HOBART JOURNALISTS' CLUB LUNCHEON
HADLEYS HOTEL, HOBART March 1968
Speech by the Prime Minister, Mr. John Gorton
Mr. President, Ladies ana Gentlemen:
It's nice for me to be able to be with the Journalists'
Club at this midday gathering. It's nice to meet the exjournalists;
it's nice to meet the wives; it's nice to meet
the guests; it's nice to meet the journalists, particularly
since one relies so much, in this situation which I somewhat
unexpectedly find myself, on interpretations made by journalists
whether they are writing directly for newspapers, whether they
are writing columns I suppose that's directly with newspapers
but every editor I know says it's indirectly; they haven't
got any control over it or whether it's commenting, or whether
it's on this new media, T. V. Because the opportunity for
presentation of personality in the political scene on all sides,
does, I think, give the public a chance to judge to judge
between arguments advanced for this or for that, to judge
between whether one believes what one is saying or is saying
what one is saying because a consensus of Party opinion wants
it to be done, to make an assessment and to present it to the
public which then accepts or rejects the assessment so made.
As far as I am concerned, the assessments that have
been made whether they are pro or con are not assessments with
which I have been able to find myself able to quarrel. If there
have been in my association with journalists those who are
critical, there has seemed to me that the criticism has been
based on argument. I might not accept the argument, I might
not accept the premise,, and therefore obviously I might not
accept the conclusion. But it seems to me to have been based,
at any rate in this brief period in which I have been so closely
associated, on assessment by journalists, on argument by
journalists, and not on prejudice by journalists. And this I
think is very important.
I suppose I can't talk to you today in the same way
as someone could talk . was it the Gridiron Club the
original Journalists' Club, the one in ' Washington where people
went who were oither highly significant American politicians
or visiting Heads of State and spoke off the record and thon
had everything they said reported on the next day? I suppose
this is quite different. But it is good to find, I think, and
I have only so far found it perhaps because I haven't been asked,
I have only so far found it in Canberra and found it here, that
journalists would form this kind of association, would meet
together for these luncheons, would have people come before
them and talk to them and subject themselves to questioning by
them. It may be that in-this assessment I have some nostalgia
because I am a journalist manque myself. " When I first came
back from England, as a very young man, I came back to be a
journalist. But my father died before I was in Australia more
than a couple of months and I had to take over a bankrupt
property and try and build that up instead of being a journaliist,
which is probably just as well because I expect I'd have been
a sub-editor or something by this stage. I might not have had
quite as much fun, although from all I have seen there is a
certain amount of fun in this occupation anyway. 2
I think that rather than talk to you on any specific
subject of national importance, or state importance, that it
would be better for me to subject myself to any questions which
any of you here may wish to ask. I warn you I will answer them
quite definitely if I think I've got an answer that I wvant to
give and that it is satisfactory to me. If it is in an area
where I am not quite sure of the answer, I will say I am not
quite sure of the answer. If it is in an area where I think
an answer at this stage ought not to be given, I'll do my best
without you noticing, to answer it in such a way that I won't
be giving an answer and you won't notice I'm not. But at least
I'll be subjecting myself to something I know is of interest to
those who are in this room and this I will do in just a matter
of a very few minutes.
I have spoken this morning at an opening of the
Chambers of Commerce here and very briefly skctched in the
choices which have to be made in a community such as ours the
requirements of the community for defence, for social services,
for education, for technological advances, for scientific
advances, for development, for a million things rnnd also the
requirement that a government should not so take from individuals
so much in order to meet these requirements that the individuals
just stop working and you can't meet any requirements. The
balance I have spoken about there and some of you may have heard
it, some of you may wvish to ask about it.
Our role as a country in the international field, some
of you may wish to ask about. The future which is possible for
us, some of you may wish to ask about, because we are now and
will be for the next two or three years in a period that I call
for this nation the tantalising years. Soon, but not yet, we'll
be reaping the benefit of the mineral discoveries we have made
and we will be exporting in the way of nickel and of iron ore
and of alumina, things which will put the wool industry on which
we have previously almost entirely relied into a much lower area
of importance in our national life. Soon we will be replacing
those things which we have had to bring from abroad and oil
is tho great example with oil from Australian resources and
some of these things you may wish to ask about.
