Page 32 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 9 December 2008
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The Olympic Games have also played a significant part in my life, starting with the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, which has been linked with the heroic freedom fight by those young revolutionaries in Hungary and which was the catalyst for my family’s refugee journey from Budapest to Sydney.
That Olympic connection continued for me in Canberra in 1998, when I was appointed the ACT SOCOG event director to run the Olympic football tournament in our capital city. It also became my personal Olympic highlight when I was chosen as an Olympic torchbearer in September 2000. The circle of Olympic connection was completed in 2001, when I was elected the President of the ACT Olympic Council and I became a strong advocate of the Pierre de Coubertin awards and their involvement with the ACT high schools and colleges. Baron Pierre de Coubertin said:
The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well.
In these troubled times, de Coubertin’s words are particularly moving and relevant. His objective was not the transitory glory of a few medals and broken records by a highly trained sporting elite but the development of strong and healthy young men and women, brought up on the highest principles of sport and fair play.
As an educational theorist, de Coubertin was convinced of the importance of sport for the development of the individual. He believed that the qualities of initiative, teamwork, sportsmanship and fair play should be encouraged in all young people who participated in sport and competitive games.
I would like to pose a challenge to all of us here today. The challenge is: dare to be different! In today’s society, where values are at times hard to define, let us take a leaf out of the Olympic ideals. Maintain our involvement and energy within our community, embrace the enthusiasm and principles of fair play, be a credit to our family, society and country, and become positive role models for those around us.
The people I have most admired in everyday life and in politics are those who dare to be different, who dare to challenge established views, who realise that ideology alone is not the answer and who demonstrate, by example, that being true to yourself and to your values is the starting point and that substance and integrity do and should matter in politics as they do in life.
My own political journey began in 1983, as I completed a major in political science at the ANU. Former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was a visiting adjunct professor, and my fellow mature age students and I were fortunate to have insights from one of the major participants in the 1975 constitutional crisis. Gough shared the history of that period with us or, perhaps more accurately, he shared his vision of history over that period. Nevertheless, it was a privilege, and perhaps it was only coincidental that during this period that I became a strong advocate of the principles of Robert Gordon Menzies and the Liberal Party.
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