I begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we meet and I pay my respects to their elders past, present and emerging.
Eighty years ago acting Prime Minister Frank Forde rose in the House of Representatives and told a still and sombre chamber:
“The Captain has been stricken in sight of the shore.”
Through the dark days of conflict, Curtin had urged the men and women of Australia forward to:
“Victory in war, victory for the peace”.
He would not live to see either, yet no Australian did more to achieve both.
It is an honour to be with you tonight to reflect on the extraordinary and enduring achievements of a Labor icon and a great Australian.
Through 124 years of our Federation and 31 Prime Ministers of Australia, John Curtin stands apart.
No leader of our nation has faced a sterner test.
No-one has known a darker hour.
And no Prime Minister has carried more on their shoulders, alone.
During the collapse of the Menzies and Fadden Governments, John Curtin did not push to seize power.
Instead, power came to him. The Parliament and the nation turned to Labor.
And within four months of being sworn in as Prime Minister, Curtin found himself leading the ‘Battle for Australia’.
Singapore had fallen, Darwin had been bombed.
And he was locked in a battle of wills with the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill as well as the President of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt.
John Curtin, a person so mindful of his flaws and limitations, pushing back against two of the most powerful men in the world and two of the most forceful personalities of 20th Century politics.
This moment is the core of the Curtin legend.
Two divisions of the Australian Imperial Force, returning from the Middle East.
Curtin wanted those troops for the defence of Australia.
Churchill wanted them in Burma – and Roosevelt backed him.
Barely two months after Curtin had said that Australia ‘looked to America’, America was telling us to listen to Britain.
It says a great deal about the nature of our relationship with Britain up to that point and indeed the character of Curtin’s predecessors that Churchill had assumed Australia would roll over.
We know this because he had already given orders for the admiralty troopships carrying Australian soldiers to change course and steam to Rangoon.
Diplomatic cables between leaders can be wrapped in all kinds of formalities and flattery.
Curtin’s message to Churchill on learning this news is a study in the power of plain speaking.
Language sanded back so you can see the grain.
First, he rebukes Churchill for treating Australia’s agreement to the diversion of Australian soldiers: ‘merely as a matter of form’.
And he goes on, speaking not just for his party or his government but for his country:
“We feel a primary obligation to save Australia”.
Some historians downplay the military significance of that moment.
They argue the threat of invasion was always exaggerated.
But consider the counterfactual.
If Churchill and FDR had got their way, Australian forces would have arrived in Burma barely a week before it fell to the Japanese.
Hundreds if not thousands of Australians would have been killed, or taken prisoner.
It would have been a disaster every bit as crushing to national morale as the fall of Singapore.
Instead, Curtin prevailed.
And he paid for that victory with the hardest and loneliest weeks of his life.
Knowing those transports, those Australian troops, were out on the Indian Ocean on his orders.
This was the solitary burden he bore on his long walks, around the base of Mount Ainslie.
And back and forth in the grounds of The Lodge, under the moonlight. His mind a thousand miles away, fearful of the very worst.
No-one could truly know the weight he carried in those days.
But all could see the toll it took.
Even when the 7th Division docked safely in Adelaide, that pattern of mental and physical strain had been set.
Today, at the safe distance of eight decades, the story of the Second World War is set in our memory.
The Allied victory over tyranny has, in retrospect, taken on a feel of inevitability.
Part of the debt we owe to Curtin, together with all the men and women who served Australia in that terrible conflict, is to remind ourselves how close history came to taking a different path.
Curtin grasped that.
And he never pretended to the people, or to himself, that dealing with these choices came easily.
John Curtin dedicated his life to our country – and he gave his life for Australia.
His colleagues saw him as a casualty of the war, as much as any fallen soldier.
And that self-sacrifice has shaped every reflection on his legacy.
When Prime Minister Gough Whitlam laid the foundation stone for John Curtin House in Canberra in 1974.
He paid moving tribute to a man ‘enslaved by the times’ for whom ‘time was a cruel master’.
