MEETING OF REPRESENTATIVES OF WOMEN
ORGANIZATIONS ARRANGED BY THE 4OMEN'S SECTION
OF THE LIBERAL PARTY IN BRISBANE ON
23RD APRIL, 1963.
Speech by the Prime Minister_ the Rt. Hon Sir Robert Menzies
I've never discovered quite accurately how one begins
Madam Chairman is that right? ( Laughter) There is a certain
ambiguity about that, but still, wetll let it pass,
I want to thank you very much, in the first place, for
having congratulated me on this event that has recently occurred
in my life. The truth of the matter is that any properly
constituted man finds it almost impossible to say " No" to a
woman ( Laughter) and that is the whole story in brief. All The
Queen had to do was to smile and say, " Now, come, come. What
about it?" and I was sunk with all hands. Some people thiink
that it is in my nature to be given the Order of the Thistle
( Laughter). The motto of the Order is done into English
" Nobody hurts me ( or frustrates me) with impunity". One or two
of my Cabinet colleagues were unkind enough to say when it
was announced that they had known that for many, many years
( Laughter) and thought it quite appropriate. But the best
translation of the lot is in the Scots, where its version is
" Who dare meddle with me?" ( Laughter) You Sassenachs won't
understand that, but all the rest will.
Now, I thought I'd like to talk to you quite briefly
this morning about one or two matters of importance. In the
first place, I am going to tell you at once, to relieve your
minds, that I don't propose to run through a whole series of
figures and facts and give you categories of this or that because
nothing is more tiresome I think, and nothing more difficult to
carry around with you, But I think it proper to say and it is
worth while everybody realising, particularly in Queensland,
that in recent times the amount that has gone on in this State
and is going on, of a developmental kind, with the active and
powerful assistance of the Commonwealth is quite remarkable,
There are some people who think that all you need to
do, if you are going to get some help from the Commonwealth
which means from the taxpayers, is to go along and say, " This
is a pretty good thing to do-what about you paying for it?"
Now, this is not right. The Commonwealth does not carry out the
public works, for example, that the States do. We do to a
limited extant, in our own field. Most of the great public
works in Australia, the great works of development, are State
works, but increasingly the Commonwealth is becoming a contributor
to their cost and we have laid down a rule that there must
be some limit to this kind of thing, some rational limit,
We have laid down a rule that we will be prepared to examine
with a State Government the possibility of financial assistance
for a particular job of work, if that job of work can be related
to the export earnings of Australia.
You see, we have a great responsibility for keeping
this country internationally solvent and that means that we
must have our exports constantly increasing, so that we may
have oversea. s, held in various forms, adequate sums of money to
preserve the solvency of Australia in the international market.
It is a complicated matter, I don't want to look beyond that
point, but it is essential that our export industries should be
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encouraged, That is why it is so essential that we should
restrain inflation in Australia because the first industries
to suffer with inflation are the primary industries which are,
to an overwhelming extent, responsible for oir export earnings
sugar, wheat, meat and so on down the listl
Now we have laid down thtis general rule and if I may
apply it to the State of Queensland, it may be interesting.
I don't take them in any particular order, but take the great
railways converton on the Mt. Isa/ Collinsville lines. It turned
out to be impossible to raise the money, to borrow the money
from the World Bank, although at one stage, we had great hopes
that that could be aone and so the Commonw.. ealth Government
stepped in and said, " We will act in place of the 4orld Bank.
Wo will finance this up to the extent of œ 020M,.
Now œ Z2014 is a lot of money. Even for an Opposition,
it is a lot of money, Why did we do this? Well, we did this
because Mt. Isa has every prospect of being the greatest copper
minint hewordand whereas copper was in very short supply
oiny an fewoersd ago there is an increasing chance of a
substantial export market in copper, to say nothing of the
extent to which it saves us from importing copper in the first
instance. ] herefore this is a great export earner and if it
could be doubled or quadrupled that is what is going on at
Mt. Isa then the earnings from the mine are doubled or
quadrupled and that is of tremendous significance in Australia's
balance of payments. Therefore, we are certainly in on this.
Take a small example ( the other is a very big one)
the coal facilities at the port of Gladstone, Now it may seem
a little odd that the Commcnwdualth should come in to Some modent
extent about œ C250,000 on some coal-handling facilities at
a port like Gladstone, but the same principle was applied. The
principle was that if these facilities were increased, then
an export market frcm the port of Gladstone in coal could be
created. We have done the same with coal ports in New South
WA~ ole S Now you may say, " Oh, well, this is all raother
humdrum." It isn't humdrum. When we came back into office
at the end of 1949, after eight years of Labour administration,
Australia wan' exporting coal, Australia was importing coal.
