Page 1233 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 24 April 1990
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However, although I believe it is improper - and, if you will accept the term, "unchristian" - to throw stones at other individuals, I think it is proper to draw conclusions about a whole society, and this is especially the role of historians and prophets.
Last night, at a gathering of young people from about 15 nations - Asian, European and African - I was asked, as an historian and as a politician, to say what I saw as dangerous for our nation. I have no doubt at all that we are in danger of losing many of the more important values of the past. We are living beyond our means, we are importing more than we are exporting, and included in our imports are many of the things that we are discussing here tonight. We are in danger of exhausting and damaging our environment. We are failing to live up to the ideals and vision and willingness to sacrifice of earlier generations. I think that is true of parties on both sides of this house, including everyone in this house.
We are becoming a society in love with the fast lane, the quick return. I say these things with a sense of mea culpa and not out of a sense of self-righteousness. We have turned into a society absorbed in bingo, poker machines, lotto, lotteries and another dozen forms of gambling; we have lost those old-fashioned attributes of frugality, simplicity, ruggedness, often simple faith and straightforward commitment.
Look at our new drug problems, and I am so glad that we have a committee in the Assembly doing just that. Look at our problems of domestic violence, of alcoholism, of street kids, of alienated young people. What is the world we now have offering them? Often violence is entertainment and sexual experimentation is a form of necessary self-expression, as a substitute for family related values.
Again mea culpa, if I have ever been responsible for any of that by passing by on the other side, by saying, "Well, that is not my business". It is our business. Mea culpa, whenever I have taken the view that societal values can be maintained by allowing free, totally unfettered expression for every individual whim. That is not what Voltaire was talking about.
Rather we should look to the past, not only in the history of so-called civilised societies but also through the findings of anthropology and sociology, and see what made and makes societies strong and healthy, and kept and keeps them strong and healthy. Often at the heart both of Christian and non-Christian societies - Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist - is the special sense of the sacredness, or at least the essentiality, of families and caring family values.
Of course, on the other side, we do not wish to see a repeat of stark puritanism. We cannot imagine ourselves
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