STATE VISIT BY PRESIDENT PARK( OF KOREA
LUNCHEON AT PARLIAMENT HOUSE, 2SP98 N
17 SEPTEMBER 1968
Speech by the Prime Minister, Mvr John Carton_
Mr President, Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen:
This function in our National Parliament gives the opportunity
to do you and your country honour. You represent a country with a history
which goes back much further than ours, and : you represent a country which,
in the course of that history, has had to face much harsher tests than ours.
You have known forcfign rule which we have not. You have
suffered direct armed aggression on your own people and your own land
which in any comparable way we have not, arid you are still subject to the
threat of aggression and indeed to the infiltration of armed commandos with
missions to kill those significant in your country including, Sir, yourself,
In recent history, you gained self-government in 1945,
after some thirty-six years of foreign domination which you could not, by
force of arms, resist or overthrow, but which you never at any time accepted
in your hearts and minds, which you consistently rejected and which ultimately
you managed to see removed.
Then, within but a short time of that, you faced an incursion
across your Northern border of well-armed, well-organised, well-prepared
military formations seeking to subject your government or the Government of
South Korea and the South Korean people by force. It took years for that
attack to be repulsed and for those who made it to be sent back from whence
they came. We remember the great sacrifices and devotion which the South
Korean people made themselves to throw back this assault and which the
United Nations, to its credit, helped and which we, as a nation, contributed
towards, as I believe, to our honour and to the honour of the United NatJons.
You are, Sir, as I have said, still challenged, and I believe
that that challenge is real. We have seen in recent weeks what can happen in
a country when the forces of suppression can walk in and can deny the
expression of the free will of the people of that country. What we saw happen
in Czechoslovakia could have happened and could happen in South Korea.
You have got to face this threat and are facing it a nation of 30 million
people with 600, 000 troops under arms because of this ever-present pressing
threat. You are providing those twin deterrents against aggression
and against subversion the willingness and ability to resist by military
force the breaching of a frontiiqr or a demarcation line, and the determination
to improve the economic living standards of the peoples of your country so that
by these both methods you will together prevent the dangers which threaten
you. 2
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We have admiration for both of these efforts on your part,
great admiration in particular for the determination you are showing to
increase your economic capacity and the living standards of your people.
Your first Five-Year Plan, I am told, was a great success. Your G NP
rose by an average of something like 10 per cent a year, and as a result, the
employment capacity and the wage capacity for the people of Korea rose with
it. Your second Plan is now off to what appears to be a
magnificent start. You are working towards complete self-sufficiency by
1980, and that, bearing in mind the war-torn recent history of your nation
and the way it had to be lifted up industrially by its bootstraps is, as has
been said in one of our journals, something that approaches an economic
miracle. And so you are engaged in these two great tasks, but you
have not only a determination to resist aggression, not only a realisation
that wherever a demarcation line or a border is violated that is a danger to
all small countries, not only an insistence on providing self-help in your
economic growth, but also beyond that an eye for the future in that it was on
your country's initiative that ASPAC came into being, That is an organisation
of which we in Australia are proud to be a foundation member and which is
designed towards regional co-operation in economic fields and in other fields
for the good of all and which will be far more effective and far more able to
advance the good of all if that day ever comes when those threats posed to
the region by communist aggression are removed.
For all these things, for all these efforts on your part, we
in Australia and the Australian Parliament are proud to do you honour.
Sir, you are a very welcome guest.