Many of you will remember it. Importing coal. Buying coal
from India, buying coal from South Africa; and because shipping
was scarce in those days, paying the most tremendous freight
rates, charter rates, in order to land the coal in Australia.
Although Australia is full of coal, we were importing it, so
declined h. ad the fortunes of the country become. And, today,
of course, we have an export market in coal. It becomes
increasingly important. The production of coal has gone up
by leaps and bounds and so has its export, and therefore we
said, " Here's a case in which there is a chance to improve the
export earnings of Australia."
Similarly, and Itll still stick to Queensland, you
take the beef roads up in the north, where we are providing,
over a short term of years, œ_ 81 or œ F914, mest of it by way of1
grant, in order to construct properly a series of beef roads
which will onab'e a bigger out-turn of cattle from the cattle
lands to be made. This, of course, will add very very
considerably to the export earnings of Australia because let us
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remember all the time that while you may look at it as the
export earnings of John Brown or of the Mt. Isa company or
whatever it may be, in reality in the broad, this goes into
the great stream of export earnings of the country itself and
if our exports exceed our imports, then we arc accumulating
reserves overseas, If ve don't accumulate reserves ovrseas,
then we are just like a household in which there is no money
in the bank, no savings made, nothing to fall back on for a
rainy day and we musn't allow the nation to be in that State.
There is a great development going on or about to
go on in the Brigalow country and we have undertaken to find
millions of pounds in relation to that, and why? For the
same reason. It will increase the production of exportable
commodities beef, meat of various kinds, whatever the products
may turn out to be.
Now, I am sorry to be tedious about that, but I wanted
you all to understand the principle on which the Government
acts in these matters. It is not just a matter of kissing
going by favour. It must never be a matter of saying " Iell,
we will do that job because there are some votes in it." This
is pretty cheap stuff and politics of a poor order. We have
therefore established the principle that we must be shown first
by a State Government that the operation will come in aid of
the national exports and if it is, then we sit down and we get
down to brass tacks and in a great number of cases we have
helped. We have done it in oJestern Australia. We are about
to do it in South Australia. Wc have done it to a certain
extent in Victoria, though perhaps not as much as the Victorians
would like, Now, so much for that.
The other thing I want to mention to you has nothing
to do with that. It is far removed from it. There has been
a groat deal of argument going on recently about disarmament and
about nuclear-free zones in the world and about a communications
station, an American station, in the North-viest of Western
Australia. I thought I would just like to say a few words to
you about those matters because there is nothing on which there
is so much confusion of thought, particularly among my opponents
who have got it all messed up in their own minds and it is
essential to keep it clear.
First of all, you must realise that the Labour Party
approaches it from the point of their firmly-established
policy that there should be a nuclear-free zone in the Southern
Hemisphere. That is to say, in the Southern Hemisphere no
nuclear -, capons are to be made or stored or used. Now that
sounds wonderful, doesn't it? Vie don't want a nuclear war.
Who does? but we want nuclear power because unless we had
had it, we would have been at war long since. But it sounds
rather attractive to say, " Well, now, you can put the whole of
the world south of the Equator out of the nuclear arena. What
would that moan? Just in the name of coraonsense, what does
that mean? It moans that China, Communist China, north of
the Equator has no prohibitions about nuclear weapons but we,
south of the Equator would. So we couldn't have our allies
use nuclear reapons in our defence but Communist China could use
them against us without reprisal and with impunity. Does
that strike you as a very sensible policy? If ever I knew
anything unrealistic, it is that. And this thinking, this
thinking which would put us in the position of absolutely
letting down our allies and therefore being let down by them,
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is pretty widespread. We happen and it is to the credit
of the present Government let me say we happen to have two
treaties in which we are in alliance with the United States
ANZUS United States, Australia, New Zealand and the
SEATO treaty in which Great Britain is also one of our partners.
Not that we need to have formal alliances with Great Britain,
but we are together, whatever comes.
But talk about America for this purpose.
America is the greatest free power in the world. If it
weren't for the enormous deterrent strength that the United
States has, this world could have been overrun at ease by the
Communist powers. What could have stood in the way? Therefore
the United States is very important to us. You, you ladies,
the custodians of the future of Australia, have a profound
interest in the security of Australia and the security of
Australia depends more than any other thing on the alliances
that we have in this part of the world with the United States
of America. Great Britain can do something here but sh-e has
enormous tasks elsewhere in the world. We have the United
States and the ANZUS pact and so on.
