Thank the University S Council for Honouring Me in This Way

Occasional address delivered at the graduation ceremony of the University of South Australia, May 18 2002

Eleanor Ramsay

Deputy Chancellor, Vice Chancellor, honoured guests, members of the Council and Senior Management of the University, staff, graduands, families and friends.

This is of course a tremendously important day for all of you who are graduating, and for your loved ones, your family and your friends, and I am delighted to be sharing this day of celebration with you all.

I’d like to begin by congratulating you all for what you have achieved, and expressing my hope both that you thoroughly enjoy today’s celebration and that it lives on in your memories as a significant and meaningful one in the history of your lives.

We have all gathered here today, and dressed ourselves in this most exotic and peculiar finery, to acknowledge and to celebrate what you have achieved, and to show our respect for the tradition of university learning, scholarship and research. Because this tradition, and the community arising from it of which you are now a part, are important - not only because of the contribution they make to the nature of our society but also because of the value placed on knowledge, for its own sake.

As well as congratulating and celebrating with you, I’d like to thank the University’s Council for honouring me in this way. It means a great deal to me. Because I have great respect for the institution of the university, and am conscious that the role of universities in our society (locally, nationally and globally) is a very significant one, as much or perhaps more so in these current times than at any other in their long history. And because I have great respect and affection for this particular University, the University of South Australia, its origins, its history, its achievements to date, and its potential for the future – in particular as each of these relate to the University’s equity mission and responsibilities.

I’ve been fortunate to have had the opportunity to contribute to that equity mission, unique in its legislative origins. For the Act of Parliament which established the University, just over a decade ago, is explicit and unambiguous in the responsibility it places on the University; to meet the educational needs and aspirations of Indigenous Australians, and other members of our community who have not had fair or equal access to the benefits of higher education – an Act of Parliament which is rare in expressing these far sighted and socially progressive expectations, and which was brought into the Parliament by our new Premier, then the Minister responsible.

While I most sincerely hope that I have helped the University, for a time, to meet those uniquely important equity responsibilities, whatever contribution I may have managed to make, both within the University and more broadly, this certainly has been achieved by building on the work of others, and working in collaboration and collectively with them – with both my colleagues here at the University of South Australia, and in other universities across this country and in others, as well as friends, colleagues, and comrades, who struggle to make this a better, fairer and more equal world, through their community activism and solidarity work. 2

Some of you good people are here today, and I ‘d like to acknowledge your dedication, hard work, commitment, and achievements, and to share with you the honour I’ve received. It’s been a privilege and a pleasure to join you in that struggle, and to work with and learn from you. And since that work and that struggle are far from over yet, I look forward to continuing to do so in a range of contexts in the future.

For while the University can most certainly claim to have made creditable progress towards greater equity, there is no room for complacency in this. Particularly here in South Australia, we are still a long way from achieving fair and equal access to the benefits of higher education for significant sections of our community for whom this is not a reality, and who suffer significant disadvantages as a result, economically, socially, professionally, and culturally, throughout their lives and throughout their communities.

What equality workers know from years of effort, experience and research is that making changes towards greater equality is hard work, requiring energetic and determined action and vigilance over time. For if the disadvantages experienced by large sections of our community are unfair and undeserved, and they are most certainly both, the privileges of those who benefit from this situation are equally unfair and undeserved. And since the privileged are in a highly advantaged position to defend their advantages, any gains which might be made towards greater equality can disappear in the blink of an eye.

Who would have thought for example, that France, one of Europe’s oldest and strongest democracies, would have found itself in the situation leading up to the recent presidential elections, with a pro-fascist, pro-racist candidate, seriously threatening the values which its population struggled so courageously to defend during the second world war?

For the context of equality work, both in the University and more broadly across the State, is a global struggle for a better and fairer world, for a world in which all of its citizens are able to live in human dignity, not just the privileged minority for whom this is currently the case. And the very most frustrating thing about this struggle is that it could so easily, and rapidly, be won. For the world actually knows what needs to be done (and even how much it would cost) to achieve universal human dignity, by putting into place access to basic health, education, and employment opportunities which are the prerequisites for this to occur. And in this globalised world we actually have practical, tangible, and realistic means of doing this, and the resources for doing so are well within our reach.

For example, the United Nations Development Program has estimated that we could provide, and maintain, universal access to basic social services - that is, basic education, health, adequate food, safe water, and sanitation - for all of the world’s billions of people with just 0.1% of world income1, or (more shockingly) 4% of the combined wealth of the world’s richest 225 people. Yet while we do indeed have the means to change the world most profoundly for the better, it appears that to date we

1The source of all data referred to in this paper is the United Nations Human Development Programme (UNDP), most of it from the Human Development Report 1998, Oxford University Press, 1998. 3 have largely lacked the collective will to do so, certainly at the global level. And that is all that it would take, the will to do so, and a preparedness to work together collaboratively and collectively, to make the world a far far better place for us all.

