This came in from Hugh Nowell:
I met Kim Beazley, Australian labour MP, at the moment
he decided to try and do so. His family
were very poor. He went to school
bare-foot. He had no ambition to enter
Parliament. But he was requested to do it,
was selected and was the youngest MP at 28.
He had a passion for history.
He also had an outsize hubris and hectored colleagues
in Parliament and was thoroughly disliked.
He had a humbling experience when visiting the Caux conference in
1953.
He was returning from a mission in London and went for
one week and stayed for 7.
He said of his experience there, ‘What was happening
was far more significant for the peace and sanity of the world than anything
happening in Australian politics.’
This was 1953.
He was introduced to the reconciliation then taking place between France
and Germany led by Adenauer and Schuman.
He then discovered that these healing processes
involved changes in people’s attitudes and relationships – including his own.
He found this experience the ultimate in realism for
it suggests an experiment that anyone can try – searching for God’s leading -
testing any thoughts that come against absolute moral standards of honesty,
purity, unselfishness and love and carrying into practice those thoughts that
meet those standards.
A Labour Party friend at the conference sat Beazley
down and suggested that he should take time alone to seek God’s guidance,
‘having nothing to prove, nothing to justify and nothing to gain for himself.’
What a shockingly subversive thing to say to someone
in politics! I had been proving just how
right I was at every election, justifying everything that we had ever done, and
gaining political power for myself. That
was the minimum I must do.
You can never understand these standards by sitting
back and trying to understand them intellectually, he says. There must be a decisive act – a turning of
the will. For me sitting down and writing
a letter of honesty to my wife started off a chain reaction. On receiving the
letter, my wife said, ‘ I knew some of the things; some I guessed; some I
didn’t know. I had a wonderful sense of
relief and trust after reading it.’
Similar letters went to his brother and sister. While disentangling ‘the web of deceit’ in
his personal life, he found he was disentangling a web in his political life.
It’s reasonable to ask how he fared after this
thorough going start.
He felt called to raise the standard of life for the
Aboriginal people.
His first achievement was secured when he was Minister
of Education.
The second great achievement took place when he was
not in office. Both measures were
unpopular at the time. That and his
determination to bring honesty into his political dealings caused him a lot of
enemies.
His Parliamentary colleagues did not warm so easily to
his new-found conviction. Alan Reid writing in the Sun in October 1953, ‘facing
the prospect of political destruction at the moment is young Kim Beazley. Powerful, office-hungry individuals fear that
his idealism and his current determination to pursue the truth, would cost the
Labour Party the next election. The word
has gone out, ‘Destroy him’.
He freely admits he made mistakes. But they did not
destroy him. At the end of 32 years in
parliament, the Melbourne Herald wrote, ‘ he was beyond any doubt one of the
best Members of Parliament Australia ever had.’
For his contribution in education and in Aboriginal
affairs the Australian National University rewarded with an honoury doctorate.
As Minister of Education all existing student grants were extended to every
Aboriginal and tertiary student. Overall
education spending rose from 4.8 per cent of GDP to 6.2per cent.
The citation went on, ‘his greatest contribution was
healing an ulcer that has festered in our country for close on 200 years. Sectarian bitterness was dealt a death blow
by needs-based funding which Beazley introduced.
One thought stayed with him from his days in Caux in
his search to live out God’s will, ‘If you live by absolute purity, you will be
used towards the rehabilitation of the Australian Aboriginal people. Purity he saw, was the alternative to living
for self-gratification, which kills intelligent care for others.
He continued his practice of early morning quiet
seeking God’s direction between 6 and 7am.
He established the principle that ’to deny a people an education in
their own language is to treat them as a conquered people and we have always
treated the Aborigines as a conquered people.’
Now teaching in schools takes place in 138 languages of the Northern
Territory.
Out of office he campaigned for Land Rights for the
Aboriginal people of which they had none.
To restore the dignity of the Aborigines became a second great principle
in which land rights were the key.
With the Rev Wells he started to campaign in 1963 to
get a Select Committee to study the incursion of mining in the Northern
Territories which threatened to destroy the spiritual and mythological
significance of the land. Finally, by
1976 legislation was passed, opening the re-possession of tribal lands. From not owning an acre, aboriginal people
gained freehold title to 643,000 square kms, an area two and half times the
size of Great Britain.
‘ What a poor reward it would have been for the nation
if Kim had pursued the cause of personal power during those years in
Opposition’, commented a senior Government adviser when Beazley left politics.
Beazley spent 28 of his 32 years in Parliament in what
he called, ‘Her Majesty’s Permanent Opposition’. ‘I have come to believe that
the true function of the Opposition is to out-think the government at the point
of its successes.’
In his time, he played a key role in Land Reform,
preparation of Papua New Guinea for Independence, a massive increase in
government spending on education and above all the welfare of the Aboriginal
people.
HN. 14.10.14
