SPEECH BY THE PRIME MINISTEht, THE RT. HON.
R. G. MENZIES, C. H. M. P. AT THE
STATE LIBERLAL CONFERNCE, HOBART, 15' TH 3JLY 196o
Mr. President and ladies and gentlemen:
I think I will follow my usual prudent course and
declare the Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the State Council
Open. I was told to do it at the finish, but I know if I don't
do it now I may forget to do it later on.
I was very very interested to find that Mr. Pitchford's
mind was running back over a long period now since this Party
began, and as that rather relates to my theme this morning, I
will make a further reference to it myself.
Back in 191+ 3 our predecessor parties had the biggest
defeat, I think, in their political history. In 1944 I had
become once more, Leader of the Party and Leader of the
Opposihion and I determined that there must be a tremendous
effort made to produce something new and vigorous and united.
Many of you may have forgotten that at that time in 1944, one
could find in Australia no less than fourteen different
organisations, all of them professing, more or less, our ownr
point of view fourteen different bodies. Disunity of that
kind was one of the reasons for our defeat. And the unity that
was produced by the work of 1944 and 1945 in welding all these
bodies into one and creating the Liberal Party is one of the
great factors that has kept us in office in the Commonwealth
for the last ten or eleven years. It is worthwhile recalling
that in disunity we found our greatest disaster; and in unity
we found our greatest and most continuous success. The history
of politics is full of that.
I can remember and no doubt many of you can in 1929-
wasn't in the Federal Parliament, that had nothing Lo do with
it the Bruce Government went down to the greatest defeat that
it could have encountered. It was forced into an election
twelve months after the election of 1928, which it had won, and
it was forced into an election by disunity in its own ranks.
And Labour came in at the end of 1929 with a majority that
induced the usual faint-hearted among us to say: " Oh, they'll
be there for ten years". It is wonderful how quickly some
people abandon all hone. They were going to be there for ten
years. And inside 18 months they had fallen to pieces. They
had encountered difficulties of policy and of character in
their own ranks, and in the result they fell to pieces and by
the end of 1931, they were gone. The Lyons' Government came
in and we had from the beginning of 1932 to the beginning, or
the middle, of 1941, an unbroken period of Government by people
of our side of politics.
Do you see how it w; orks out? Every time there is
disuhity, disaster may be looked for. Every time there is
unity victory is three parts achieved.
I had, I think, some illustration of the value of
this kind of thing this year in London. lie had a Prime
Ministers' Conference. The Conference met under very, very
difficult circumstances. There had been an incident at
Sharpeville in South Africa and all round the world there were
denunciations of the South African racial policy not that
that policy was a policy of shooting people but the policy of
apartheid, the policy of separate developmenl of the black and
the white races. And this was under tremendous attack.
Fortunately the matter came up for the first time in any wide
discussion at the Prime Ministers' Conference.
And there we were quite different people: Mr. Macmillan
as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Mr. Diefen-
baker from Canada, Mr. Nash from New Zealand, Tunku Abdul
Rahnaan from Malaya, President Ayub from Pakistan, a representative
of Ceylon and the Prime Minister of Ghana, Dr. Nkrumah.
Well, we are all different people. And, particularly in the
case of some of our colleagues from Asia and Africa, feelings
were very, very high and they had stated their views and
offered them with considerable force in their own countries.
In the result we sat down together: there is a strange, illusive
unity about the British Commonwealth. If you look at it
as a matter of paper you say " Well what is it?" I have
encountered people who say i doesn? t exist. W~ hat is the
relation between these countries? There are republics; and
there are monarchies, like Australia. ' Uhat does hold these
people together? What is it that induces a country like Ghana
when it gets independent self-government, to apply at once tha?
it may be a member of the Commonwealth? And what induces it,
when it votes to become a republic, to apply at once, as it
did, for approval to remain in the Commonweal th as a republic?