Do you realise that this Labour policy means
that if the United States became involved in a great war
with Communist China and that would be a world war on a
great scale that the United States couldn't attack Communist
China from any point south of the Equator and would therefore
be utterly handicapped in conducting operations of war.
Suppose look, God knows we don't want it; we pray against
it but suppose the world got into a great war, with the
United States and Great Britain on one side and Communist
China and Communist Russia on the other, and we as one of the
prizes of defeat or victory, and we have an alliance with
the United States can you suppose that Australia would
approve of telling the United States, " You can't have a
submarine with a nuclear weaponon it; you can't have an
aircraft carrier with a nuclear weapon on it; you can't have
an aircraft with a nuclear weapon on it south of the Equator,
otherwise you are breaking the rules that we have laid down.
The effect would be to destroy the Unites Statest capacity
to attack the Communist powers from the south from a point
from which they are most vulnerable the Indian Ocean and
its surroundingsø We would simply immobilise our own ally
and, of course, the United States, indeed no great country,
can trifle with its own safety in that way. It would simply
say, " We ignore your rules", and so all we get for our
contribution is a quarrel at that time with the nation whose
victory is essential to ours. Now all that nonsense, as I
call it the suicidal nonsense about a nuclear-free zone,
is clearly to be observed in the approach of the Labour Party
to this signalling station at North-West Cape. Really, they
have a bee in their bonnet on this business. They only just
failed to declare their hostility to it. Nineteen to seventeen,
If the gentleman from Queensland hadntt changed his vote, as
I understand, at the last moment, the hostility to it would
have been confirmed and a Labour Government the one that
you are going to vote for if you vote against us a Labour
Government would have served notice that if it won the next
election, it would term-inate the American rights to conduct
that signalling base in the North-West of Western Australia.
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Now what is this signalling station? They have
got an idea that it is going to be a fire control tower, that
somebody will press a button and that will fire a Polaris
missile off a submarine. This is so childish. It has no
foundation in life at all. That is not the way these things
are done. All that this station is for is to enable communiications
to be had from the Administration in the United States
with the United States naval vessels in the Indian Ocean and
South West Pacific, whether they are above the water or under
the water, It is part of the naval forces. And they need to
have the signalling connection with them badly. They have it
in the Pacific. They have it in the Atlantic. They don't have
it in this area, and the one place in which it can be effectively
established is in the North-West of Australia. de are their
ally. Their friend. And they are our friend and, to a large
extent, our protector. Are we to say to them, " No, you can't
have a radio station; the land would still be ours, of
course, but you can't have a radio station, because you know,
you may bo signalling to a submarine and a submarine
Oh, that's a rude word with the Left-Wingers in the Labour
Party, unless it is a Russian submarine in which case it is
quite respectable, thank you.
Well, you know this is puerile and yet, I repeat,
but for the more accident of a single change of vote, the
policy of the next Labour Government would have been to
declare, " Out with this station".* As it is, I am going to
take no chances on this matter. I've got too much sense of
responsibility for this country to take chances on this and
thereforcj, whon the agreement is finally concluded -because they
are still working out a few details when the agreement is
concluded, we are going to put it through Parliament and have
it authorised by the Parliament of the Commonwealth of
Australia and it won't be very easy then for a new Government
to tear it up because it will not only have to repudiate the
agreement, it will have to got Parliament also to approve
of the repudiation, and that's not so easy in Australia.
It is essential, from our point of view, tha-t this matter
should be confirmed, made absolutely clear, and the only
reason I am mentioning it to you is that once more it throws
light on what these strange opponents of ours think about the
problems of national security,
Of course it all illustrates this: that they have
gone back to isolationism. They were isolationist before the
war. They had to snap out of it during the war when they
went into office and did it very wel]* Now they have gone
back to isolationism. Everybody in ustralia ought to look
at the map once a week the map of South East Asia once a
week ait least. I go Into the Cabinet room and pull it down
and ? ook at it with regularity. I know it back to front.
