A US TRA L IA N ST EEN
A T
UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY
TEXT OF SPEECH
by
THE RIGHT HONOURABLE R. G. MENZIES,
PRIME MINISTER
Wednesday, 5th October, 1960
S T A T E M E N T
AUSTRALIAN STATEMENT
a t
UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY
Text of' Speech by the Right Honourable R. G. Menzie. E,
C. HI 10) M. P, Prtm e MiniLs ter
I', dinev-Iay, 5th October, 1960
I join in the congratulations which have been extended to the new
President and the new member nations. Each of them, in a sense, needs our
sympathy, our understanding, and our disinterested help. I have heard only
some of the speeches. for I arrived from Australia only on Friday last, but I
have read most of the earlier speeches, and have endeavoured to sense the
feeling of the debate. Each delegate must try to make his individual
contribution to our discussion from the point of view of his own country.
I should therefore present myself to you I am afraid for the second time
to-day as the Prime Minister of a nation which grew out of six colonies;
a nation of relatively small numbers something over ten millions-but of
considerable productive and trading development, and a lively interest in the
world Australia is, indeed in terms of international trade, one of
the first seven trading nations. This being so, it will at once be seen that
the continuance and expansion of peaceful trade is, from an economic point
of view, vital to us,
The proportion ' of our trade which sails the seas is immeasurably greater
than that of countries of high population and resources, who could, if they
wished, live to themselves much more successfully than we could. We therefore
not only have, as human beings, a passionate desire for peace; we have, as a
nation, a great vested interest in its preservation, It would seemn to most of
us a happy circumstance that sentiment and interest should coincide. " 1Here",
we would say, " is the perfect marriage", Future generations, if huiman follies
do not destroy them in advance, may well, with the clear " hindsight" of history,
wonder how it came about that the 20th century was so marred by war, and how
it was that, in 1960, representatives of 100 nations could not make peace.
" Surely", they will say, " if each nation had peace as its heart's desire, and
also wanted peace as the condition of prosperity, nothing could have stood
in the way". Can we all honestly look into our own hearts and mindsand answer
those implicit questions? As a newcomer to this Assembly: I have been
shocked at the evidence that there are some who have no peace in their hearts,
and who appear to believe that by threats of aggression, by violent propaganda,
by actual conquest if necessary, they will extend the substance of their
material wealth and the boundaries of their economic influence.
I thought that President Eisenhower made a statesmanlike, constructive,
generous speech. In a conference in which there appears to be a
disposition in the minds of some to play for the ideological support of the
new member nations, and to bring them within what I believe are called
" Spheres of influence" for purposes of aggrandisement, the American President
took a high line.
He said in effect, and I most respectfully agree, that we are not
to look at our new colleagues as if they were voters to be collected, or as
pawns in a vast international game, but as independent, co-equal, and free.
The new nations have not won their freedom only in order to barter it
away. It is offensive to them to regard them as potential satellites. Let
me, for my own country, address some words directly to the representatives of
these nations. They have not failed to observe that there are those here who seek
to inflame their minds with a spirit of resentment, and to make them believe that
their best friends are those who produce with monotonous but fierce regularity
slogans about " colonialism" and " imperialism".
It is I believe, a simple but sometimes forgotten truth that the
greatest enemy to present joy and high hope is the cultivation of
retrospective bitterness. I beg of all these distinguished representatives
to put bitterness out of their minds.
So far as they are concerned, the past has gone. The dead past
should bury its dead. It is the present and future that matter. Most of them
know that political independence can be won more swiftly than economic independence
and yet both are essential to true nationhood.
Under these circumstances, nations which are older in self-government
should not be looking at the new nations as people whose support should be
canvassed, but as people who need objective assistance with no strings if the
material prosperity of their people is to be improved. It is one of the
significant things in contemporary history that the advanced industrial
nations are, because of their scientific and technological advantages,
improving their standards at a phenomenal rate; while less advanced
countries, lacking the same techniques on the same scale, are advancing at
a slower rate. This is not one of the facts of life which one may observe and,
having observed, forget. Its significance is that gap between the advanced
and the relatively unadvanced tends, unless we do something about it, to grow
wider every year. It is not a state of affairs which civilised and humane
thinking can indefinitely tolerate.
