SPEECH BY THE PRIME MINISTEA,", THE RT. HON. R. G.
MENZIES AT CENTRAL METHODIST MISSION ON SUNDAY,
6TH SEPTEMER, _ 9D
I was reminded and kindly, by a newspaper yesterday
that this will be the 26th appearance of mine in this rostrum,
in this pulpit that's a long time isn't it?
When I bagan my second chapter of these appearames
about 14 or 15 years ago, Dr. Benson used to preteqyilchat I
came here to say something about the anniversary oi the second
lar but since then, in the last few years, he's become rather
" Father's day" minded. I don't mind telling you that I had no
idea it was Father's Day until just before lunch when three
turbulent grandsons, and one turbulent grand-daughter, arrived
to have lunch with us, and each of them, with that magnificent
gesture of generosity that has been hinted at by Dr. Benson,
presented me with the noblest of all gifts: a bag of peanuts
in the shell. I got a great kick out of it. They all ceme in,
one after the other and said: " Hellos Grandpa, Father's Day
present". And of course you know what young grand-children
are like at least some of you do. Having presented you with a
bag of something edible, they stand around expectantly and so a
good time was had by all ( Laughter).
In spite of it being Father's Day I still like, when I
come here, to say something about the state of the world. It is
ful of problems. I had the great good fortune earlier this year
to go around the world and to have long talks, and intimate and
friendly talks with no less than ten heads of Government. This
is, of course, always a very illuminating experience.
Each year one imagines that one understands what the
problems are for the next 12 months, or two years, but it never
quite works out like that. Today's red hot problem is out of
the news in six weeks, because some other problem has taken its
place. You just look back a little and remember that it isn't
so long ago that we were reading anxiously about matters affecLing
Quemoy and the Matsu Islands off the Chinese coast, with
Formosa in the background, and wondering how this might blow up
trouble in the world trouble not very remote from us because
we have had a faculty, and a very proper one, of becoming involved
in the world's problems, right through the lifetimes of
all of us. And then that just dropped out of the news, though
it didn't drop out of existence, and we began to read about Laos
and the great troubles they are having in that small, but not so
very remote country in South East Asia. Just as that matter
was beginning to lodge in the minds of a great number of thoughtful
people, there was trouble on the border between India and
Tibet and my distinguished friend, Mr. Nehru, found himself
compelled to say things and to contemplate things that he had
hoped never to say, or to contemplate.
So the world is shifting and changing in detail all
the time, and somebody who understands these problems, or hcpes
that he does, today, may, unless he takes care to pursue thcm,
find that he knows nothing about them in 12 months' time.
I mention that to you because I want to establish thr.
this is a very strange, shifting, uncertain, uneasy sort o
world. But if life is strange and shifting and uneasy it doosn C
make us enjoy it any the less. Uhat we need to do is to Lahvc a
look occasionally at the things that are not changing or shift,.
ing, so that we may get our sense of balance when we ccntor> . t
world affairs. And therefore today Imrnrt going zo ta. 1k to -c
in particular, but I want to talk to you a little in the. broø d
about some of these matters.
I remember, Dr. Benson, that during the war h-hun T
the not unhappy task of being Leader of the Opposition., hc mg
been Prime Minister a post which. no doubt, if I rea2-
I will once more occupy some day and I well remember at that
time a very earnest man from America being in Canberra. He was
one of those men you have occasionally met them whose earnestness
overwhelms their sense of proportion, who are wishful
thinkers, who feel that whatever happens next must be good and
right and, therefore, it will happen. And he said to me: " What
would you think would be the state of affairs in the world
years after peace?" and I admit that somewhat lightheartedly, I
said to him: " Well I would think that ten years after the war I
would think that Nationalism would have grown greatly at the
expense of Internationalism. I would think that freedom would be
enjoyed by rather fewer people and I would think that on the
d. hole tariff barriers would be higher". He almost collapsed.
He said to me: " What a dreadful series of remarks to make." And
I said, " W4ell, I thought you wanted to know what I believed; if
you only want to know what Ithtink will please you, of course,
all that is wrong",
I mention that because we will not properly understand
this world that we are living in, this world in which we in
Australia are a small and highly exposed unit, unless we face up
to the facts of what has happened since the war. It was a war
to defend freedom and a very just war to defend froedom, and it
was a war to defend it ag-ainst one of the most wickeC. 1 dictators
that the world has yet produced.
