Scott Morrison speech: You are more, we are more, individually, than the things others try to identify us by

Prime Minister Scott Morrison at St Andrew's Cathedral in Sydney. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Bianca De Marchi

Tonight I want to talk about a topic that I know is very dear to you. My father was a big believer in community. He was Mayor of Waverley, he was on the Waverley Council for some 16, 17 years and he taught me a lot about the importance of community. And he learnt it all from you because my father would tell me, if you want to understand community, understand the Jewish community, which he loved passionately and dearly.

And they cared for him at Wolper in some of his last months as my mother was recently cared for there. She is fine, by the way, she just had a back operation. But the care, the community of the Jewish community, has deeply impacted my family and my father taught me that.

And so I want to talk about a topic tonight that is dear to your hearts — community. Community of individuals, a nation of individuals.

Now, as some of you may know, I have been deeply influenced in recent years by the writings of the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks.

His books Lessons in Leadership, Covenant and Conversation, and Morality, his last work, have given me a more textured understanding of Judaism, my own Christian faith and what unites us all as human beings. I shared some of these learnings with my own church community last week at the Gold Coast with Stuart Robert at their national conference.

In his works, Rabbi Sacks wrestles, a bit like Jacob, wrestles with the practical complexities of our modern pluralistic world and finds, through the tenets of his faith, as he did, a pathway to the common good.

At the heart of our Judeo-Christian heritage are two words. Human dignity. Everything else flows from this.

Seeing the inherent dignity of all human beings is the foundation of morality. It makes us more capable of love and compassion, of selflessness and forgiveness.

Because if you see the dignity and worth of another person, another human being, the beating heart in front of you, you’re less likely to disrespect them, insult or show contempt or hatred for them, or seek to cancel them, as is becoming the fashion these days.

You’re less likely to be indifferent to their lives, and callous towards their feelings.

Now, those of Jewish faith understand this. As Rabbi Sacks said, “The purpose of Judaism is to honour the image of God in other people.”

Reflecting the Psalmist: people who are fearfully and wonderfully made.

Such a beautiful idea. And one shared by many other faiths, including my own. Appreciating human dignity also fosters our sense of shared humanity.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison and wife Jenny sing during an Easter Sunday service at his Horizon Church at Sutherland in Sydney.

This means that because we are conscious of our own failings and vulnerabilities, we can be more accepting and understanding of the failings and vulnerabilities of others.

True faith and religion is about confronting your own frailties. It’s about understanding your own and our humanity. The result of that is a humble heart, not a pious or judgemental one.

This has certainly been my experience. It has also been my privilege to appreciate the commonality of this view in deepening my ever connections with so many other faith and religious communities across Australia.

Christians from all denominations. The Eastern Orthodox faiths, Maronites, Catholics, Anglicans, and then of course Judaism, Hinduism, Muslims.

Seeing the dignity in others means we can see others as imperfect people striving to do their best.

And, you know, in a liberal democracy, there is no greater liberal democracy than the ones that are shared here and in Israel. Human dignity is foundational to our freedom.

It restrains government, it restrains our own actions and our own behaviour because we act for others and not ourselves, as you indeed do here this evening. That is the essence of morality.

De Tocqueville agreed. He said, “Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith’. Hayek the economist said the same thing, “Freedom has never worked without deeply ingrained moral beliefs.”

Acting to morally enhance the freedom of others ultimately serves to enhance our own freedom.

So it is no surprise then that Rabbi Sacks concluded in his final work, Morality, “If you lose your own morality, you are in danger of losing your freedom.”

The implication here is very important.

Liberty is not borne of the state but rests with the individual, for whom morality must be a personal responsibility.

In Lessons in Leadership, he quotes distinguished American jurist Judge Learned Hand, to argue this point:

I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws, upon courts .. believe me these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women, when it dies there, no constitution, no law can save it.

Freedom therefore rests on us taking personal responsibility for how we treat each other, based on our respect for, and appreciation of, human dignity.

This is not about state power. This is not about market power. This is about morality and personal responsibility.

Now, morality is also then the foundation of true community.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison and wife Jenny Morrison and his daughters during Mass at St Mark Coptic Orthodox Church at Arncliffe in Sydney.

The place where we are valued; where we are unique; where we respect one another and contribute to and share one another’s lives. Where we pledge faithfulness to do together what we cannot achieve alone.

Sacks describes this as the covenant of community.

