Memorandum of understanding speech by Dr Basil Hetzel
Chancellor, University of South Australia
Speech on the occasion of the signing of the Memorandum of
Understanding between the Hon R J L Hawke AC and the University of South
Australia to establish the Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre, 9 December
1997
Your Excellency the Governor of South Australia, Sir Eric Neal Former Prime
Minister, The Honourable Bob Hawke Vice Chancellor Denise Bradley,
Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen. It is my privilege and pleasure
as Chancellor to welcome you all to the new City West Campus of the
University of South Australia, opened in February this year by the Governor
General.
We are here today to mark the foundation of a dynamic Australian project -
the establishment of the Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre - a Centre that
will not only document and store an important part of Australian political
history, but will provide research and inspiration that will help to build
our future.
In being named after Robert James Lee Hawke, the Centre acknowledges
Australia’s second longest serving Prime Minister and his remarkable record
of achieving reconciliation in the Australian nation. But, more than this,
it will acknowledge and demonstrate that Australian leaders such as Bob
Hawke make a significant impact on regional and international politics, and
on our place in the world.
The Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre is based in essence on the
Presidential Libraries and Centres now well established in the United
States. What these centres do is to bring together, preserve and indeed
analyse part of the nation’s history around the term of a President.
It is to our University Librarian, Alan Bundy, that we are indebted for the
original idea of this Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre at the University
of South Australia in the State where Bob Hawke was born just 68 years ago
today.
We remember that during Bob Hawke’s Prime Ministership, Australia and the
world underwent unprecedented social changes.
In Australia we floated the dollar, established the ACTU and Government
Accord, held our first National Economic Summit Conference, lived through
the boom of the 80s and its inevitable bust, struggled with unemployment,
introduced equal opportunity legislation, saved the Franklin, modernised
universities, and by the by, we won the America’s Cup.
And Bob Hawke was centrally involved in these events - and none of us will
forget him in his magnificent blazer celebrating Australia’s win in the
America’s Cup!!
On the world stage we saw the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of
the Soviet Union, the Gulf War, the explosion of the AIDS virus, the
Tienanmen Square Massacre and the evolution of Asia as an economic giant.
Today this signing ceremony marks the first step in the development of the
Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre as a new national institution within the
University of South Australia.
The Centre marks a commitment by the University to help the Australian
people to understand where we have been as a nation and where we want to
take ourselves in the future.
It will include both the Hawke Library and Research Institute and the Hawke
Institute. The Hawke Institute will house seven of our existing research
groups in the fields of education, social justice, mediation and
reconciliation, comprising some 30 staff, the Institute will become
functional on 1st January 1998.
We are most grateful for the support of six eminent Patrons - the Governor
of South Australia, Sir Eric Neal as Patron-in-Chief; his predecessor Dame
Roma Mitchell; former Chair of ATSIC and Doctor of the University, Dr Lois
O’Donoghue; Former Governor Generals of Australia, Sir Zelman Cowan and Sir
Ninian Stephen; and President of the ACTU Ms Jennie George.
The creation of the Centre also includes the Bob Hawke Memorial Lecture. The
inaugural lecture will be given by Bob Hawke himself at the University in
May 1998.
It is with great pleasure that I now ask His Excellency the Governor Sir
Eric Neal to speak.