I join in the congratulations which have been extended to the new President and to the new Member nations. Each of them, in a sense, needs our sympathy, our understanding, and our disinterested help.
31. I have heard only some of the speeches, for I arrived from Australia only on 30 September, but I have read most of the earlier speeches, and have endeavoured to sense the feeling of the debate.
32. Each representative, of course, must try to make his individual contribution to our discussion from the point of view of his own country. I should therefor present myself to you — I am afraid, for the second time today — 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 in the world. This being so, it will be seen at once 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, which 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 seem to most of us a happy circumstance that sentiment and interest should coincide. "Here", we would say, "is the perfect marriage."
33. Future generations, if human follies do not destroy them in advance, may well, with the clear "hindsight” of history, wonder how it came about that the twentieth century was so marred by war, and how it was that, in 1960, representatives of almost 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 minds and answer those implicit questions?
34. As a newcomer to the 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.
35. I thought that President Eisenhower, when he addressed the Assembly [868th meeting], 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 — if I may use that horrible expression — of the new Member nations, and to bring them within what I believe are called "spheres of influence” for purposes of aggrandisement, the President of the United States took a high line. He said, in effects — I am not quoting his words — 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; we are to look at them 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.
36. 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 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 the 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.
37. 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 the 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 civilized and humane thinking can long tolerate.
38. If in the 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 quite 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 tomorrow. This point of view seemed to me to underlie the temperate and persuasive speech of Mr. Macmillan and other speeches made by democratic leaders.
39. 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.
40. In his speech [869th meeting] the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union made his usual great play about "colonialism". As Mr. Macmillan reminded us in his speech [877th meeting], the answer to much of his story is to be found in the presence in the Assembly of many new nations, once colonies and now independent. Mr. Khrushchev said, among other things: “Peoples which oppress others cannot be free. Every free people must help those who are still oppressed to gain their freedom and independence" [869th meeting, para. 225].
41. This was, in one sense, a most encouraging observation. It made me wonder whether we were perhaps about to see a beginning of an era in which the nations of Europe 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 would be opened up by such a policy! How much it would do to relieve the causes of tension and to promote peace!
42. 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.
43. Further, in the course of this session of the Assembly, Mr. Khrushchev was good enough to make some references to my own country as a member of a group of countries and to our position in relation to the Territories of Papua and New Guinea. He calls upon us to give immediate independence and self-government to these Territories. As a piece of rhetoric, this no doubt has its points — we can all admire rhetoric; we hear a good deal of it. 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 can doubt for a moment that for us in Australia to abandon our responsibilities forthwith would be an almost criminal act,
44. 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 that war without organized 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 more than 200 different languages — not dialects, but 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 unique area.
45. Since the war, some form of civilized 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 5,000 miles of road, over 100 airfields. We have established and improved postal and telecommunications services. We have built four large base hospitals, 100 subsidiary hospitals, 12,000 aid posts and medical centres. 778 infants’ and welfare climes. We have trained hundreds of doctors and nurses, thousands of native medical assistants. We have established 4,000 schools, which are attended by 200,000 pupils. We have established large stock stations and a great forestry industry.
46. I could go on almost 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, many more millions into Papua and New Guinea than have ever come out, or ever will come out. Like the Netherlands, whose representative spoke yesterday [886th meeting] about its side of New Guinea, we regard our selves 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. We have set up a legislative council on which only the other day we substantially increased the number of indigenous representatives.
47. And yet Mr. Khrushchev includes us in his diatribe against foreign administrators who despise and loot the local population. I have said enough to show exactly what that amounts to. His further extravaganza about the overseer's lash and the executioner's axe must relate to areas with which he is rather more intimately familiar than he is with Papua and New Guinea,
48. 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 any colonial people into freedom and self-government. We indeed are proud to be in the great British tradition of the twentieth 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,
49. I turn now to another consideration. Why has this session of the General Assembly become so significant a forum? Why has it attracted the attendance of what I imagine must be the greatest number of Heads of State and Heads of Government in its history? These are very interesting questions, and I should like to try to answer them.
