FOURTEENTH COLOMBO PLAN CONFERENCE HELD IN
MELBOURNE DURING OCTOBER NOVEMBER, 1962
Consultative Coimittee Meetingheld on
12th November 2
Inauiural address by the Prime Minister, RtiHon, R. G, Menzies
Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen
It gives me very great pleasure to welcome you
all to Australia and to this Meeting,
We played our own part at the time of the foundation
of the Colombo Plan and since then we have maintained a very,
very close interest in it, I don't think that anybody
would have thought ten years ago that it could have reached
such proportions as it now hasE or have been r. sponsible for
so much assi. stance to new coun; ries as it has in fact
provided over the last decadeo All this is very satisfactory,
but it is ro real reason for us becoming smug or selfsatisfied
because there is much to be done,
One of the things that strikes the observer in
recent times I'll say broadly in the period since the last
war is that many countries have emerged into political
independence, political independence being something very
dear to the heart of man. but they have not necessarily at
the same time emerged in6o economic independence. There
are many politically independent countries in what is called
the New World which still have great economic problems and
one of the basic ideas of the Colombo Plan was, of course,
to try to attack that problem by giving effective aid for
the raising of economic standards and of living standards,
but great difficulties have presented themselves.
We have quite a few illustrations in these times
of great financial aid being given to nations financial
aid designed to help them to develop their own production
and to export the products of their labours only to find
that when they are ready to export them they are confronted
by high tariff barriers or by fluctuating prices or by some
other uncertainty in the world market which tends to defeat
the effect of the aid that they have been given. This to
me is one of the very great problems of our time. We discussed
it in London at a Prime Ministers' Conference, It has been
discussed elsewhere from time to time. I believe myself that
there is a growing consciousness of this problem right round
the world. For indeed it is quite clear, quite elementary
indeed, that a nation which is, as I have described it, coming
into the direction of economic independence striving to
back its political independence with a genuine strength in its
own country it is quite clear that that is a country that
needs to be able to import capita] l goods.
Even we in Australia who are, relatively speaking,
a highly developed country and a highly industrialized one,
still need capital beyond the amount that we can generate
ourselves out of our own savings. Fortunately for us no
doubt as the result of the resounding virtues of the Government
we still receive year by year very large sums of capital inflow
from other countries. If that is true of us it is doubly
true about a great number of the countries represented here.
They can't hope to produce all their capital from their
internal efforts and therefore they must be able to get from
overseas, capital, capital goods, capital equipment, of the
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kind that they will need for developing the resources of their
own country. And if they are to do that and not get these
things merely as a donation forever then they must be able to
earn these things by the export of their goods to the rest of
the world, This is the final state of national dignity when
each nation pays its way by selling to the world what it
produces and getting from the world what it needs, and that's
a tremendously important thing, not only economically but
humanly and we have, as I am sure you have, time after time
pointed out to some of the great industrial nations of the
world how self-defeating it is to provide money even on the
most lavish scale without contributing to a stability of
world markets, an assurance of world markets, some guarantee
that prices will be profitable prices, payable prices,
This is of the essence, I believe, of any new
economic world order and we must all work towards it. If we
do, the Colombo Plan will increasingly find itself coming in
aid of national development, a development soundly and hopefully
to be engaged in because of the knowledge that what is
produced will find a market in the world at a price which is
adequate to the labour expended on it.
I am a little optimistic about modern developments
on this. In the London conference of Prime Ministers, a
great deal of headway w'as made in relation to it. There has,
I believe been a considerable amount of headway, though it is
as yet a little indefinite, in discussions among the European
powers. But increasingly we, and for that matter, most of
the Prime Ministers who were at that conference, were convinced
that the problem I have just been discussing is at the very
heart of the developments of the next fifty years and, unless
the problem is solved, such frustrations will be developed,
such hostilities will be developed, that all the generosityinthe
world will meet a poor response. The real generosity in the world,
great as it has been in this Plan, onderful as it has been, the
ultimate generosity will be the helping to establish new nations
with proper markets'for wiihat they produce and steadily rising
living standards. This will be the ultimate proof of what's done.
Before I conclude Sir, I'd just like to say that
there is another aspect of this matter, it's really another
aspect of the same point, and it's this, There has boon for
a long time in the world a tendency to classify nations as
those who have and those who have not, and undoubtedly there
has been a big gap between the standards of living of the
heavily industrialized, capital-rich countries and those who
are in a more nrimary state of development. The trouble is
that that is a gap which tends to widen because the rate of
advancement in countries of great technological skill is mo:: e
rapid than the rate of advancement in countries engaged in
primary industy. Therefore unless we watch it we will find that
with all the goodwill in the world this is a gap which widens
and if that gap widens too much then the tensions in the world,
the hostilities, the misunderstandings will grow deeper and
more serious, And the way in which to avoid that, of course,
is again as I say, to take every conceivable step to add to the
rate of economic growth in the nations which I have described
as the newly-emerging nations of the modern world.
Sir, I know you have all these things in mind3 in
fact I rather gathered from one paper I saw that this is going
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be among the thneom es that you consider on this occasion, and
so I content myself having taken up your time to that extent
by saying for myself and for the Government how delighted we
are to see you here. Nobody would have expected ten years
ago to see so many nations represented here, such a diversity
of interest and of talent, and if, bet-woeeon all those things,
you can't produce some results which will add to humanity,
add to civilization, add to growth and brotherliness, then I
shall be grievously disappointed.
I welcome you very much,