have elections, there wasn’t any secrecy attached to it. Imagine if your boss could say: you don’t keep your job unless you vote for my preferred candidate. Some of these huge democratic innovations, ensuring that women have the right to vote, ensuring that every adult citizen had the right to vote, have given this liberal democracy that since the tragedy of two world wars in the last century has now been exported to hundreds of millions of people around the world.
That is an important tradition you carry with you. That is why Magna Carta is important, not because our modern society was established 800 years ago by some barons forcing a king to sign a document. But because the principles it established meant for the next 800 years people could have more and more say in how they were governed and the idea that a government exists by the consent of its citizens has flowed from that very document. You are the inheritors of that, and our job is not just to protect it, it is to expand it to as many people in the world, because tragically there are still hundreds of millions of citizens who do not have the rights that you will grow up with.
I hope you enjoy learning about the Magna Carta, it’s a fantastic innovation, well done Tim and thank you for having me here today.
(ENDS)