What do you see? You see Communist China so aggressive in
philosophy that even Khrushchev is disagreeing with them and
saying, " Now, gently, gently; don't be so extreme". That
is the Chinese Communist outlook. And below them, what have
we got? We have got Burma, which lives under their shadow
and, I would imagine, in the fear of them. We have North
Viet Nam, absolutely violently Communist under Ho Chi Minh-
South Viet Nam, a little outpost of non-Communism involving
today the assistance of the United States and Aus~ ralia;
Laos which is in a state of chronic confusion due entirely
to Communist agitation internally and from ou~ side. We have
Malaya, peaceful, well-governed, quite a rich country, part of
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the British Commonwealth; Singapore, the new concept of
Malaysia, and then down here well, wevbo hiado
course which is our ally and down below here, Indonesia
you never know and Australia. Aren't we interested in
seeing that the Communist attack doesn't come too near to us,
or are we going to put our heads in a bag and say, " Well, we'll
pretend~ we didn't know anything about it until it happened.
They can come down; they can infiltrate; they can get hold
of Laos; they can get hold of Thailand; they can wipe out
South Viet Nam." All imaginary things but, really, in terms
of military power, these countries left to themselves couldn't
resist it. And yet, in our Parliament, we have a member
of the Executive of the Parliamentary Labour Party, Mr. Haylen,
and who is bound to be a Minister if they come into office,
saying, " WIhat's Ma] lya got to do with us? The Commonwealth
Brigade in the reserve ought to be withdrawn from Malaya.
What's it got to do with us?" In other words, what doe3 ' Lt
matter to us if Malaya is overrun by the Communists. This
is wonderful statesmanship, isn't it? This is the kind of
statesmanship that has produced a war or two in modern history.
Don't lot us stand up for anything when we can; let it go,
lot it go let it go, until finally you are in it on the worst
possible terms, with all your outposts taken. It is worth
thinking about this matter, this suicidal attitude towards
what is, after all, the ov . irwhelmingly important thing for
you and for me and for our children and our granchildren, that
this country should be strong, self-respecting, secure and
living on terms of honourable friondship with great free nations
around the world. I once used an expression I daresay that like
most people I repeated it about our great and powerful
friends. I like to have great and poworful friends and so
do you. But this has become a sort of jeering thing now:
" The Prime Minister, of course, he bows his knee to our great
and powerful friends, while of course ' ve, the Labour Party,
so far from bowing the knee, kick them hard, because that's
the way to deal wvith great and powe rful frionds.,"
Now, this is a tremendously s: i-rious matter.
If the next election merely involved some change of emphasis
in how much money you spent inside Australia on this or that,
perhaps it wouldn't matter, but if a change of Government
involves, as I have shown you i does, an utter conversion from
one extreme to the other, from one point to another on the
attitude towards the security of Australia, then I want to say
to you it's a risk no sensible person ought to take. You will
be accused I will be accused of being warmongers. I was
one of the Prime Ministers who, at the Prime Ministers'
Conference agreed on a stateme., nt about disarmament, every word
of which now stands and to which the Labour Party pays lip
service. The operative part on the matters I have been
discussing I actually drafted myself in the Prime Ministers'
Conference. Of course we want to see a slowing-dowm of the
armament race. Of course we wfant to see a substantial measure
of disarmament, but the first thing to remember is that there
are two kinds of arraament in the world. There is the nuclear
weapon and there is what they are pleased to call the conventional
weapon conventional forces, nuclear forces. A lot of
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people like a few of those silly old men who sit in the street
in England, a lot of people have persuaded themselves that if'
you get rid of nuclear weapons you have solved the problem of'
peace or war in the world. You havent. You have merely
transferred the balance of power from the West to the Communists
and therefore we have said right throughout, " You must deal
with these two matters together. If you are going to reduce
nuclear armaments, and we are all for it, then you must reduce,
correspondingly roduce, conventional armament. You are not
to have a process of disarmament which throws the world out
of balance and gives some tremendous advantage to one side or
the other. So keep it phased; keep it in harmony and get
down to a point where ultimately, someday, the peace will be
kept., we hope, by some properly controlled international
force." 1 But in the meantime, there is -n awful lot of work
to be done, and those people who because of the sheer horror
of thinking about it want te abolish the nuclear forces while
leaving the other forces untouched are just if they go away
with it, making it a certainty that the whole balance of power
would swing around and that the Communist powers would be
able to dominate the world at will. Ind they are not very
gentle. They don~ t have too much of the Christian othic so
far as I have been able to discovcer and the prospect of them
dominating the world is one that would fill any average
Australian with complete horror.
Nqow, I have already spoken too long. Thank
you vary much. I didn't expect to seu anything like so many
of you when I came here this 1--orning. I have to go away
and be spoken to by the r:, erabers of the State Cabinet at
lunchtime and then I think I am on a television exercise
this afternoon and then a meeting in the stadium tonight.
So the day is only really beginning. Thank you very much
for making it begin so well.
I I