But since the war hundreds of millions of people in
this world have become members of dictator countries, largely
against their own will. You think of countries like Poland and
Czechoslovakia, to a lesser degree perhaps Yugoslavia, countries
right up through the middle band of Europe, countries which were,
you know, historically, t'he homes of freedom, and today they are
satellites of the most powerful dictatorship in the world, not
by their own choice, but by force and conquest. At that time
before the war the people of China were not, peri-aps, the pcoplp'
of a PAation, because it is a great error to think that because a
country is a vast area, geographically on the map, it is in
consequence a Nation. No, China, continental China., was a group
of communities with individual War Lords occasionally warring
with eacti other. It wasn't a concentrated nation with a concerted
national mind a. nd national feeling as ours is. But at
any rate it preserved the ancient culture. It had a faith. It
lived, so to speak, its own life, And today, it, with all its
hundreds of millions of people, is governed by a dictatorship.
You see what I mean, that we are not to suppose that
the world has not changed since the war, or that all the changes
have been for the better. The fact is that there are hundreds
of millions of people who once felt that they were free, who
now know that they are not. And if we shut our eyes to that
fact we do badly, if we are to have a balanced view of the
world. There is a socond aspect to this that I would like to
say a little about : Nationalism. You know really, a lot of us
thought didn't we -in the course of t'. ae war, that' when, it was
over there would be a new, international organization and that
we would become all rather less national, and a little more
international, a little less insistent upon our own. rights and a
little more concerned with the rights of the community of men
and women around the world. Yet since the war we have found,
haven't we, in various parts of the world, a new, insurgent
nationalism w; hich has secured independence, which has, not infrequently
produced dictatorships, which has, in itso1f, the
spirit of aggression. With all the work done by the United
Nations I would very greatly doubt whether there has been any
period of ten years in my lifetime in which there has been a
more insistent demand for independent, separate nationalism on
the part of the people of a score of countries in the world.
There it is; that's one of the facts of life and we must face it.
Well, how do we go about facing these things? One of
the ideas, most prevalent has been that you must follow all
these movements; wherver there is a movement for independent
nationalism you present the people of that country 4ith independence,
and we've done it. Nobody can doubt that whatever may
be said about colonialism in this world, the history of British
colonialism in this century has been one of glory and intelligence,
because the whole process has been to say to people:
" Very well, you have your freedom; you govern yourselves".
But there again, ro can easily go wrong. * o are not to assume
either that people are all equally competent to govern themselves
or that our system of Government is the right one for them.
Now I will say nothing about the first because it is
self-evident. But I want to talk to you a little, this afternoon,
about whether we ought to be so smugly satisfied that our
system of Government is the right one for Indonesia, or Malaya,
or Singapore or India, or Pakistan, or Ceylon, or Ghana, or
Nigeria, or the Vest Indies. Are we so right? Are we wise to
push down the throats of other people our ideas of how a country
ought to govern itself, just because they are our ideas? I don't
think we are. I think nothing could be more foolish. I think
we ought to pay a little more regard to other peoples' history
and hackground and religion and culture and leave it to them to
, rork out a system of Government which suits them, because it
suits them and not just because it suits us.
Do you ever think about our system of Government? I
know that I've been in the middle of our system of Goverrmpnt
now, believe it or not, man and boy, for 30 years, and I know ail
the noises that our system of Govcrnment makes and I know that
there are people who take a broad view of Government and a broad
view of national policy, and there are others who take a smaller
view and say: " What will it cost me?" and one becomes accustomed
to all this. But at the base of it I beg of you all to remember that
I am a Prime Minister of Australia and there is a national
parliament in Australia, and there is a parliament in each State
c& pital, and a Premier and Ministers, because hundreds of years
ago our forefathers in Groat Br: train sat under the villne oak
tree and lerned how to manage their own affairs, their own
public affairs, their own local government. Step by stop, over
centuries the position was achieved in which there was a Parliament
elected freely by all the adult people in the country
without r. gard to wealth or privilege. That didn't happen
over night. It was only in the nineteenth century, that the
Parliament at Jestminster, which had fought and won its battle
with despotic monarchy over 200 years before, found itself by
successive reform acts, voted for by a wider and wider constituency
until adult men all had a vote by the end of the
century. It was only in the lifetime of a great number of
relatively young people that women had a vote in Groat Britain.
