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Queen's Commonwealth Day message
Following is the Commonwealth Day message 1996 from the Queen, Head of the Commonwealth:
The theme for Commonwealth Day this year is "Working in Partnership".
This theme reminds us that we can achieve much more if we work in a team, making use of each other's different skills and experience, than if we are all separately trying to do the same thing. A successful partnership depends on mutual respect and friendship, and what matters is not what people are but what they can contribute to the common purpose. Partnership builds on experience, drawing lessons from the past and cementing shared friendships; and it looks to the future as it tackles the challenges of the present.
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The Commonwealth is an excellent example of this kind of partnership. The fifty-three sovereign nations who belong to it have vastly different social and ethnic traditions, but it has been able to fashion unity out of this diversity and to become a working partnership of governments and peoples. One of the most valuable aspects of this partnership is the network of Commonwealth Non-Governmental Organisations which link members of a wide range of professions and activities architects, engineers, journalists and broadcasters, doctors and vets, magistrates and judges, and so on and help them to benefit from each other's experience and to work together for the common good. There are thriving partnerships between the Universities, the parliamentarians and the Trade Unions of the Commonwealth countries. In the arts, literature and music, there are Commonwealth links which enrich the cultural life of all the members, and there is also a friendly rivalry in a wide range of sporting activities.
The Heads of Government of the Commonwealth set out its fundamental aims and principles in a statement adopted at Harare in 1991, and last November in New Zealand they agreed on an important Action Programme to give that mission statement a real cutting edge, with the emphasis on democracy, development and consensus building. Those aims, like so many others, can best be pursued in partnership both within the Commonwealth and on a wider global scale.
Young people learn early the value of taking part in teams and tackling projects in partnership. I hope that you will carry those lessons into later life and, with the idealism and clear vision which the young can offer, help to build lasting partnerships to make the world a better and safer place.
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