We haven't got those benefits yet, we won't get them
for a couple of years but they arc there), they are coming, they
are beckoning, and for two tantalising years we must wait for
those full benefits to come before we can get a great I don't
like to use this word, because it is used by someone with whose
political opinions I don't agree but the great leap forward
which I think faces Australia; there will be advances but the
great leap forward when these things come in. Now there it is.
I am here to be questioned. I am here to the best of
my ability to try and answer those things which are in your minds.
And so may I ask you, having thanked you for this function,
having thanked you for the opportunity to meet you, to put it
now to the best advantage by cross-questioning me on those
things which arc of interest to you.
Q. With the current.-American elections coming up, if the President
is ousted by either Eugene McCarthy or Robert Kennedy and radical
changes in Vietnamese policy are made by the United States, will
Australia~ make these changes as well? / 3
PM. Well, if there were and this is an awfully what President
Roosevelt always used to call an " iffy"' question, but if there
were great changes in the United States involvement in Vietnam
I think the Australian people would be forced to accept those
changes. We cannot, as a nation of 12 million people, and a
nation making, I think, a very significant contribution for
its 12 million people, we cannot as a nation of 12 million
people hope, of ourselves, to achieve a result without the full
involvement of the United States and its other allies and if
there were, as you have suggosted, there might be a bouleversement
complete change in policies, then, since we could not, of
ourselves, hope to achieve things by ourselves, I think we would
have a decision forced upon us not to try to do things of
ourselves.
Q. Mr. Prime Minister, is it possible to ostablish a minimum
standard of living in Australia and is it possible to work up
machinery to make sure that nobody lives below that standard?
PM. I think it is possible to establish a minimum standard of living.
I don't think that there will ever be a time when there will not
be arguments as to whether that minimum standard of living so
established is high enough or there is no room for argument
that that standard of living should not be improved. Indeed,
I hope there never would be. I hope that in a developing
community, such as we have been and will be, that there will
be argument as to whether those on the lower standard of living,
the minimum standard of living, should not be able to be provided
by the community with something more. But yes, I think there
could be a minimum. The argument would then be whether the
minimum was enough or wasn't enough.
Q. Mr. Prime Minister, on the matter of the 20uropean Common Market,
do you in the future perhaps see an Eastern Common Market where
we can raise our own tariff barriers say against Europe in our
particular area?
PM. Well, I would rather not touch on the matter of whether we raise
tariff barriers against Europe-as such, because who knows what
the future of Europe is going to be. Yes, there is an EEC now,
but it doesn't cover all the countries of Europe. One wouldn't
want to say " Yes, we'll raise tariff barriers against Europe",
I think you would have to oxamine that country by country
according to what they were doing in relation to our own desire
to export and to their own involvement in the European Common
Market. But what I would think was a possibility was this. If
by our smallish efforts and they must be smallish ( always
remember we are not a great power), but for our size significant,
coupled with efforts of the United States, United Kingdom and,
for that matter, the European powers, we could improve the
economies of the Asian countries near to us and thereby improve
the standard of living of the peoples of those countries near
to us and thereby improve the demand for better things from those
countries near to us, then we could, I would hope, see that in
these areas the same kind of demand for our own products would
arise as has arisen in Japan because the economy has gone up and
the living standards have gone up and the demands have gone up.
If we could do that in these densely populated areas of Indonesia,
Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand these are the
countries nearest to us but you can fill in the others further
away then if that could happen, there would be an immense
market for what we could produce and we would benefit ourselves
by being able to sell from and buy from that market.
In the last ton years, in our Japanese trade alone, ( the figures
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have gone out of my mind now) there has been an immense
expansion in what we have been able to sell to the Japanese
and what we have bought from them, to our mutual benefit with
Japan. Now, with the other countries around, that same sort
of thing could happen, it could bc to our common benefit.
Q. On 2 February at a Canberra Press Conference, it was reported
you said Australia would not increase the size of its Vietnam
force. You are reported as saying that as far as you were
concerned this was a permanent statement. But on 13 March in
the House of Representatives in reply to a question about your
previous statement, you opened the way for an increase in the
number of Australian troops in Vietnam. Was this a change of
policy; was it pressure from the United States which influenced
you, or was it, as Mr. Connor, Labor, New South Wales, suggested
in Parliament on Thursday night that " the back room boys got at
you". What is your present policy on Vietnam?