Why is it that this happehs? And the answer is that we meet.
ge are not like any other body on eath. We have no slight
resemblance to the Security Council of the United Nations or
the General Assembly. We are not meeting on the stage of the
theatre; we are not conducting public debates; we are not
taking votes; we don't have people running around the lobbies
trying to persuade somebody else to support this amendment if
I support yours. All this kind of thing which is inseparable
from great assemblies doesn't exist when we enter No.
Downing Street. And down upon us in that room I know because I have
had a long experience of it, longer now than anybody else
down upon us there settles a particular sense of intimacy, a
particular sense of friendly understanding, a particular realisation
that if we can remain a united body for the things that
we believe in, a great good will come to the world. And there
we were, sitting around the table, sitting in various rooms,
talking as occasion offered with the representative of South
Africa, the South African problem: courteously, quietly, no
passions displayed, an earnest desire to get to understand and
to make sensible suggestions. And in the result, after 10 days
of that conference, we were able to issue a communique which
referred to the problem of South Africa referred to the
existence of a multi-racial soc,-4oty in Lho Commonwealth, and
which was the unanimous product of all those present
includinc, South Africa.
You see the point that I am getting at? There are
plenty of debating societies in the world I take a hand in
one at Canberra from time to time, myself,-( Laughter) in a
small way. But the Prime Ministers' Conference is one of the
gre at proofs that people who disagree, perhaps profoundly on
a number of matters, can find a great sense of unity aboU~ the
important things about which, underneath it all, they find
themselves agre. eing.
Now, Sir, we can carry that further on to the world
stage. The world is going through a pretty bad period, a very
worrying period. Khrushchev has two things, perhaps, in his
favour: one is that he knows his own mind and he is the
master of his own time table, just as Hitler was. The other is
that he is acting, so to speak, on internal lines of communication:
he's got this great country behind him, an enormous
aggregation of people behind him, whether willingly or otherwise,
and he can press out, probe out on to the rest of the
wiorld at his own choico. While the free world, being the free
world, will argue, one country with the other, conduct all the
disputes in public, have all the differences magnified in the
headlines though they may be quite trivial. Superficially it
is an example of unity versus a certain amount of disunity.
0 3.
When the disunity becomes too prevalent, the Cold Var by the
Soviet Union succeeds. When the great nations of the Vdest
really get together and begin to act and think together, then
the Cold War begins to fail. But the Cold Wgar has had a
considerable amount of success of late.
I was in London of course, at the time when the
Summit Conference occurred, or didn't occur as the case may be.
And when Mr. Macmillan came back from Paris I had a long
private discussion vith him about it in order to get some of
the background of it. He was, of course, bitterly disappointed.
No man had done so much as hehad to bring it about. He had
with a bold stroke of moral leadership, as I will always
regard it, IoettMso hmef urged the holding of a
Meeting at the Summit, and had finally persuaded President
Eisenhower and General De Gaulle that it ought to occur. And
so, everything was set for it. Khrushchev had himself
proposed it, do you remember, at least a year before,
Well, what were we all expecting? It know that it is
a very human frailty always to expect too much and I daresay
there might have been some who expected that out of the Summit
we would get an era of peace. 4ell that was never quite, I
think, on the board.
But there wolo two things that I, for on~ e, had hopes
about. One was that they might have agreed to some sort of a
moratorium cabout Berlin. This wretched nagging problem of
Berlin which bordered very close to armed conflict only a fea
years back, until the whole thing was broken by the famous airlift
to Berlin, this nagging problem which goes on and on with
threats on the Eastern side, threats of separate treaties with
East Germany and of closing Berlin out to the i-estern world and
to Western influence. And so most of us had hoped that when
four men of responsible posts got togother they would have
said: " Well there is plenty of time to settle all these
allegedly legal arguments about Berlin; let's have a moratorium
on that",
And in the second place that we might have seen some
answer to the problem of nuclear tests. Because at Geneva they
had been discussing with each other for a long timeu the problem
of suspending nuclear tests on both sides, with an adequate
system of inspection. They had got so close together that I
thought myself that all it needed was a good nudge by the four
people meeting together at the Summit, to close the gap and
bring about at least that measure of relief from tension.