If in this Assembly and in the nations here represented, we will
constantly remember that our trust is for humanity and that, indeed, the
United Nations itself has no other reason for existence, we will more and
more concentrate our efforts on providing economic and technical help for new
nations to the very limit of our capacity; not because we want, to put it
crudely, to buy them into our own ideas of things, not only because we really
and passionately believe in independence and freedom, but also because we
believe that our fellow human beings everywhere are entitled to decent
conditions of life, and have enough sense to know that independence and
freedom are mere words unless the ordinary people of free countries have a chance
of a better life to-morrow.
This point of view seemed to me to underlie the temperate speech
of Mr. Macmillan and other speeches made by democratic leaders.
But there are others who have so far misunderstood the spirit of the
United Nations as to resort to open or veiled threats, blatant and in some
instances lying propaganda, a clearly expressed desire to divide and conquer.
They should learn that " threatened men live long", and that free nations,
however small, are not susceptible to bullying.
I will permit myself the luxury of developing this theme, though
quite briefly, in the particular and in the general. In his opening speech,
Mr. Chairman, Mr. Khrushchev made his usual great play about " colonialism".
As Mr. Macmillan reminded us, the a'iswer to much of his story is to be found
in the presence in this Assembly of many new nations, once colonies and now
independent. Mr. Khrushchev said among other things " nations who oppress other
nations cannot themselves be free. Every free nation should help the peoples
still oppressed to win freedom and !-ndependence". This was, in one sense, a
most encouraging observation.
It made me wonder whetheT we were perhaps about to see a beginning
of an era in which the nations of Eu~ rope,, which were once independent and are
now under Soviet Communist control, were going to receive the blessings of
independence. What a glorious vista of freedom w3uld be opened up by s-ich a
policy. How much it would do to relieve the causes of tension, and promote
peace. I venture to say that it is an act of complete hypocrisy for a
Communist leader to denounce colonialism as if it were an evil characteristic
of the Western Powers, when the facts are that the greatest colonial power
now existing is the Soviet Union itself.
Further, in the course of this Assembly, Mr. Khrushchev wab good
enough to make some references to my own country and its positior la~ ion
to the Territories of Papua and New Guinea. He calls upon Australia to give
immediate full independence and self-government to New Guinea and Papua. As
a piece of rhetoric this no doubt has its points. But it exhibits a disturbing
want of knowledge of these territories and of the present stage of their
development. Nobody who knows anything about these territories and their
indigenous people could doubt for a moment that for us in Australia to abandon
our responsibilities forthwith would be an almost criminal act.
Here is a country which not so long ago was to a real extent in a
state of savagery. It passed through the most gruesome experiences during
the last war. It came out of it without organised administration and, in a
sense, without hope. It is not a nation in the accepted term. Its people
have no real structure of association except through our administration.
its groups are isolated among mountains, forests, rivers and swamps. It is
estimated that there are no less than 200 different languages.
The work to be done to create and foster a sense and organism of
community is therefore enormous. But with a high sense of responsibility,
Australia has attacked its human task in this almost unique area. Since the
war some form of civilised order has been established over many thousands of
square miles which were previously unexplored.
We have built up an extensive administration service from nothing to
a total of thousands of public servants, local members of the public service
and administration indigenous employees.
We have created five main ports with modern equipment, We have
built over 5,000 miles of road; constructed over 100 air fields; established
and improved postal and tele-communications services. We have built four
large and modern base hospitals, 101 subsidiary hospitals and 12,000 aid
posts and medical centres. There are in operation 778 infant and welfare
clinics. We have built from nothing, medical services which include 119
doctors, 347 trained nurses, 236 medical assistants, and thousands of native
medical assistants, medical orderlies and nurses.
In a little more than a few years, we have established 4,100 schools
which are attended by 200,000 pupils; large stock stations have been
established; and a great forestry industry founded. I could go on like this
indefinitely. All this has been done in a few years since the war. The
achievement has not been without cost. We are a very strange colonial power,
if I understand the sense in which that term is used. We have put many
more millions into Papua and New Guinea than have ever come out or will ever
come out. Like the Netherlands. whose representative spoke last night about
its side of New Guinea we regard ourselves as having a duty to produce as
soon as it is practicable an opportunity for complete self-determination for
the people of Papua and New Guinea. We have established many local
government Councils in order to provide training in administration, and we
have set up a Legislative Council on which only the other day we substantially
increased the number of indigenous representatives.
