Page 2451 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 6 August 1991
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We were graced by that council. It was a great honour to us and it was one of the most successful conferences, from a tourism point of view, ever held in Australia. I like to think of our city, then, to use the Japanese analogy that has already been mentioned, as the Kyoto of Australia, not some kind of armaments centre of Australia. Forever after in world history, Canberra will be seen as the home of the World Council of Churches. Our city has been the centre of faith, peace and, above all, constructive, not destructive, activity.
As to not cancelling the 1991 Aidex, I recognise the particular problems with contracts already drawn up, but it does endanger this image of our tourist industry, our natural capital. So, I ask our tourist industry - any who are here from the tourist industry this evening and my colleague Robyn Nolan who is very interested in the tourist industry - to spread the word that our natural capital is one of the greatest assets we have. We must not do anything to muck it up, to destroy it, or to destroy that image. We need to keep Canberra in this very special nature and very special image.
I have been reading today a marvellous magazine called Dialogue which has some very productive and future-looking articles about the nature of the future of cities. I want to stress that for our future we must be, above all - for our tourist industry, for ourselves, for our economy, for the nation, for international activity - a city committed to the protection of our environment. I ask you to look at the city of Belfast, at Beirut, and at what has been happening in Iraq and Kuwait. We are the very opposite of that. We have a chance never to be that. We live in a continent which is the least likely ever to be damaged by arms and wars. Let us keep it that way.
Finally, what of Aidex itself? I do not see them as baboons. No doubt these men - and they are, again, essentially men - have got onto some kind of track whereby they have gone into arms industries, and there they are in their careers - for 10, 15, 20, 25 years stuck in that industry. Here is a chance in 1991 for as many Canberrans as possible to reach them in their exhibition. I call on us all to do this; to help them to get out of it, to help them to stop selling arms and to help them become peace-minded and peace-loving people.
Furthermore, it is likely that international arms merchants will feel relieved that their bizarre bazaar will not take place in a city committed to peace in the future. They can sell their wares elsewhere, in cities and countries which glory in trading in death.
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