And so it was a tragedy for the world, a tragedy for
ordinary men and women all over the world, people who have a
vested interest in being kept out of the horrors of another war.
It was a tragedy that this one man, on the feeblest excuse in
the world, should have wiped the Summit Meeting out before it
began. Ile must beware of the propagandists, because the
propagandists, the Communist propagandists, would have you
believe that the reason why he did that was the Americans had
had a plane over Russia taking photographs.
Well I'm bound to say two things, ladies and gentlemen:
one is: it may have been very unwise to have a plane at
that time, but at some time or another, I think a very .:, ood idea.
Lot us just reason together a little about this matter, this
famous U2. Did he complain about the U2 because he was shocked
at the idea that somebody was spying on his country? a strange
kind of sheok for a Communist to suffer from., the strangest in
the world. Of course he wasn't. He regarded it in the first
place as rather a nice trick that he had taken. This plane had
come down, or had been brought down, he had the pilot, and I can
almost imagine him saying, " Ab, I've taken the first trick in
this game; now I'll have them in trouble". But all in a
sense good clean fun, you know. ( Laughter) Until, of course,
he suddenly realised, and so did the famous Marshal Malenovsky,
that this plane was 1 000 miles inside the Russian frontier a
thousand miles. And that as it could be guessed pretty safely
it was by no means the first, but it was the first to be detected
and brought down, this was a little embarrassing: this meant
that without intercontinental ballistic missiles these
wretched things that some day, let's say, will be capable of
being popped up and dropped on to the precise spot in another
continent even in the absence of those, quite clearly, aircraft,
flying at a suitable height, couiA deliver nuclear
weapons deep into the Soviet Union. In other words, the nuclear
deterrent was disc losed in one flash as being immeasurably more
powerful than Khrushchtev had ever been prepared to admit. And
all his protestations to his own people that the counter-attack
was ' kn absurdity, just fell to the ground. And that, I am
sure, with suitablecomplaints in his headquarters, induced in
him this fit of rage which may have begun by being synthetic
but ended up by being very real, in which he just blew the
whole thing out.
Wiell I don't suppose that that is the end of it, because
you remember that very shortly afterwards he said that we
might perhaps have a Summit in another six or seven months'
time, meaning by that after the American Presidential election.
And I don't myself despair of that being the case: I think
that very well might turn out to be the case.
I don't quite knew what the famous Khrushchev has in
his mind on that point because that was, I thought, just about
as good an indication as anything could be, that he would wait
until he could deal with a Democratic President. And if I had
been a Democrat in the United States of America I would have
thought that was very dubious assistance to have my Party told
that it would be more likely to be agreeable to Mr. Khrushchev
than the Republican Party, I don't think for one moment that
that is true, but they have strange ideas in their minds
occasionally about the Western psychology. I hope, and believe,
that after the Presidential election he will get an unpleasant
surprise whichever candidate wins.
Now, Sir, the ether thing that I want to mention to
you is thils I was talking about this Cold liar. W~ e have
seen two things of dramatic importance in the Middle East and
in the Jest in our recent lives: the first of them was Suez,
whore, in the result Colonel Nasser got awray with it had a
great success, developed immense prestige in the Middle East,
with the result that the Middle East has been in this place and
that in a state of foment ever since. And the second one is
the incidents in Cuba.
You know we have fed so well on sensations in our
lifetimes, in this century of sonsations, that we hale almost
lost our capacity for surprise everything just seems to be
another incident, and what of it.
