INTINJPIATI. N. L ALIR TRA'SPORi T A3SOCIATICN ME2&, ING
In Sydney. 3rd October. 1963.
Speech byZ the Prime iinis ter the Rt. Hon. Menzies
I am delighted to be here this morning under your
presidency, because really Sir Kudson Fysh is one of the most
remarkable of living Austr:: aians. He was the true pioneer of
commercial flying in Australia. I have no doubt that back in
those earlier days he thought this vas a bold stroke to start a
-thing and call it Queensland Northern Territories Aerial
Services hop from here to there, and hop back again. with a
little bit of luck. That is how it all be:, an. Now it is one of
the great airlines of the world. And the man rho began it and
who thought of himself, first of all primarily, I hage no doubt,
as a pilot and an adienturer, still remains an adventurer. But
he has in one sense ceased to be c pilot and become a pirate,
because he tarns out to have, and unexpectedly in those
circumstances, a positive flair for business, for driving an
enterprise on he saw , rith an eye of imagination all round the
world and, what is more, he has, in my experience ( and I don't
want to say this to encourage any of the others of you) an
unrivalled capacity for rifling the Treasury.
Now, Sir, having said that and all the good bi. ts
about you are completely true I just want to tell you that at
the week-end I thought " Jhat can I say in opening a conference of
this kind? I suppose I ought to be completely agreeable and
pat everybody on the back". But when I sat down I found that at
the end of two hours all the things I had thought of about
aviation, about civil aviation, were extremely disagreeable. I
recall the fact that over the better part of a million miles I
have been sitting in mid-air in my time trying to think and
failing, trying to read and failing, arriving at the other end
in a state of complete intellectual dejection, being cross
examined by people in press conference and television interview.,
people who had been to bed the previous night. One has some
of these strange memories.
Indeed I ' ant to tell you this great historic
disclosure: I am a fairly senior sort of Prime Minister
attending Prime Ministers' Conferences and about 5 or 6 years
ago, attending one, I proposed that we should form a Prime
Ministers' Union. iWell, of course, you know not all Prime
Ministers appreciate that kind of remark and so it was rather
badly received. I said, " Well, it's perfectly simple. The
union has only one rule. It won't have anything to do with
-ages and conditions or any of that sort of thing we ill do
the best we can in those departments ourselves but" I said,
" there must be one rule and that is No press or television
interview . rithin 24 hours of arriving after a flight of not less
than 3,000 miles". I said that to give Diefenbaker a chance
from Canada. And do you kno, that with the exception of my
support, this wise, humane proposal this statesmanlike idea was
unanimously rejected. They all went away feeling that I was an
extraordinarily frivolous fellow and I have never had the same
status in a Prime Ministers' Conference since.
But, Sir, in spite of these qualified remarks about
flying, let us agree that flying is here and your business is to
make flying better, safer, more economical, meaning by that
economically -ore sound, I may say something about those things
in a moment, but before I do I just want to remind myself and
all of you, of some of the benefits that have come to us hrough
flying.
A great deal of trouble in the -orld has arisen from
notions of insularity, each country tending to live to itself,
drag its cloak about it, feel that it is a better country than
any other and that on the -hole it is prudent not to know the
neighbours. This idea of insularity is an idea which has, in
our lifetime assailed even the greatest of nations and what
flying? international flying, has done, perhaps more than any
other instrumentality, is to break down this feeling of
insularity. Thousands more people, to take the example of
Australia, zisit us and we visit them. Thousands of people, in
an early day and by other means perhaps, saw little of us except
the ports, and ports with great respecc to Sydney are seldom
the most fascinating parts of a country. Lots of people who
did not ; et beyond the ports now by reason of the greater speed
of arrival and the more time that they have available to them,
see a great deal more of the country and that goes for the
people of our ow. n who travel abroad.