PD1. Well, I think that if I could answer that this way. First, it
wasn't a change of policy and the back room boys hadn't got at
me and it wasn't a result of any request from the United States.
I was asked at the Press Conference to which you refer which
was held at the time when the Tet Offensive was breaking out
you remember, and people were pouring into the Vietnamese cities
and so on, would this lead to an increase in the U. S. commitments
in Australian commitments, and I said no, it wouldn't. And in
the statement in the House to which you refer but which was not
a full quotation because you left this bit out, I said yes. I
said that and what I said stands. This was in the answer to the
question in the House of Representatives. But I can't look years
into the future. There may be completely unknown developments
which no man in charge of the Government could bind himself to
ignore, but I do not know what they could be and I think that
we are, as a nation of 12 million people, with unknown requirements
as yet to help in Singapore and to help in Malaysia, with known
requirements for developments of our own nation, providing very
significant assistance at the present level at which we are
providing it and that seems to me to be the answer to your
question.
Q. Mr. Prime Minister, Sir Wilfred Kent Hughes has suggested that
there ought to be censorship on views coming out of Vietnam.
Now do you, Sir, personally support this view or does the Cabinet
support this view?
PM. WIell, the Cabinet hasn't discussed it and anything that I say
to you would just be a matter of my own approach to it. But
I would have thought that one should agree that when one's
forces are engaged in war whether declared or undeclared, there
ought to be some censorship, indeed I am not sure there isn't.
But there ought to be some censorship, for example as to where
one's forces are going to go,. where an operation is going to
be carried out, how many troops are engaged in that operation,
what sort of back-up there is. In other words, things which
could be of use to an enemy commander whether guerilla or
regular would not in any war of which either had been cognizant
been allowed to be freely published and to that extent that
sort of censorship I think really ought to be imposed although
it doesn't seem to be imposed by most of the people up in
Vietnam and they are not necessarily our o,. wn people. Well
if you were to talk about censorship in that sense, I would
say my predilection was towards it if it was able to be imposed
by Australians.
There are other areas of opinion to be reported where it's
not quite so clear, to me at any rate, that censorship ought
to be put in, but my impression of' what Sir Wilfred Kent Hughes
was talking about was more about reporting of troop movements,
of operations which, if they were reported prematurely, could
prejudice those operations and the lives of Australian troops,
and I would have a predilection towards that kind of censorship
if we could impose it.
Q. Mr. Prime Minister, last year, largely we understood through
the personal interest of your predecessor the late Mr. Holt,
there was a national fitness campaign programme introduced
through the Federal Government. Is it envisaged that this will
continue under the present Cabinet?
PM. Well, I haven't turned my mind to that but in my present state
of physical health, it is probably time I did.
Q. Mr. Prime Minister, how do you see the future of the National
Shipping Lines? Do you see it going overseas? Do you see
that Australia will be penalised if it doesn't?
PM. Well this is a question of policy. Let me just say this in
answer to you. I would think that that was a possibility
that is the question of an Australian shipping line going
overseas or getting some overseas link or something of that
kind. It is a question of policy which ought not to be ruled
out as a possibility.
Q. Mr. Gorton, the Adelaide journalist, Ian Mackay, says that in
Vietnam the Australians are killing wounded Vietcong. Now
what are you doing to investigate this? Are you in a position
to say whether or not it's true and how do you feel in general
about these allegations against our troops?
PM. well I'm not doing anything to investigate it myself and if it
were brought to me on a third-hand report which I understand
is the kind of report, I wouldn't undertake to even think of
investigating it. What I feel about allegations against our
Australian troops are these, having been an Australian troop:
that there are some individuals who from time to time may do
things which the Australian nation or the Army as a whole would
not support and this has always been so in all wars. But I
would have the greatest reluctance and repugnance to holding
up a service to some kind of ( an investigation, legal investigation
by a judge and people of that kind, where any allegations can
be made by anybody without any backing, where headlines will
naturally be given to those allegations and where if at some
later stage those allegations are shown to be without any
substance whatever, the damage to the Service and the morale
of the Service will have already been done. Now that's my
answer to you.