But this performance by Fidel Castro in Ct': ba is on
all fours with the performances of Nasser. And as you haven't
failed to observe, not only has he been treating the United
States, his near neighbour, with open contempt, but he has been
getting away with it, getting away wi-th their investments,
getting away with their money, getting away with their interests
calling in aid, the Soviet Union, getting large and
posihive help from Khrushchev, doing all that he can to convert
Cuba into a Soviet base right off the shores of the United
States. That to me is one of the great crucial things that has
happened of late. It indicat * es something that you and I have
to give a lot of thought to. 14hat it illustrates is that small
countries today are not unwilling to treat with contumely the
large powers of the world. They will turn to them for protection;
but they will use their own voice, and the voice of an
aggregation of other small countries, to defeat and humiliate
them if they can.
I hope that the United States of America, with its
passionate belief in the United Nations, as the saviour won't
be too disillusioned if Castro rallies in the United Nations a
few score of countries, small in themselves, all willing to
" have a go" at the big fallow.
This is a very disturbing state of affairs and it will
require two things: it will require immense strength and
readiness and determination in the great powers in the United
States of America, in the United Kingdom, in France, which is
recovering rapidly in modern terms great strength and determination
on their part, great unity between them so th~ at
they are not divided and conquered. And for us, who are of the
free world, it reminds that we should be increasingly conscious
of what is going on outside, of our duty to our friends of our
readiness ourselves to play our part in the affairs of the free
world, and in our capacity, because of character and determination,
to earn the respect and friendship of these great countries
upon whom the security of the world depends,
These are vitally important considerations. I know
that there are some people who say: " Oh, what has that got to
do with Australia?" Some fellow, the other day in Melbourne,
I noticed, talked about Foreign Affairs, " What has that got to
do with Australia?". Voll if that state of mind prevailed in
this country we would be finished. vie are an adult nation. We
are ten million people it's quite true but believe me, we
are listenedtto in the rest of theo world in a Prime Ministers'
Conference, in a meeting of the South-East Asian Treaty, in a
meeting of ANZUS with the United States of America. In all
these things in Whitehall and in Washington Australia is
listened to and, I'm proud to say, listened to with sympathy
and respect. ( Appla~ use). We are not to underestimate our-selves0
And because of that I believe we must look forwad to a
period in front of us when Australia will increasingly become
known as a country with internationai outlook and intc-, rational
ideas. These very matters that I have mentioned and thoe
are only a few out of miiany are the best proof that thla-oe
matters on the world stage are immeasurably more important than
any of the things that we argue about of a domestic kind inside
our own country. And they have a great habit of coming home,
Twice in this century they have dome home. Does anybody suppose
that if the world fell into nuclear war or indeed a global war
of any kind, we would be innocent bystanders? Not at all. And
the contribution that a country can make to the solution of the
world's problems is not measured by the population of the
country. There are some very large countries in the world that
have contributed mighty little to the solving of the world's
problems one or two of them not far away from us, like
Communist China. And yet on the other hand there are smaller
countries which make a contribution. I venture to say that
under Mr. Harold Macmillan, Great Britain is more and more
restoring herself to a position of, intellectual and moral
leadership in the world. ( Applause)
Now, Sir, Cuba may seem a long way away, That phrase
reminds me, if I may interrupt myself, that back in 1935 I think
it was, I had a conversation with President Roosevelt in Washington
at the Vhitehouse and I asked him a highly hypoi. hetical
question about what the attitude of America would be if Australia~
got into any kind of trouble. And ' iith that characteristic
smile of his, he said: " Well you know what my mind is on that,
but what my people would say I wouldn't know!. You know they
might say: ' It's a long ways away'.' 1 I couldn't object to
that, because that's just what we say, isn't it, about some of
the events of the world.
Today that attitude has entirely disappeared. One
never meets an American who doesn't know about Australia and
Australians, and very seldom does one meet one who hasn't either
himself or by a brother-, or a cousin, or an uncle, been in
Australia either during the war or after it. And ther-, fore we
are on c-lose easy friendly terms with them.