Then, inside our own country and this is worth
remembering in Australia, a country roughly the size of the
United States of America with only 10 million people flying
has done more than any othe4' thing in our history to eliminate
many of the symptoms and disabilities of remoteness in our
country. A country like ours wiill never develop unless those
people who have the feeling cen be encouraged to live and work in
remote places: otherwise we shall be all city heads and nothing
else. Before flying, a man was remote in the centre of
Australia. A man who was in the far outback was indeed removed
from his fellowmnen. He indeed felt the great loneliness that can
come to a man, and that can come to a woman, to the wives even
more so. 3ut today with our air services instead of being weeks
away from other people, people are only hours away from other
people. We have great things like the Flying Doctor Service in
Australia. This is one of our prides and joys. People who on . e
would have been left almost literally to die in remote places are
today, rithin a few hours call by a flying doctor and a proper
medical aerial sarvice.
People get letters more frequently. They have the
great and stimulating advantage of leading the newspapers more
frequently, which is an awfully good thing for the digestion
because it stirs something up in you.
So, Sir, I believe that inside Australia and outside
Australia commercial flying has a great record and an even
greater opportunity in the future. But when I have said that I
want to turn from prestige to the work of your great Association.
I may tell you at once that its recording system is remarkably
good because Twhen I said, as one does on these occasions, " Have
they sent me any dope so that I will know rhat to talk about?
Has Sir Hudson Fysh drafted a speech for me?" or words to that
effect, the answer was to bring indeed all the speeches made by
the presidents and the heads of governments welcoming conferences
of IATA since it began. I want to tell you that I am a glutton
for punishment: I read the lot. But I still found myself left
with this: W'hat is it that you are doing? Tell you are, I
believre, primarily engaged in developing what in effect is a
co-operative system, a system based on mutual understanding and
mutual willingness to help and to eliminate absurd things. I
believe that if you can do this to perfection, the future of
aviation is going to be much better than even its very
remarkable past.
And safety: you know we road the newspapers and from
time to time we read of another crash somewhere. These are
dreadful things but, . rhen you compare them against the enormous
number of millions of people carried safely every year, I
venture to say that one of the most astonishing things in the
history of civil aviation has been the safety factor; and I
dare say that it is a rapidly growing safety factor when you
consider the enormous demand on air services. This doesn't
happen by chance. This happens by tremendous scientific
researd by vast expenditures on safety measures, vast
expenditures on the machinery, the tackle that is needed in
order to control flying, in order to make air movements safe
movements. I know that there are organisations which have,
perhaps, a more particular interest in that mattor and a more
particular responsibility than you have but another thing which
must have given you great exercise is that there is, alter all,
a disposition in the :. orld to say, " We have an . irline, our
prestige requires that , we should, so to speak, have no connection
with the firm next door". I can o1ll imagine that it is not a
simple matter to get a areat number of airlines together and get
them to work out ways and means of the interchange of their
services, the working out of routes so that people, instead of
having to be precipitated at their ultimate destination iith the
highest speed ill be able to change over, will be able to pause
hero have a look at this country, learn something about this
country, and then go on in an orderly pre-arranged progress.
This kind of thing seems to me to be tremendously important.
But one of the things I do not envy you and I do not
envy governments who are concerned in these matters, and that is
that as the world goes on, faster aircraft are produced, faster
aircraft are demanded. ; e are about, I believe, to enter the
ultimate miseries of supersonic international aviation. I have
a pet the. ry myself that my successor, because I am bound to
have one you know, that my successor, in a few years' time, will
be rung up and will be invited by the Primo Minister in London
to " nip over and have dinner, there are one or two matters I'd
like to have you talk with me about". He will then go out and
be put in a sort of capsule, will be fired off up into space,
dodging those copper needles on the journey, and will no doubt
be brought down by some form of remote control at the other end,
and go to dinner. It is a terrible prospect to me, but I do
know quite practically, that every time an airline today
re-equips it begins a process that is already half over.
