This lecture series is an important part of our cultural history and a platform for the dissemination of big ideas and challenges for Australian national conversations. Sometimes the choice of lecturer has been controversial, no more so than Manning Clark, but they have always been significant public personalities with something to say. Recent lecturers have included Marcia Langton, Geraldine Brooks, Glyn Davis, Peter Cosgrove, Rupert Murdoch and Noel Pearson.

In accepting this offer, the Governor-General, five months from the end of her extended term of office, has taken the opportunity for a full flowering of her own voice. This is a potentially risky step, one that no previous governor-general has attempted while in office. Bryce herself reflected on accepting the offer that the Boyer Lectures have sought to take Australians "down countless paths: enthralling, challenging, unworn paths".

Governors-general give lots of talks and speeches, but none of this standing and potential scope. Their impartial, non-partisan role normally encourages them to err on the side of being carefully bland rather than to cut through boldly where major public issues are concerned. Bryce has been brave in choosing to take the lectures on and her decision may well come to be seen as a further step in the development of the role of governor-general.

She has chosen the general topic of "Back to the Grassroots". Her emphasis, drawing on her lifetime experience as an academic, lawyer, and community and human rights advocate as well as her time as Governor-General, is on building communities, courage in everyday life, the powerful role of women in Australia and across the world and the future of Australian citizenship.

She is not afraid to speak about themes with such clear policy implications that they often carry with them danger signs. In the second of her lectures, for instance, she spoke about the international disgrace, shared in full measure by Australia, of violence against women.

Her experience as Governor-General drives her to challenge Australians: "Wherever I go around the country the rape crisis centres and women's safe houses are full, resources are over-stretched, and countless more women are awaiting refuge from horrific circumstances."

The statistics she then quotes are a disgrace. One-third of Australian women have experienced physical assault, almost 20 per cent have suffered sexual assault and almost every week a woman is killed by her present or former male partner.

Her voice is not just an expression of solidarity with those women, many still not fully accepted by mainstream Australia, who run such refuges, but also a call to the whole community, government and non-government, civil, church and military authorities, to do more to remove this stain from Australian life. We have a long way to go, as recent scandals testify.

Bryce is a voice for the voiceless and for the many Australians she has met in her travels as Governor-General. She is also an authoritative, adult voice and a model for others in public life.

The Governor-General plays many roles: constitutional, ceremonial and bridge to the community. She has her own, personal voice but also, on formal occasions such as the opening of Parliament, she speaks for "her" government in her address to the Parliament. Her task is to lay out the incoming government's legislative agenda and program. Her dignified presence this week in the Parliament to carry out her formal, ceremonial duties inevitably brings to mind comparisons with the parliamentarians around her on the government, opposition and cross benches. This is a Parliament and a

government under scrutiny. Recent parliaments have been raucous, undisciplined and frequently nasty. Much of the blame for that state of affairs has rightly been blamed on the approach of the Abbott opposition in its attempts to destabilise the previous hung Parliament.

Furthermore, parliamentarians collectively are under pressure for their apparent abuse of parliamentary entitlements. Quite a few have a questionable attitude to the distinction between private interests and public duty. Their professional standing has fallen.

Consequently, the Prime Minister has been unwise to declare that with the election of his Coalition government "the adults are back in charge". Unfortunately he is not joking. He is unwise not just because of his central part in the childishness of the recent past for which he now seems to blame his opposition, but also because his remarks invite general scrutiny of parliamentary behaviour in a way that may well rebound upon him. He has set the bar very high and chosen divisiveness over healing.

Abbott's claim brings to mind previous characterisations of Parliament. Many years ago the late Senator John Button described Parliament House and its denizens only half-jokingly as like a boarding school because he was appalled by some of the behaviour he observed. When he entered Parliament, Button commented, it was like "entering a second adolescence". Many a true word is said in jest. He used his dry sense of humour to good effect as a critic of both Parliament and his own Labor Party.

The roles of governor-general and politician are very different, of course. Quentin Bryce, whether playing a ceremonial role or projecting her own voice, is free from many of the negative pressures that dog politicians. Nevertheless the adult approach of the Governor-General is a model from which all MPs would do well to learn.

John Warhurst is an emeritus professor of political science at the Australian National University.

John.Warhurst@anu.edu.au