But, despite all that, you may say: " IVell Cuba is a
long way from us". But Communis China isn't. If we look up
north: Indonesia is not far from us; Singapore is not far
from us. I only realised the other day how short a distance it
is to Singapore, because if you leave Darwin by plane today you
are in Singapore in about three htours' time. North of Singapore,
you have Malaya and you have Thailand; you have South
Viet Nam, Laos, Cambodia and all around them on the top and at
the sides you have the Communist forces whether they are the
forces of North Viet Nam, or the forces of Continental China
itself. And there is in all these places a constant pressure.
Communist China, they estimate, will have by the turn of the
century a thousand million people. And they won't be untrained
or ill-informed. That is a long way off it's forty years
hence and in 40O years enormous strides can be made in industrial
development, in the organisation of military activities
enormous strides. A thousand million people.
My friend, Mr. Nehru, the Prime M nister of India,
ought to be the last man to be undier attack by Chou En-lai, of
China, because sometimes, at the risk of unpopularity with some
of us, he has sought to explain their point of view, has
maintained diplomatic relations with then he is no Communist
himself, of course but he has always tried to act as a sort
of moderating and interpreting element between Communist China
and the rest of the free world. And for his reward he finds
that Tibet is dealt with by Communist China in a most violent
fashion, rofugoes are streaming over the frontier and the
frontier2 of India have boen violated and are at this rioment,
violated by Communist China, A pretty poor reward for honourable
conduct. And the result of it, of course, is that India,
now, is in a state of mind of feeling apprehensive about the
thrust of these arrogant people.
We have the South East Asia Treaty Organisation. It
was my own Government that played a leading hand in organising
it. We have the ANZUS pact with the United States and New
Zealand of which we were certainly -the promoters. These are
of great potential value. In the South East Asian Treaty we
have Pakistan, and we have two or three of the Asian countries
plus Great Britain and France, and the United States and New
Zealand and ourselves. And there we are, 1Wbhra d a meeting
in 1-Jashington. There is, I think, a greowing sense of community.
But there again I had occasion to point out that all the
organisational arrangements, all the military planning in the
world, wouldn't make our Organisation effective if there were
internal disputes inside our own frontiers, so to speak.
And to take an example:, Cambodia, which is one of
the protected countries under th. is iireaty, has a quarrel with
Thailand and it gets very heated. It is over something that I
would have regarded as quite trivial, but it goes on. Then
another country has another argument with somebody over a couple
of islands of no great intrinsic value except as a matter of
prestige. And, as I pointed out to them, unless you can settle
these irritating points of difference, you will find that the
Communists are not fools they love to intervene where there
are private disputes, they like to exaggerate them, they like
to fish in troubled waters. And so long as they can fish in
troubled waters our side of their frontier then we are
weakening our own position and exposing ourselves to great risk.
Well I hope that those things will be solved because
and here again is my point it is only by the utmost unity,
not only by treaty, but by the spirit between the nations in
the South East Asian Treaty Organisation, that we have any
chance of ultimate salvation. Unity, unity, unity must be the
thing to be achieved all over the free world, whether it is in
our own Party or in our own nation or in the international
field. Disunity means disaster.
Our opponents, to go down to the political field, in
Canberra have an expert know~ ledge of that truth.
Now, Sir, I have spoken a long time Jout those
matters, but I have spoken about them because I believe that we
are going through a tough, rough, international period. That
doesn't mean that I believe that Khrushchev wants to start a
war. As always, he will go as far as he can, as boldly as ho
can, as bullyingly as he can, up to the point at which he sees
a strong prospect that this will be resisted by force. And in
the meantime they go on, probing here, probing there sometimes
it is a relatively small matter; sometimes it is a
relatively g,, reat mattes:. But every time there is a probe of
that kind and it succeeds, and we simply fall back on vague
generalisations and arguments with each other every time that
happens another step has been taken in the march of Communism
in the world a march which, of course, is welcomed by the
Communist Fifth Columnists inside Australia; and apparently not
entirely disfavoured by those) who are willing to ally themselves
with them, but a march of the greatest gravity for all of us.