50. The dominating fact is that the peace of the world is under threat, and, as Mr. Nehru pointed out on Monday [882nd meeting], peace is the paramount problem. We are not living in a time of peace. The cold war is intensifying. The hearts and minds of men and women are distressed. Most representatives have come here hoping that tensions might be reduced; that some ray of light might 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.
51. Running through all these ideas is the wide-spread 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 organized group, threateningly lead, has developed an attack in at least four directions.
52. First, 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. On Monday last [882nd meeting], Mr. Khrushchev talked 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 without 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 forgo the joy and hopes of their new and independent nationhood.
53. Second, he 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 Secretary-General, the biased representative of Western capitalism — a thing I have never heard of before — and has asked [869th meeting] 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 "inbuilt" veto; a triumvirate whose work would be clearly doomed to frustration and fatuity, leading to the consequent collapse of the United Nations executive machinery.
54. 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 acts. It is a trite saying, but it is worth thinking about,
55. Third, Mr. Khrushchev has sought to convert the United Nations into the "dis-United Nations" by dividing the nations — as ancient Gaul was divided, according to Julius Caesar — into three parts, which he conveniently, though perhaps not very accurately, describes as the communist world, the free democratic 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.
56. 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, we mean 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.
57. 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 they are active supporters of the Charter. What he has consistently made clear — to my mind, at any rate — is that he stands for non-alignment, in the sense that he will not engage in any special military or quasi-military alliance.
58. My own country does not subscribe to this view, though it respects it, since we are party, for example, to the South-East Asia Treaty with the military associations which are either expressed or implied in it. But we do not quarrel with others about these matters. I would think it impossible 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.
59. The real point that I want to emphasize is that you cannot make the United Nations effective by converting it into the "dis-United Nations"; by converting all of us into pledged advocates of groups of conflicting or supposedly conflicting interests in this Assembly, in the Security Council, in the whole operation of the United Nations audits specialized agencies. Unity must be the aim. Common action for peace must be the procedure.
60. Fourth, 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 or confuse the minds of the free peoples.
61. 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, and to raise its standards of living; with no aggression in its heart; utterly independent, though, of course, with strong historic and present ties with its sister nations of the Commonwealth.
62. In Australia we are, as you may have gathered from what I have said, resolutely opposed to communism. It will never prevail in an unconquered Australia. It runs counter to all our traditions, our instincts and 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, of course, we would be glad to have reciprocated — or to resort to the futile arbitrament of war. In this true sense, we stand for peaceful coexistence. We believe that communist countries have as much right to their own system as we have to ours. This means that for other countries, emerging from colonial rule, we believe in self-determination, uninfluenced by threat or guile or purchase.
63. This is an appropriate occasion on which to remind representatives 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 the Marxist principles.
64. It is small wonder that such nations as Pakistan and the Philippines, Thailand, the United Kingdom, 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. The South-East Asia Treaty is palpably one of non-aggression. It deserves the careful thought of representatives, because it will recall to their minds the fact that communism is not expansionist in the west and south-west only.
65. I used the well-known phrase "peaceful coexistence". Perhaps I should make it quite clear that we would welcome "peaceful coexistence" if the communists would only practise it. Nobody denies or regrets the great modem 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 be left alone to enjoy our own forms of government and our own type of civilization.
66. 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 today, which are worth mentioning.
67. 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 unthinkable to me 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, I believe, 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 further development, which deprives the communist Powers of instant and overwhelming military superiority in the relevant areas. Nuclear, thermo-nuclear and conventional arms must, therefore, all be dealt with together.
68. The second point I want to make on this great problem 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, try force if necessary, then the possession by that Power or group of Powers of vast armaments will be a cause of tension. But if the non-aggressive Powers are in the result driven into maintaining and developing great defensive armaments, it is proper to say that their armaments are the results of tension and not its cause.
69. 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 enemies of peace.
70. 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.