REORGANISED.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 21, 25 January 1936, Page 11

REORGANISED.

EXTERNAL AFFAIRS. AUSTRALIAN DEVELOPMENT. INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS. I (From Our Own Correspondent.) SYDNEY, January 20. During the Parliamentary recess the Federal Department of External Affairs is being reorganised in a: very significant way. The staff is to be increased by the appointment of five members who will receive , salaries ranging from about £300 to £1100 a year. The functions of the Department are to be "reviewed by the Prime Minister and his colleagues, the various duties are to be allocated afresh, and the Department itself is to be subdivided into two main sections, one dealing with political busii ness and the other with "affairs involving international co-operation." Apparently the political section will be concerned chiefly with Pacific and Imperial business, while the other section will attend to "foreign" affairs in the broadest sense of the term. All this, so Mr. Lyons has informed us, has been forced upon the Federal authorities by "political and economic necessity." The Commonwealth Government has been compelled to realise that "it must have effective machinery to enable Australia to play a full part in international co-operation and to promote friendly understandings and relations with foreign countries. No doubt the Prime Minister and his colleagues are fully justified in planning the expansion of our Department of External Affairs along the lines that he has indicated. Possibly these changes may serve to mark a distinct epoch in our history from which future chroniclers may date the first growths of cur national interest in foreign affairs. For it will hardly be denied that hitherto the average Australian has developed very little interest in such matters, except in a negative way. Most of us, especially since the Great War, have got so far as to make up our minda that Australia cannot always Afford to

let herself be dragged blindly at Britain's chariot wheels through the mazes of her foreign policy. But this is a very different thing from claiming, or even desiring, a share in the direction of Britain's foreign policy, with all the responsibilities that it might entail. "Egregious Mistake." One of the most egregious mistakes ever made by Englishmen about "the colonies" was perpetrated by Lionel Curtis and his friends, some 25 years ago, when they first propagated their doctrines on this side of the world. Without any personal experience of Australia and New Zealand Curtis had persuaded himself that all "colonials'" were desperately anxious to share in the control of Britain's foreign policy, and that to secure this privilege we were prepared to surrender our cherished right of fiscal autonomy, and to permit a body of delegates sitting in London to tax us for the benefit of the Empire.

No more fatuous blunder could ever have been made by public men, and no doubt the revulsion of public feeling on this side of the world, when Austr-ilia and New Zealand realised all the implications of such a policy, may account largely for the reluctance of the Commonwealth and the Dominion to become involved in all Britain's attempts to handle foreign affairs. No doubt, also, it is to this reluctance that we may attribute the prolonged hesitation of the Federal Parliament about adopting or ratifying the Statute of Westminster, which made the Dominions virtually independent States. But though this latest development at Canberra does not necessarily mean that Australia intends to plunge at once into the vortex of international politics, it will certainly facilitate our dealings with Britain and with foreign States." and it may prepare the way for Australia's eventual emergence as a completely autonomous nation on the stage of world affairs.