But instead the global trends are in exactly the opposite direction. The levels of poverty in the world are escalating, and the gap between the richest and the poorest peoples is widening, both within and between countries. The US itself, with the highest per capita income among the world’s most industrialised countries, also has the highest level of human poverty.

Yet these trends are neither irreversible nor are they our unavoidable destiny. Halting and reversing them, either at the national or global level, is not in fact a matter of wealth but rather a matter of collective will. Some of the world’s poorer nations have made impressive gains, despite their relative lack of resources. For example, three very different and certainly not very wealthy countries, China, Zimbabwe and Sri Lanka, have raised the adult literacy of the women in their populations by seventy percent or more, well above that of far wealthier countries, by means of a strong political commitment to do so. And according to World Bank figures, China has halved the number of its peoples living in dire poverty during the same period in which these numbers skyrocketed to intolerable levels worldwide.

Simultaneously, the wealth of the very wealthy has grown astronomically and indecently. The combined wealth of the world’s 225 richest people is equal to the annual income of the poorest forty seven percent of the world’s people, while the assets of the world’s richest three people exceed the GDP of the world’s 48 least developed countries. And while such statistics are shocking, the unprecedented pace at which consumption levels have been growing in wealthy countries, including our own, can only be described as immoral and indecent in the face of the simultaneous increase in world poverty levels. World consumption doubled in just thirteen years between 1975 and 1998, and currently is neither shared, socially responsible, nor sustainable.

For example, $6 of the $8 billion spent annually on cosmetics in the United States would achieve universal access to basic education for the entire world’s population; and universal water and sanitation could be put into place with $2 billion less than is spent on icecreams in Europe. Four billion dollars more is spent each year on pet food in the United States and Europe than is needed for everyone in the world to be healthy and have enough food to eat. Nearly four times more than is needed to achieve universal health and nutrition is spent on cigarettes in Europe alone, and more than six times than is needed for this to occur is spent on alcoholic drinks. The world’s annual expenditure on narcotic drugs is ten times what is required to achieve universal human dignity for all of the world’s citizens, and global military spending is nearly double this again, at twenty times what is needed.

At the global level, while the need has never been greater, and the wealthy have never been wealthier nor consumed more of the world’s resources, the attention and resources we are prepared to give to ameliorate this situation are declining. The world’s official development aid is at its lowest since statistics began to be collected, suggestive of a global meanness of spirit amongst we, the more privileged nations. Meanwhile, while these trends may be regretted and resisted by many in this country, 4 we have nevertheless earned an unenviable reputation internationally, for the conscience-free, anti-community, and amoral individualism which has been given such official sanction in recent times - by for example, the inadequacy of our federal Government’s reaction to the Stolen Generation and more recently to the human needs and misery of the asylum seekers, the latter provoking a call by former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser for a return to decency in public life. Resonating around the nation, this call crystallized our awareness of the extent to which decency in public leadership has been absent of late, and how bereft we are as a people without it.

For if we know anything about ourselves from human history, it is that individual and collective wellbeing are deeply connected, and that our own humanity is depleted by incursions on the human rights of others. And this has never been truer, more unavoidable, or more immediately apparent than in this globalised world of ours in which technology has brought us closer together than ever before in human history. Just acknowledging that the world needs to change is the first step in making it a much better place, for others and for ourselves. Refusing to recognise this, as individuals and as a nation, amounts to abandoning our place in the human community, and our rights and responsibilities as citizens of this world. It also erodes our humanity, and ultimately undermines our own wellbeing and happiness as individuals and as a community.

Apathetic and lazy acceptance of the propagandised and convenient notion that there is no alternative to the current state of the world, with its massive, indecent and growing inequalities, is tantamount to approving of it and certainly helps to perpetuate this unsustainable situation. For all that stands in the way of achieving universal human dignity, and the massive increase in our collective well being that this would bring about, is our preparedness to acknowledge firstly, that this is a matter not only well worth but requiring our attention and secondly, that we can and should do something about it. So putting this matter on our agenda, allowing it to register on the screen, as a community and as individuals, is not only a significant but a crucial step. Which is why the overt social justice agenda brought to the forefront of the public policy agenda by our new South Australian Government, and so quickly after taking office, is such a welcome and very important development.

As graduates in education, the arts, and social sciences, you not only have a particularly well developed understanding of these issues and an awareness of how much they matter, you also have a particular responsibility to do something about them and are well equipped to do so – through your professional and creative practice, and through how you live your lives, as citizens and individuals.

While much I have had to say today is cause for concern, looking at you all and knowing what you have already achieved, I am nevertheless optimistic about what your own contribution will be. There is indeed much to do to make our world a truly civilised place for all of its citizens, but it can be done and in our time, if we have the will to do it and understand that working together is the only way to change the world in worthwhile and sustainable ways.

So perhaps it’s time that I stopped talking so that we can all roll up our sleeves and get on with it. Congratulations once again and good luck with whatever your chosen 5 path may be. May it be fulfilling and challenging for you, and may it make a difference for the better, for the local and global communities of which you are a part.