PRESS, RADIO AND TV INTERVIEW GIVEN BY THE
PRIME MINISTER, MR. HAROLD HOLT AT MASCOT
AIRPORT, SYDNEY. ON HIS RETURN FROM THE
PRIME MINISTERS' CONFERENCE. LONDON 19TH SEPTEM3ER. 1966
Well, gentlemen, as you will have gathered from my comments
in London, the conference I have just attended was a very remarkable
one. I don't expect ever to attend another like it and certainly
I have never attended one like it before. M11r. Wilson, when he was
commenting on the conference said that it had come through the flames
and -there had been a testing of the Commonwealth Association, but it
had come through successfully, and I think that is a comment which
can be made although it leaves many question marks about the future
of Commonwealth Conferences in the years ahead.
I think that we all felt that the solution which emerged
after six iays of di.-1-ussion on Rhodesia was not entirely satisfactory
to anybody, but it represented the highest common denominator
of agreement which could be achieved, and the c,; mmunique put out
on this subject indicated that there ., ere still some important
differences of view amorgt members of the Commonwealth some feeling
that force was the answer; others joining with Great Britain in
believing that there should be an opportunity given to the Smith
regime in Rhodesia to come to constructive and positive negotiation
with the United Kingdom Government which would ensure that eventually
majority rule would prevail in that country. The main points of
difference here were that the Afro-Asian-Caribbean group, which
developed the habit of meeting as a caucus in the course of the
conference, wished to ensure that there was no grant of independence
without majority rule ' being a condition of it. The United Kingdom,
on the other hand was prepared to ne-gotiate on the basis that
provide4 there was a guarantee of majority rule, there could be a
gradual evolution to this result.
The position now is that in the absence of some successful
outcome from negotiations, there is likely to lae a move to the
United Nations for selective sanctions, but Australia is in the
position to determine its own course as these developments become
known. The Rhodesian matter was of such burning interest to
many of the heads of delegations that it occupied six of the eight
days, and at one point, I felt it necessary to remind the conference
that we had spent six days of our eight on the affairs of this
particular country, and that nine-tenths of humankind who were much
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affected by-ether aspects of our agenda had not been under
discussion at all.
We did turn, as a result of the move I made at that time to
prevent further adjournment, to a consideration of the world
political situation, but unfortunately the discussion of w,-, hat were,
for us, tremendously important matters Viet Nam being perhaps the
most important in Australian eyes this discussion was of a rather
disjointed and perfunctory character because there would be adjournments
while we had aspects of the Rhodesian matter draft
communiques and matters of procedure broight back under our notice.
Much the same applied in the case of the talk on the world
economic situation. I was given the task of leading the discussion
on this subject matter. It contained some elemonts of very great
importance, not only to Australia, but to the world generally,
including the pressing matter of international monetary liquidity.
It remains a fact that reserves the world's reserves are not
growing in proportion to world trade. Gold production, except in
South Africa, is declining in the free world, and we are seeing
symptoms of shortages of liquidity in various developments vfhch
are now coming under notice. The fact that money is so scarce, that
it is costing so much, that interest rates are becoming so high, the
actions of the United Kingdom and the United States in restricting
the movements of capital out of their countries by investors into
other parts of the world, these are all symptomatic of a growing
problem of international monetary liquidity.
It has been relieved to a temporary degree by the swap
arrangement which was entered into recently by the United Kingdom,
but the problem remains.
Now, there were a variety of other matters at the conference
which did, I think, reflect a more hopeful aspect of this Commonwealth
Association. There was remarkably little controversy on
a number of matters of a fruitful kind, and these are reflected in
the communique which was published at the end of the conference.
This augurs quite well for the future in that there were so many
matters on which a positive, constructive co-operation was manifest.
But what marred the conference was the evidence of racial associations
through this caucus system which, I believe, prevented a fair and
objective study of the subject under review and could be quite
4angerous and certainly distur-bing to many members of the Commonwealth
if this were to become the practice at future conferences.
The disproportionate time devoted to one subject matter was again
a weakness. When all these things are taken together, the fact remains
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that the heads oS daeiegations of 22 countries in a multi-racial
association, representative of all the principal racial groups,
and a vast degree of different attitudes, habits of life, history,
tradition, matters of that sort, were able to come together and
reach an agreed document in respect of a most complex and explosive
issue. It was a conference in which you had all the elements
drama, tension, humour, frustration, exasperation and a variety of
other factors, but out of it camne agreed communiques, first on the
controversial issue of Rhodesia itself and the second covering a
wide variety of matters dealt with at the conference.
And so some will be able to claim with justification
that the Commonwealth has come throug~ h a testing period with the
prospect of going on to better wiork in the future. Others will
argue that the price paid in the adoption of these undesirable
techniques in the emergence on such a scale of racial attitudes, that
these things are both harmful to the future of Commonwealth
collaboration and create dangers of their own and perhaps arguaments
of their owin for the future.
In my judgment, we will need more than one conference
before wve can come to a final judgment as to wihether this is a
continuing contribution to the well-being of mankind. But my own
tentative conclusion is that this does remain the best hope for
mankind of a multi-racial association for construotive purposes,
and like the United Nations itself, because the aspiration that
it embodies is one of the highest that man could hold, we can't
discard lightly the desirability of maintaining it in the future.