Thank you very much Guy, and Jock, and all of the people who run this wonderful forum, it really is impressive to see young Australians who are interested in faith and values and the Parliament, and for old hands like me it gives us a lot of enthusiasm to see that there are young people in Australia who care so deeply about these things.
Earlier on this year I was standing on the shores of Anzac Cove on Anzac Day, it was 4.30 in the morning and was extremely cold. I didn't know if the Australian backpackers would come to the ceremony because there had been a media alert with Al Qaida operatives within Turkey there might be dangers. And as I stood in the dark I wondered whether the young Australians would come in the numbers that they have come in years gone by to commemorate the Anzac landing on the 25th of April 1915.
I can't tell you the sense of elation that I felt as the light came across the Aegean Sea and lit up first, ten metres in front of me, then 20 metres in front of me, 30 metres in front of me. And I looked out and I saw there were ten thousand young backpackers that had come by bus from Istanbul, stayed up all night, many of them standing, many of them with the Australian flag wrapped around their shoulders to commemorate a military defeat which had happened nearly 90 years ago.
And that day as I spoke to many of those young Australians who were 19 and 20, I asked them why they were there. Like me, they all wanted to get a feeling of what values had taken young Australians nearly 90 years ago around the world to a place they had never heard of, many of them died. You can't help but feel as you walk amongst the headstones, you see people who were 18 or 19 years of age who fell in a country a long way from our shores, because they believed in something. What was it? What was it that they believed in? And what was it that motivated them? And I think that is why Australians go back to that area of the world to try and ask themselves the same question - what is it that motivates me? What are the values? Are our values the kind of values that would allow us to measure up to the 19 and 20 year olds of 1915?
I guess I would just like to leave you with two thoughts as you approach this seminar. The first is, you can't go through life without any faith or values, you have got to have something that will motivate you from the inside, something that will help you fit all of life's experiences into some kind of understanding. And if you don't think about that you will pick up someone else's faith or values along the line, they will become your motivating factors, or if you can't find any at all, you might lose hope in life as far too many young people in our society do.
The second point I would like to leave you with is, not all values are equal. You have probably heard the expression post-modernism, it says, look everything is equal, it doesn't matter what you believe, as long as you believe something. I don't think that is right.
You would have seen yesterday, the big explosion in Jerusalem, maybe like me you watched the TV and you have seen video of the suicide bomber who did that. He was holding a rifle in one hand and a Koran in another. He had faith and he had values, you can't deny that. He probably had more faith than all of us put together. But were they the right values? What sort of values would lead someone to engage in a terrorist attack? That's an extreme case, but I am trying to illustrate that not all values are the right values. One of the values that we like to start off with, particularly in our society with the ethic and the faith background that we come from is the value of life over death. That is why we react in horror to terrorism, but there are some extremist groups that don't have that value, that think there is some kind of glory in death or terror.
So as you go through life, you will have to find faith and values and not all faith and not all values will be equally noticeable. It is something that you will have to confront, each one of you, in your own lives. And if those values can pick you up and sustain you in a life of service to others, that affirms life, that enlarges life, so much better in my view. They are my values, not necessarily everybody's, but so much better in my view.
You are a very privileged generation, you are living in one of the richest countries in the world at its richest time. Australians have never been as wealthy as they are today in material terms, you are a blessed generation. You have knowledge at your fingertips which your forebears could not imagine. One of the reasons why many of them went to Gallipoli was, it was their chance to get out of the country. You can go there on a website, you can see it, you can fly there, you can come home again. You don't have to go away for four or five years to war to see the other side of the world. And you are well educated. I know that because I go and speak in schools a lot and the questions I get asked are much harder than the questions I get from any journalist around this place.
You are rich, you are well informed, you are highly educated, you have massive potential. And if you can harness the engine room of the faith and values to direct that, you will make a great contribution and our country will be in safe hands. Thank you.