That is a fundamental, inescapable part of the John Curtin story.
But it is not the whole.
His leadership has earned a bigger place in history than that.
And his legacy runs deeper than that, for our party and for our country.
Because Curtin restored in Labor what he revived in Australia:
Unity and purpose in times of crisis and uncertainty.
Ambition and co-operation in pursuit of opportunity.
And, above all, the confidence and determination to think and act for ourselves.
To follow our own course and shape our own future.
Curtin once said that the greatness of the Australian labour movement lay in the fact that it:
“had never followed the flags of other lands, or patterned itself on the movements which originated in other places.”
This was the country John Curtin was born into.
The ‘social laboratory’, ‘the workers’ paradise’.
A nation that led the world in creating a fair minimum wage, independently set.
A pension when you grew old, support if you got sick.
Protections – and respect – for the right of workers to organise and bargain and demand better for themselves.
And a democracy that was stronger because women could vote in elections and run for parliament.
That spirit of social democratic creativity had ebbed away under conservative governments.
Curtin, together with Chifley, gave it new life and meaning.
Curtin empowered Chifley to lead the Department of Reconstruction in 1942. Think about that.
As John Edwards wrote:
“Roosevelt remade the US economy before the war.
Atlee remade the British economy after the war.
Curtin remade the Australian economy during the war.”
Because his vision, even in the darkest hour of conflict, was for a peace worth the winning.
A nation that honoured the courage and sacrifice of its citizens, with more than monuments and memorials.
Where the bravery of Australians had won them the right to build a good life for themselves and their families.
With new opportunities in education.
Secure, well-paid jobs in manufacturing.
Affordable medicines through the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.
And a society where, to quote that Government’s housing policy, a home was ‘not only the need but the right of every citizen’.
I used those same words at our campaign launch in Perth this year.
Because while our nation has changed beyond the imagining of the Labor generations that have gone before us, respect for the aspirations of the Australian people still drives us.
And the spirit of progressive patriotism still moves us.
We understand that part of what makes this the best country on earth, is that all of us share a responsibility and a determination to make it even better and fairer.
That is why we are making the biggest ever investment in Medicare.
So more Australians than ever before can see a doctor for free.
It’s why we’ve made it clear that under our Labor Government, the PBS is not up for negotiation.
And it is why on Tuesday, we built on two great Labor reforms – and brought them together.
We lifted superannuation to 12 per cent.
We expanded Paid Parental Leave by a further two weeks.
And for the first time ever, we are adding superannuation to it.
So women who take time away from work to be with their new baby, don’t pay a penalty in retirement.
This is about building an economy and a society that upholds Australian values – and values every Australian.
That is the Labor way.
And it is the Australian way, under Labor.
Because we do not seek our inspiration overseas. We find it right here in our people.
And we carry it with us, in the way we engage with the world.
John Curtin is rightly honoured as the founder of Australia’s alliance with the United States.
A pillar of our foreign policy.
Our most important defence and security partnership.
And a relationship that commands bipartisan support, respect and affection in both our nations.
Yet our Alliance with the US ought to be remembered as a product of Curtin’s leadership in defence and foreign policy, not the extent of it.
Because Curtin’s famous statement that Australia ‘looked to America’ was much more than the idea of trading one strategic guarantor for another.
Or swapping an alliance with the old world for one with the new.
It was a recognition that Australia’s fate would be decided in our region.
It followed the decision Curtin had made in 1941 that Australia would issue its own declaration of war with Japan.
Speaking for ourselves, as a sovereign nation.
Where Menzies had said that because Britain was at war with Germany, as a result Australia was also at war.
Under Labor, Curtin said Australia was at war:
“Because our vital interests are imperilled and because the rights of free people in the whole Pacific are assailed.”
That’s what Curtin recognised – this was a Pacific war.
It was its own conflict which demanded its own strategy.
Our security could not be outsourced to London, or trusted to vague assurances from Britain.
We needed an Australian foreign policy anchored in strategic reality, not bound by tradition.
