Closer Tasman Links?

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30028, 12 January 1963, Page 13

Closer Tasman Links?

(NZP-A.-Reuter- Copyright)

LONDON, Jan. 11. Imminence of a decision on British entry into the Common Market would give urgency to this year’s AustralianNew Zealand Ministerial talks in Wellington, “The Times” Canberra correspondent wrote today. The correspondent asked: “Will this development induce Australia and New Zealand to forge much closer links with each other? “Much will depend on popular prejudice and less upon rational argument, although, to be sure, reason is not all in favour of

amalgamation. The prime mover, as in Europe, will have to be instinct, and the instinct of Australians and New Zealanders has hitherto been not to combine, except in war.”

However, the correspondent said, the more imaginative were now beginning to ask whether “Australasia” was really unthinkable. Australians and New Zealanders were different

pertly as a result of the dissimilar lands in which they lived.

Australia was “awful, immense and on the whole, brown, as well as being 30 times the size of New Zealand.”

New Zealand was ‘.‘amiable, green, and little enough to be tended with care.”

The correspondent said economic considerations were the ones most Influential in bringing Australia and New Zealand together.

Trade between the two countries had almost quadrupled in the past decade. Most of the mote serious comment was concentrating on the possibility of a customs union or a “free trade area of Australasia.”

Several strong sectional interests in both countries opposed a dose economic union, the correspondent said.

“Understandable stresses” arising partly from the dairy trade of the two countries were ' ’tending to get in the way of an economic intimacy which would give Australians and New Zealanders all the benefits of a single domestic market, more specialised production within it, and a joint approach to international trade.”

The correspondent said: “An empirical approach would seem the sort most likely to succeed and the coming talks might set a thorough evolution going.”