The determination to step up and play a role and to contribute as you are indeed doing this evening as part of this amazing organisation. Not leaving it to someone else, to another.

That is the moral responsibility and covenant, I would argue, of citizenship. Not to think we can leave it to someone else.

But there are warnings. Where we once understood our rights in terms of our protections from the state, now it seems these rights are increasingly defined by what we expect from the state.

As citizens, we cannot allow what we think we are entitled to, to become more important than what we are responsible for as citizens.

Teddy Roosevelt argued this more than a century ago in his famous ‘Man in the Arena’ speech. But I’m not going to quote the section that is most known. Arguing that going down this path of entitlements of citizenship, as opposed to the responsibilities, is a very dangerous one, and it indeed jeopardises national success in a liberal democracy.

He said, “The stream will not permanently rise higher than the main source; and the main source of national power and national greatness is found in the average citizenship of the nation.”

He said, “In the long run, success or failure will be conditioned upon the way in which the average man, the average woman, does his or her duty, first in the ordinary, every-day affairs of life, and next in those great occasional crises [and we know a bit about that] which call for the heroic virtues.”

Now together and individually we are each responsible for building and sustaining community, and we each have something unique to bring. Because community begins with the individual, not the state, not the marketplace. It begins with an appreciation of the unique dignity of each human being. It recognises that each individual has something to offer and that failure to appreciate and realise this, as a community, means our community is poorer and it is weaker.

In short, to realise true community we must first appreciate each individual human being matters. You matter. You, individually.

And in this context I would also argue we must protect against those forces that would undermine that in community, and I don’t just mean, as I’ve recently remarked, the social and moral corrosion caused by the misuse of social media, and the abuse that occurs there. But I would say it also includes the growing tendency to commodify human beings through identity politics.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison with Steven Lowy at the United Israel Appeal dinner in Sydney. Picture: Adam Taylor/PMO

We must never surrender the truth that the experience and value of every human being is unique and personal. You are more, we are more, individually, more than the things others try to identify us by, you by, in this age of identity politics. You are more than your gender, you are more than your race, you are more than your sexuality, you are more than your ethnicity, you are more than your religion, your language group, your age.

All of these of course contribute to who we may be and the incredible diversity of our society, particularly in this country, and our place in the world. But of themselves they are not the essence of our humanity.

When we reduce ourselves to a collection of attributes, or divide ourselves, even worse, on this basis, we can lose sight of who we actually are as individual human beings - in all our complexity, in all our wholeness and in all our wonder.

We then define each other if we go down that other path by the boxes we tick or don’t tick, rather than our qualities, skills and character. And we fail to see the value that other people hold as individuals, with real agency and responsibility.

Throughout history, we’ve seen what happens when people are defined solely by the group they belong to, or an attribute they have, or an identity they possess. The Jewish community understands that better than any in the world.

So my message is simple: you matter, you make the difference, you make community. And together with family and marriage and the associations of clubs and community groups, faith networks, indeed the organisations we’re here celebrating tonight, and so much more, they are the further building blocks of community on that individual, providing the stability and the sinews of society that bind us one to another.

And upon that moral foundation of community we build our institutions of state. Within that moral context we operate our market place.

To your great credit, this event is an affirmation that morality always starts with individuals seeing the dignity and need in each other and deciding to act. You are demonstrating by your own actions that morality can never be outsourced, because when it is we rob ourselves of that precious agency and we deny the strength and goodwill that comes from building community.

You matter. Community matters. In a democracy, it matters especially. It’s a tremendous source of strength and it’s why foreign actors seek to sow discord online, in many other ways, inflaming angers and hatreds and spreading lies and disinformation.

Of course, the right to disagree peacefully is at the heart of democracy, I’m not referring to that. But democracy is a shared endeavour, and the civility, trust and generosity, they are the currency that mediates our differences.

As I said to the Australian-Israel Chamber of Commerce in Melbourne a few years ago, in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre which broke our hearts and tore our souls, what we need is not to disagree less, in a liberal democracy like Australia, we just need to disagree better.

I’ve been so incredibly heartened to see people from across the country show the best of us as a nation this past year. As Teddy Roosevelt said, those heroic virtues that were called upon at such a time.

Drought, bushfires, floods, cyclones, pandemic — Australians have found ways to support each other and stand with each other. Checking in on each other, keeping jobs there for your employees, volunteering, helping neighbours with their shopping.

This is an edited extract of Scott Morrison’s address to the United Israel Appeal NSW Donor Dinner in Sydney last night.