This process of self-government, of parliamentary
self-government of ours, has grown slowly and somctimes painfully
over a period of contuies. We all have it in our bloo. It is
part of our history. It is something wo learned about from our
father or our mother and that they in their turn learned about
from those wtho went before them something that we've read,
something that we've come to understand, something that we've
felt. That is why I always maintain that in Australia we
understand just as much about democratic, parliamentary selfgovernment
as any other country in the world. Vc are in the
forefront of that historic development. But it has taken
centuries. Do you suppose that you can take a community of many
millions of people, not bred in our tradition, not with that
fusion that has gone on for so many centuries with us, between
4.
the principles of Christianity and the principles of representative
Government, bred in some strange creed, from our point of
view, with notable cultures going back into their own history,
but incapable of being understood by us, or by many of us, at
any rate. You can't take a fully grown plant, like our parliamentary
democracy, and put it down in an alien soil and expect
it to flourish and grow and bear its fruit as if it had been
there all its life. It is a very great mistake for . well-meaning
people to insist that our system of governing ourselves must be
right because it suits us it is right for us and then say:
" Well all we have to do is to present this, fully grown, to some
other community and say, ' Well, there you are boys, you all have
a vote, you will all have a Parliament, now just go ahead and
govern yourselves'". Life doesn't happen that way.
And I am saying that to you because ory now and then
you will read in the newspapers of some head of a neo Government.
whether it's in Africa or in Asia, who has done something
which, from our point of view, is quite dictatorial. And we
say, " But that's a terrible thing to do; this is a dictator's
action". Don't become too excited about that. There are
quite a few so-called dictatorships in these new countries which
will, in the course of years, mellow down until they develop
their own form of popular Government, and when they do it will
be their own form and they will understand it. Don't be too
severe in judgrent about what goes on in Ghana, or what goes on
in Karachi, or what goes on somewhere else. Don't be too
severe about it. You don't expect other people to be able to
adopt systems of Government which we understand instantly so
that everybody knows them and everybody responds to them just as
readily as those whose great, great, great, grand, grand-parents
saw the developments of these things in British countries.
And therefore don't let's force our views, and, above
all, don't let's be intolerant about Ihat goes on in these
countries. I'm not defending dictatorship. Dictatorship has
brought horrors to the world. lle will never have one in
Australia. But there may be countries which, in their early
stages of development in independent Government may need to
give much more power to their central rulers than wre world dream
of doing, so that order may be established and grac' rl-administrative
procedures can be worked out and put into operation.
Now the only other thing that I want to say a word to
you about is this: we think, and I think we are right, that we
understand our system of Government, though there are some
people who think that it is a system of Government by pressure
groups, or by threats, or by something of that kind, but we
know better than that. ' o know that by and large, over the
years, we have been able to throw out Governments which have
honestly tried to serve the interests of the community, And we
understand that. But we are a little bit inclined to assume,
aren't we, that our system of Government is just the same as
the system of Government in other democratic countries.
It has been my task and, of course, frorr time to time
my pleasure, to attend dinners in the United States, in Groat
Britain and in Australia in which glory has been attributed to
the relations between the United States and ourselves, the
United States and Great Britain, and in that genial mood, men
at least get into after a good dinner, people eliminate all the
difficulties, They talk about us being the same people, the
same language. Almost, they pursuade themselves that we are of
the same blood we are just completely identified people and
then they wake up next day and find there is a frightful brawl
going on between Washington and ihitehall, and they say: " I
don't understand how that happened; how coulc it happen?".
Silly enough thing to say, anyhow because my experience, when I
was a lawyer was that the most bitter of all litigation was
between members of families. But anyhow lot that pass. They
assume that we are the same in our system of Government,
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Some day I hope somebody, if I haven't got the time
myself, will write something about the basic differences between
Ameiican self-government and our own, and if it is written, then
we will not quarrel with the United States from time to time. We
will understand what these differences are, they u; ill understand
what the differences are, and with an understanding of our
differences we have a much firmer foundation than we have by
talking rather vapidly about our unities and forgetting about
our differences. I give you one example.
In London, in Canberra, if we want to work out what
our policy is in some great international matter, vie don't,
contrary to what you may have thought, ask other people to talk
about it. We go into the Cabinet Room and we talk about it
ourselves, and we do a lot of reading and thinking about it,
and finally we say: " Well that is uhat our policy is to be in
relation to this matter", whether it's to be in relation to some
near territory like New Guinea or South East Asia or the United
States, Whatever it may be, when it emerges and is stated it is
our policy. And there it is. And people in the rest of the
world, reading it, being so advised by our Ambassadors and our
Ministers, are able to say: " Well we know where Australia stands
on this matter" which is very useful.