Mr. Khrushchev includes us in his diatribe against " foreign
administrators who despise and loot the local population". I have shown
how exactly opposite to the truth this is in our case. His further
extravaganza about the " overseer's lash" and the " executioner's axe" must
relate to areas with which he is more familiar than he is with New Guinea
and Papua. I must say with complete clarity that we do not need to be lectured
on such matters by a man who has no record whatever of having brought colonial
people into freedom and self-Government. We indeed are proud to be in the
British tradition of the 20th Century a tradition which has by sensible
degrees and enlightened administration brought the blessings of self-
Government and a seat in the Councils of the world to many former colonies.
Why has this General Assembly become so significant a forum on this
occasion? Why has it attracted the attendance of what I must imagine to be
the greatest number of Heads of State and Heads of Government in its history?
These are interesting questions and I should like to try to
answer them. The dominating fact is that world's peace is under threat and,
as Mr. Nehru pointed out on Monday, peace is the paramount problem. We
are not living in a time of peace.
The " cold war" is intensifying. The heartsand minds of men and
women are distressed. Most delegates have come here hoping that tensions
might be reduced, that some ray of light may come through some opening door;
that the new nations here represented for the first time here because they
have achieved an independent freedom and are, as I hope and believe,
determined to maintain it would make a fresh contribution not to
recriminations but to achievement.
Running through all these ideas is the widespread world feeling that
the United Nations represents the great hope; that it is better to debate
freely about grievances and occasions of difference than to make war about
them. But what has happened so far? A highly organised group, threateningly
led, has developed an attack in at least four directions.
It has engaged in a colossal war of propaganda, singularly uninhibited
by facts and marked by gross falsity of argument. The old slogans
have been used ad nauseam. Mr. Khrushchev talked on Monday last in a somewhat
macabre fashion about corpses. But I point out that the whole of his
heated propaganda about " imperialism", of which his own country is no doubt
itself the chief current practitioner, has been designed to put pressure
on the newly free nations to move into the unfree Communist orbit, to foment
bitterness in their minds about the past, to disinter the corpses of old
grievances and sorrows; to persuade our new colleagues, if he can, to
forego the joy and hopes of their new and independent nationhood.
Mr. Khrushchev has engaged in an attack upon the Secretary-
General, the distinguished choice of the United Nations, a man with whose
opinion anybody has a right to disagree, but whose ability and integrity
are beyond challenge. He has the complete confidence of Australia.
Mr. Khrushchev has without a shred of evidence, called him the biassed
representative of Western capitalism, and has asked for his replacement by a
triumvirate of Secretaries-General.
In this triumvirate there will be what I will describe in the
modern jargon as an " in-built" veto; a triumvirate whose work would be
clearly doomed to frustration and fatuity, leading to the consequential
collapse of the United Nations executive machinery. Since the result of his
proposal could be no other than this, it must be presumed that he intends
it. There is an old maxim of the English law that a man is presumed to
intend the reasonable consequences of his actions. It is a trite saying,
but it is worth thinking about.
Mr. Khrushchev has sought to convertthe United Nations into the
dis-United Nations by dividing the nations ( as ancient Gaul was, according to
Caesar) into three parts, which he conveniently though perhaps not very
accurately described as the Communist world, the free aemocratic world
( or as he might prefer to call it so as not to step outside the slogan line
the capitalist world), and the neutral world. Neutralism is of course, one
of those rather rotund words which does not readily admit of definition.
If, when we say that a nation is neutral, that it will not under
any circumstances take arms in any conflict which does not concern the
protection of its own immediate boundaries, it seems to be a notion hard
to reconcile with the Charter of the United Nations which contemplates under
certain circumstances the use of combined force in terms of the Charter
itself. Mr. Nehru, the distinguished leader of India, has not, I think,
used the word " neutral" in this sense I hope I accurately represent him,
He and his Government maintain large defences in their own country, and are
active supporters of the Charter.
What he has consistently made clear is that he stands for nonalignment
in the sense that he will not engage in any special military or
quasi-military alliance.
My own country does not subscribe to this view although it
respects it, since we are party, for example, to the South-East Asian
Treaty with the military associations which are either expressed or implied
in it. But we do not quarrel with each other about these matters
0
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I would think it i mpossible to believe that some of the
greatest leaders of so-called neutral countries would regard themselves
as being neutral in the great conflict of ideas. The real point that I
want to emphasize is that you cannot make the United Nations effective by
converting all of us into pledge advocates of groups of conflicting
interests in this Assembly, in the Security Council, in the whole operation
of the United Nations and its specialised agencies.
