If anybody had told us that the state education system would decline relative to the private schools we wouldn't have believed them. If anybody had said that the schools we went to would be worse, not better, in thirty years' time we would have taken it as a sign of madness. We were, our family, monarchists, loyal to Britain and the ABC. Those things went together.

We depended on the ABC even more than we depended on Britain - a great deal more after they joined the Common Market and we had nowhere to send our butter, we thought. We depended on the ABC for stock market reports, weather reports, news (especially national and international news), for comedy, for music, for the essential sense of nationhood, for knowing that we lived together on this continent with other Australians.

Believe it or not, we depended on the ABC for (dare I mention the word) 'culture' - that is to say, for ideas, comforts and the sense that our lives had a wider meaning than the cows, the family and perhaps the Church. And if anybody had told us that, forty years later, the ABC would be under almost perpetual attack and always fated to justify its role in Australia, we would have said they were mad too.

The point of this is that if you take these things away, I mean if you shrink the public sector - not only shrink it but consistently deny the validity of the public realm as if it has no future - then you have to expect a certain amount of shock. I wouldn't dare for a moment suggest that the economic reforms of the 1980s were anything but necessary and for the most part good. But something in my sense of 'home', makes me resist the calumny heaped on public enterprise and the dogma that nothing good ever came of it or will come of it again.

Don Watson 2003 National Trust Heritage Lecture 11nov03