But in the United States, policies are today, to a
remarkable extent, thrashed out by Committees of Congress, not
one member of which is a Minister, because, as some of you will
know, Ministers, as we would call them, in the Cabinet, as we
would call it, of the President of the United States, not only
don't sit in Congress but they are not allowed to. They a-c
completely separate from Parliament I'll give up calling it
Congress for the sake of clarity and call it Parliament. So
there's a Parliament, House of Representatives, Senate, at
: ashington, not a Minister allowed to sit in it and Ministers
are up somewhere else discussing their problems among th. eseve-
On a few occasions the Minister may have had parliamentary experience
but on most occasions he has never had any. He has
been selected because of his capacity in his particular field,
which is of course, to that extent, a great advantage. And the
result is that Congress has established a series of committees.
They have, for example, a Foreign Relations Committee of the
Senate and a Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Pepresentatives
and they occasionally sit together.
If the Secretary of State, the late Foster Dulles or
today, Mr. Hea-ter, the most important Minister in the United
States, is engaged in international negotiations of some kind
can be, and is, called before a committee of Congress, and crossexamined,
perhaps all day, about how his mind is working, what h
thinks may be the result of his thoughts. ' Tell it i. s very
interesting. It is all done in the presence of the Press and
frequently with Television. It is very interesting. But it
seems to us to be an odd way of evolving a policy because here is
the Minister " tho hasn't been able to work out what his policy is.
to completion, and he is being asked to analyse his own mind in
the presence of the public. And therefore, like any other man
appearing before a committeeo, he will think aloud, He will say:
" Well, of course, that's one way we might deal with it" and then
later on he sayd: " That's another way we might deal with it" and
these little bits and pieces come out to the world and get on to
the cables and people in London and people in Melbourne and
Canberra say: " What sort of a man is this? He doesn't seem to
know his own mind".
This was said about John Foster Dulles, you know. It
was wickedly untrue. If ever I knew a man who knew his own
mind, it was John Foster Dulles. But before a committee he might
express ten minds in the course of ten hours of questioning, all
in the process of making up, ultimately, his own mind,
6.
You see I hope you follow what I'm moaning by this
that means it is easy for us to misjudge what's going on in the
United States. It is easy for us to got false ideas about
American policy, or about American standards, terribly easy,
disastrously easy, unless wo understand that their system of
Government, and their system of policy-making, is completely unlike
ours because we have a Cabinet Government, with Cabinet
sitting in the Prliament. and directly responsible to Parliament
on the floor of Parliament. These are two utterly different
systems. I prefer ours, if I may say so. They prefer theirs.
They are a very great country, with a great number of extraordinarily
able men and women and they arc well entitled to
prefer their system. All I amasking is that we shouldn't go
blundering along assuming that our system of GovernAent is the
same as the system in any other democracy.
So that you see that there are two parts to this little
lay sermon of mine: firstly, don't assume, when we talk about
the democracies of the world that we all have the same machinery
of democracy, because if you do, , we will fall into misunderstandings
every few months. Secondly, don't let us fall into
the error of thinking that we can say to millions and millions of
people who have emerged, or are emerging, from an entirely different
state of life, that our system of government is necessarily
the best for them.
All these things, all these international problems,
call for a degree of tolerance, a degree of intelligent understanding,
ahich, so far, we haven't achieved nnd it is because I
kno how important understanding and tolerance are in the world,
that I am always delighted when I see that the head of some
Government has talked to the heads of other Governments.
I know there are people in Australia who are inclined
to regard these personal contacts as a jaunt or a dcscrtion of
duty. On the contrary, they are the performance of the highest
form of duty. It will be a sad day for Australia rhen the heed
of the Government of this country cannot go and be a knom and
recognised friend and intimate of the leaders of the major Governments
of the world a very sad day.
And now that the President has come anay from the
' hitohouse, and has been travelling in London, in Bonn, in Paris,
I am delighted. And perhaps the way to sum it up is to say that
I am most of all delighted because I think it is rather sad that
in a world of human beings contacts between the most prominent
human beings should be regarded as the exception rather tian the
rule. I would like them to happen every few, weeks, without
brass bands, or trumpets, or television sets or all the other
impedimenta of publicity. I would like them to happen just as
matter of normality so that we Till all know each other better
and bettor, Lnd particularly these great men in the world, kao
each other better and better and better, because and hee . Ls
the great and closing comfort the more the ordinary people anA.
the extraordinary people of the world know each other and arfriendly
with each other, the less dense will be the cloud o,
possible war, the greater will be the chances of a-" nvrirpeace.
I I