Unity must be the aim. Common action for peace must be the
procedure. In short, Mr. Khrushchev has on this occasion, so far from working
towards an easing of the cold war, for the very existence of which his country
carries a grievous and major responsibility, set out to exacerbate the cold
war by fomenting tension, by encouraging bitterness and by seeking to paralyse
oftconfuse the minds of the free peoples. I speak for a small nation with a
love of peace, without nuclear weapons, with a burning desire to develop
itself, a task which consumes every ounce of energy it possesses; to raise
. its standards * of living; with no ' aggression in its heart;
utterly independent, though with strong historic and present ties with its
sister nations of the Commonwealth.
In Australia-we are as I will not need to say, resolutely opposed
to communism. It will never prevail in an unconquered Australia. It runs
co ' unter to all our traditions, our instincts, anO our hopes. But there is
a distinction to be made. , Free democracies are not aggressive. No free
nation or combination of free nations desires either to send political
missionaries into the Soviet Union ( a courtesy which we would be glad to have
reciprocated) or to resort to the futile arbitrament of war. In this true
sense, we stand for peaceful co-existence. We believe that Communist countries
have as much right to their own system as we have to ours. It means that
for other countries, emerging from colonial rule, we believe in selfdetermination,
uninfluenced by threat or guile or purchase.
It is an appropriate occasion on which to remind delegates that
Australia is situated in a part of the world in which the immediate threat of
aggression comes from Communist China, a nation of vast resources of manpower,
and with leaders deeply devoted to Marxist principles. It is small
wonder that such nations as Pakistan and the Philippines, Thailand, Great
Britain, the United States, France, New Zealand and Australia have banded
themselves together for mutual assistance and to do their best to avoid a
further exposure of the area to Communist control. This treaty is paIlpably
one of non-aggression. It deserves the careful thought of delegates
because it will recall to their minds the fact that Communism is not expansionist
in the West and South-West only.
I used the well-known phrase " peaceful co-existence". Perhaps
I should make it quite clear that we would welcome " peaceful co-exist~ ence" if
4 8.
the Communists would only practise it. Nobody denies or regrets the great
modern development of the resources of the Communist powers. The technological
achievements of the Soviet Union for example have excited our admiration.
All that we ask is that we just be left alone to enjoy our own forms of
government and our own type of civilization.
I was profoundly interested in what Mr. Nehru said about disarmament,
and about the need for establishing contemporaneously, arrangements for
disarmament and inspection. There are, however, two aspects of this matter,
about which he and I have exchanged ideas before to-day, which are worth
mentioning. The first is that the problem of disarmament itself cannot be
divided into parts.
As has already been said, disarmament and inspection are inseparable.
Again it is to me unthinkable that we should imagine that the risks of war
would be diminished if the nations disarmed in the nuclear field but not in'
the field of what are politely called " conventional arms". For the fact is
that it is only the possession of nuclear weapons, terrible though they
are in their possibilities of destruction, horrible as it is to contemplate their
continued development, which deprives the Communist powers of instant and
overwhelming military superiority in the relevant areas. Nuclear, thermonuclear
and conventional arms must, therefore, all be dealt with together.
The second point I make is that I cannot honestly accept the view
that armaments are the major cause of world tension. That view seems to me
a serious over-simplification. True, if any power or combination of powers
has shown that it is aggressively-minded and seeks to extend its boundaries
of control wider and wider by force if necessary, then the possession by
that power or group of powers of vast armaments will be the cause of tension.
But if the non-aggressive powers are in result driven into maintaining and
developing great defensive armaments, it is proper to say that their armaments
are the result of tension and not its cause.
In effect, what we need in the world, just as much as the vastly
important disarmament talks, is a serious attempt by negotiation to encourage
freedom and understanding, to remove the causes of friction and to persuade
nations that aggressive policies and proselytising political religions are the
ememies of peace. There are many other matters which I could speak about.
But time marches on, and I wish to avoid repetition.
I therefore conclude by saying, for Australia, that we subscribe to
the sound principle of foreign policy that no nation should seek to interfere
with the domestic affairs of another. This, indeed, is the " good
neighbour" principle. If it could be accepted seriously and generally, the
world would become a happy place.