Q. Mr. Prime Minister, are our external commitments, Vietnam's
especially, hindering this great leap forward you spoke of
for Australia?
PM. Woll I think, taking together our defence commitments Vietnam
is one, requirements for assistance from Singapore and Malaysia
are others, our own need to maintain some defence capability
ourselves inside our own country and this changing world are
others nobody could say that the requirement to divert
resources to those things did not mean that there were less
resources to devote to other things. We have gone on for a
long time in the past with an average annual expenditure on
defence of around about $ 400 million, if my recollection is
right. All right, now it's risen to $ 1200 million. W1ith
commitments already accepted it's likely to go up more, almost
inescapably, but I hope not too much more. Now this is a mere
matter of arithmetic, that if those resources are devoted to
that end, then they are not available for many of the other
things that we would like to see done in Australia and so I
suppose to take the words you asked me, it is limiting advances,
leap forwards in other fields. But on the other hand I think
it could also be said that it is an insurance policy to see
that such advances as are made may be maintained and may be
permanent, just as in the case of an individual, the payment
of a life insurance premium prevents him from getting more
household goods or providing better education for his students
but is something he thinks ought to be done for safety's sake,
as I think this should be.
Q. Mr. Gorton, the late Prime Minister, Mr. Holt, in the time of
the Palestinian W! ar made an offer to the Arab refugees of a
place-. in Australia. Since then there's been nothing about it.
Now, I don't want to know whether they want to come here or not
but is the present Government of a mind to allow people such
as these into Australia?
PM. I'm not quite sure, if you will forgive me, whether you stated
the question quite accurately at the beginning. I didn't think
the late Prime Minister, Mr. Holt, did say we will take Arab
refugees into Australia period. I thought what he said was, if
there was an international plan in which a whole lot of countries
will involve themselves and they will all take some portion of
these refugqos into their countries, then we would consider
taking part in that plan. But as far as I know, there has been
no such plan agreed to by other nations.
Q. If there was a plan would you consider it?
PM. If there was a plan I would consider it.
Q. We are about to finish a trial period on daylight saving in
Tasmania. I would like to hear your opinions on daylight saving
and whether you would like to see it introduced into other States.
PM. Well you know I haven't had enough time to talk to all the dairy
farmers, and apple growers and I would rather wait until I had,
before I expressed an opinion.
Q. Mr. Prime Minister, I am wondering whether you feel there is
sufficient communication between Government and the people in
Australia through the press, television and radio, whether you
feel that people are well enough informed about policies and
practices of the Federal Governmcnt?
PM. That's an extraordinarily interesting question and a hard one.
We do our best tt as a Government we do our best to try and
see that people are informed but of course as you would well
realise, onc of the ways by which Government Departments do
this is by handouts as to what it is that they are proposing
to do and how wonderful it is that they are able to do it.
These get regarded with some cynicism, I think, after a while
by those to whom thce handouts are given. Perhaps more cynicism
than they should be, but I think they do tend to be relegated
to a spike instead of analysed to see whether there's anything
in thern or not. How better things could be done to get this
communication, I'm not sure. When I was a Minister and not a
Prime Minister, my door was open always to journalists to come
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7.
in and question about handouts, to come in and question about
things they had heard around the market place and were they
true or weren't they true and all that kind of thing and this
seems to me to be the best method of communication that can be
devised other than interviews or interviews with press people
or interviews with television people, And provided a Government
can establish a reputation that what it says is designed to
provide information and not to suppress information, then that
kind of channel would be open. But it's not easy, partly from
a Governmental Department point of view because if there's some
kind of thing that they think could reflect criticism it is
sought to be suppressed. It's not altogether easy from a
Government's point of view vis-a-vis journalists because very
often some journalists will seek to take something and twist
it round a little bit and both ways tend to cause difficulties
in communication. I'm not satisfiod that the best method of
doing this has been arrived at. I am satisfied that we should
both try to see that it is arrived at because it seems to me
to be tho proper basis of a public judgment and a public
judgment seems to me to be the proper basis of a democracy
I mean a judgment on facts.
Thank you.