It gets the latest as it sees the latest. It knows
quite well that in a couple of years' time there will be
something later than the latest; it may, when it buys its new
equipment or aircraft of a particular type, optimistically say
" Well now, we'll amortise the cost of these over X years". At
the end of half that time it is sometimes suddenly reminded that
after all it's impossible to resist re-equipment with this new
one because you are being driven out of business by your
competitor and so the partly amo-tised cost suddenly becomes a
write off. How the financial men connected with the great
flying companies manage to survive and have dark hair in so many
cases, I do not understand.
This problem of the economics of flying is one to
which I believe we all and you in particular must direct
more and more attention, because I do not believe it is possible
to go on just keeping up with the Jones's whatever the cost of
keeping up with the Jones's may be. The last thing that you
want to have happen, or that I want to have happen, is to have
international flying or domestic flying, civil aviation in the
broad, regarded as something that is inevitably insolvent or
to put it another way, is something which inevitably cannot live
except without massiv3subsidies.
I do not believo that needs to be true. I do not
believe that it is beyond the wit of man to solve these problems,
to organise the production of now types of aircraft, and to
organise new programmes so that they have some relation to the
effective use of the reoat assets already in oporation. I do
not know Ahether there is a temptation among flying people to
look down on the earth and say that is a matter for pedestrians.
This, of course, is a very pedestrian problem I am reminding you
of; but it is a problem that will have to be solved because the
people themselves in the world who, in the long run pay, will
require to be satisfied that the economics of air travel are
regarded today with equal urgency and importance as the mechanics
of civil aviation, or the electronics of controlling aircraft and
their passage through the air.
Now, Sir, I know that you have all those things in
mind. I apologise for reminding you, therefore, of them. But
speaking as one who sees no limit to what may be done in the air
in the second half of this century, I would like to feel that it
was not only going to be something dramatic, sonithing exciting,
something of immeasurable use to the world, but that it was
something that could, to a very large extent, live on itself,
depend on itself and not be beholden too much to the politicians
of the world. Now, before I conclude, I just want to tell you that I
mentioned a little while ago how remoteness in my own country was
being overcome by flying. Political remoteness, I may add
before I close, is being overcome in just that way. In the old
days my earliest predecessors, as Prime Ministers of this
country, if they wanted to go to Jestern Australia, travelled
by an international ship. They went comfortably, or
uncomfortably, across the Great Australian Bight; they had four
or five days of leisure, which, no doubt, they devoted to reading
heavy matter and engaging in powerful thoughts. They then
arrived at Perth, they discharged some of these powerful
thoughts at a meeting, and then they got back on to the ship and
came back to the Eastern States. This is a marvellous form of
life. I look at it now just retrospectively. But it was
impossible for them to know very much about Australia. Today,
the problem is solved by flying.
In the last six months I myself, just inside Australia
and as normal routine, have flown just under 20,000 miles and
will fly another 10 or 11 thousand before polling day if I may
refer to that unhappy event.
I think it is quite safe to say that in the course of
the last 12 years I must have flown, inside Australia, the better
part of half a million miles and all this has been done into
every corner of the continent, into remote mining towns north,
north west, north central, south central all over Australia, to
places Icould never have gone to if it were not for flying. This
I trust, though I am not the best judge of it, has made me a
slightly less incompetent Prime Minister than I other ise would
have been. It has broadened my kncwledge, broadened my horizons,
brought into my ears and into my eyes, the problems of people
whom otherwise I would never see. This, I believe, in a country
like ours, is the ultimate, marvellous . ans.. er to that remoteness
4hich might otherw ise overcome the Federal Capital with its
limited opportunities on the part of Ministers to see the
country and the people for wom they are responsible.
And so, Sir in spite of my initial complaints which
are genuine, but not to be taken out of proportion I stand here
as the debtor of civil aviation, and as your debtor, because as
I see it, I reard you as some of the -reat driving men in this
business in this country. If I venture to suggest that I have
some uneasiness in my mind about whlere we are getting to,
economically, when we consider this tremendous rapidity with
which re-equip-: ent becomes necessary, it is only because I think
so highly of civil aviation all around the world that wouldn't
care to have it put at the mercy of other people, or put
financially into a precarious condition.
I relcome you and I declare this Conference open.