I Trould just like to add to that that there is going
to be a Presidential election in Ameirica; there is going to be
an election in Ceylon shortly: " Uhat though the tropic breezes
blow soft o'er Ceylon's isle". Some of us have been there a
lovely place, marvellous place, happy people. They have two
Communist Parties in their Parliament and those Parties, in this
election, are active and make no secret of the fact that if they
can socure an alliance what you might call a unity ticket
with one of the major opposition parties, then they will be
inside that Party if it wins and they will ultimately get
command of it. I am most unhappy and you would be too at
the very thought that it might be possible for Ceylon to come
under Communist influence.
B~ ut it is not the only place. Before I finish, let me
say this to you: people have talked so much about South Africa
that they have, perhaps, forgotten that that is only a small
portion of Africa. There are 200 million people in Africa and
all moving with tremendous speed towards self-government.
People have a great itch for political self-government it is
understandable. Very few of them worry a-bout economic selfgovernrment".
It is rather, to people like ourselves,-" a little
astonishing to find that there is no recognition that there is
a distinction between political independence and economic
dependence on the rest of the world. But there it is. And it
has this effect: political independence they are going to
have willy-nilly. Sometimes, as in the case of Ghana, with
grea goodwill; as in the case of Nigeria very soon, with
great goodwill; sometimes, as in the case of the Congo, with
the absolute certainty, as most of us believed, of riot and
bloodshed which is now going on because circumstances were
I 8.
differaint. Gr~ eat Britain is the one power, in my opinion, in
the world that understands or has understood the colonial
problem, and how to bring people up to a stage of governing
themselves. But there is one remarkable truth, greatly forgotten
I fear, and that is that if these nations in Africa achieve
their political independence at a time when they are not
economically capable of survival, and therefore need great help,
economically, they will either get it from the free world or
they will got it from the Soviet Union. And if they get it
from the Soviet Union, which is busy today examining Africa,
then before long they will find that they have fallen into the
hands of the Soviet Union, that they are mere catspaws for the
Soviet Union. And therefore, from that point of view, there is
an enormous task in front of the doestern world not to diminish
its help to other countries, but to increase its help to other
countries. Unless we of the destern world, we in our small way
and other great countries in their large way, face up to the
duty of doing something about these emergent African States we
may wake up, or our children may wake up some day, to find that
there is a great Communist Continent. That would be, I think,
more than Australia could surviv3.
There is another aspect of it and it is a very humane
one, and as we are a humane Party with, I am happy to say, a
magnificent record of humanity in legislation and provision, we
might think about it. One of the ironies of the (, Iorld is that
the highly developed industrial countries are developing more
and more rapidly every year, as technology, technical skills,
scientific efforts and the progress of an industrial country
improves. It is remarkable. But in these under-developed
countries, like these emergent nations in Africa and in Asia
progress is nothing like so fast it can't be: they do no
have the technical resources; they do not have the technicians.
And therefore their rate of progress is slow, while our rate of
progress is rapid. And that means and this is a simple truth,
easily to be overlooked that the gap between their standards
of living and ours, instead of diminishing, is increasing. Now
that, I think, is something wihich must make us all furiously
think that in spite of what g; oes on, the gap increases. And as
the gap increases, so will the inevitable resentment and
frustration of these people grow more and more strong. And in
that atm.-osphere, the Com-. munists, the overthrowers, have a great
opportunity. And therefore so far as all the free world is
concerned, it will have to divert more and more time, and
thought, and money a-, nd sacrifice to helping other human beings
in the world to raise their standards of living, to get into
that condition of life in which Communism will not interest
theom, will have w appeal to them and in i , hichi by their very
realisation that there has been a warm and friendly atmosphere
in the world, they may themselves powerfully contribute to the
peace of mankind.