Dealing with the world as it is, not as we would like it to be.
As Paul Keating put it, in his John Curtin Memorial Lecture.
“Curtin began us thinking in our own terms.”
So we remember Curtin not just because he looked to America.
We honour him because he spoke for Australia.
For Australia and for Labor, that independence has never meant isolationism.
Choosing our own way, doesn’t mean going it alone.
It was the Curtin and Chifley Governments that brought Australia into the United Nations, the World Bank and the IMF, at the outset.
Australia did not just join the institutions which created the international rules based order, we helped shape them.
Because we did not want the future of our region to rest on what Doc Evatt called a ‘great power peace’.
Then – and now – we championed the rights and the role of middle powers and smaller nations.
Then – and now – we recognised that our region’s security depends on collective responsibility.
Then – and now – we strive for a world where the sovereignty of every nation is respected and the dignity of every individual is upheld.
Then – and now – Australia backs our words with deeds.
Eighty years ago, Australia under Chifley was one of the first countries in the world to publicly support the people of Indonesia in their struggle for independence.
And part of the first-ever UN peacekeeping mission to help secure Indonesian sovereignty.
Ever since, Labor Governments have understood that Australia’s security and our prosperity depend on engaging with our region, as ourselves.
Investing in our capabilities – and investing in our relationships.
In times of profound change in our region and against the backdrop of global uncertainty, Australia under Labor has always had the courage and imagination to play a constructive and creative role.
That’s the approach our Government has taken, from day one.
Rebuilding our standing as a leader and partner in the Pacific.
Patiently and deliberately working to stabilise our relationship with China.
Deepening our economic engagement across South East Asia.
Forging new defence and security co-operation with our nearest neighbours, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea.
And giving our security and trade and energy partnership with India the long overdue investment and attention it deserves.
The Australian Labor Party is Australia’s oldest political party – and the movement which gave it life is older still.
Anniversaries like this – along with the work of Nick Dyrenfurth and the John Curtin Research Centre – remind us of the fullness and richness of the story to which we belong.
Yet the great creative tension of Australian Labor is that while we love our history, we are not hostages to it.
We are links in a long chain – but we are not shackled to our past.
We draw from it, we build on it and we learn from it.
As a junior member of the Scullin Government, Curtin had watched, in dismay and frustration, as the hopes invested in that Labor Government fell victim to events.
Its ambitions crushed by the Great Depression.
Its fate sealed by foreign banks and the state premiers.
For Curtin, who lost his seat in the landslide defeat that followed, a hard lesson of those years was that Labor could never again allow itself to be seen as ineffectual in times of economic crisis.
That’s part of what drove Curtin and Chifley to put the Commonwealth at the centre of tax and revenue.
They understood that Australia could not meet the twin challenges of mobilisation and reconstruction as a disparate collection of states pulling in different directions.
And when you consider the big challenges and opportunities facing Australia today:
Building the new homes and infrastructure our suburbs and regions need.
Securing the future of the National Disability Insurance Scheme.
Powering new jobs and industries through the energy transition.
Training our workforce and workplaces so that Artificial Intelligence is a creator of good jobs – not a threat to them.
None of that can be realised by one level of government on its own, or indeed by government alone.
It depends – as ever – on mobilising the talents and capacity of all Australians.
The world John Curtin knew and the nation he served belong to history now.
Yet the lessons of his life and legacy endure.
Because while the nature of global uncertainty evolves, this fundamental truth remains.
Australia cannot predict, or control the challenges we will face.
But we can determine how we respond.
We can choose the way we engage with our region and deal with the world.
The stability and prosperity we build and defend with our partners, the peace and security we seek for ourselves.
And – above all – we can choose the nation we strive to build here at home.
An economy that rewards hard work and creates opportunity.
A society true to the values of fairness and aspiration that Australians voted for.
And a government worthy of the people we serve.
Repaying the trust that Australians have placed in us.
And living up to the example of courage and kindness that Australians set for us, every day.
That is the Labor way. That is the Australian way.
That is our way forward, for the future.