N.Z. And Australia ‘Not Ready For Integration’

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30542, 10 September 1964, Page 20

N.Z. And Australia ‘Not Ready For Integration’

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyright)

CANBERRA, September 9.

Neither New Zealand nor Australia is ready to form an integrated community, Professor E. J. Tapp said yesterday.

Mr Tapp, who is Associate Professor of History at the University of New England, was discussing proposals for integration in an article in the journal of the Australian Institute of International Affairs.

Mounting pressure throughout the world for closer associations might make a united New Zealand and Australian community both necessary and feasible in the foreseeable future, he said. But unless there was a common will towards such a community on both sides of the Tasman there could be no political way of achieving it.

“If Canberra and Wellington are our guides there would seem to be little public demand on either side of the Tasman for closer political union, and politicians may be credited with being shrewd judges of what the people want,” Professor Tapp said. Although minor tariff wars had virtually disappeared and the volume of trade across the Tasman had steadily increased, the imbalance had been disturbingly accentuated, Professor Tapp said. After pointing to Australian exports to New Zealand in the year to March, 1964, at £63m compared with imports worth £l6m, he added: “Small wonder that New Zealanders feel not a little concerned at the trade situation, which seems to be getting worse rather than better.” “111-Timed” “Not unnaturally many have felt that the recent advocacy of a free trade area by the new High Commissioner for New Zealand in Australia (Mr J. L. Hazlett) has been ill-timed. “Especially would it seem so in the light of trade discussions going on for nearly two years of a joint consultative committee.”

Professor Tapp said that while both countries hoped, by commodity bargaining, to free a greater amount of their trade to a point where a customs union might be possible, New Zealanders feared that Australians were quite satisfied with existing arrangements. “Point is given to such fears by Australian manufacturers who have urged the adoption of a limited free trade area—a suggestion which will only confirm the worst forebodings of New Zealand manufacturers,” Professor Tapp said. In his article Professor Tapp said that differences of attitude and outlook between Australia and New Zealand might be resolved by the increasing non-political contacts drawing the two countries together, though they were still sufficient to raise doubts as to whether an Aus-tralian-New Zealand community was practicable. “Casual Giant” After discussing New Zealanders’ tendency to feel superior to Australians, Professor Tapp added: “A more mature and sophisticated New Zealand is beginning to appreciate the more realistic attitude of Australia to Britain. . . . Yet while the impact that New Zealand makes on the consciousness of Australians is so little that they can hardly care less what New Zealanders think of them, New Zealanders for their part must take cognisance of what their nearest neighbours think of them. “Although generally they have less wish now than they may have had once to remain

aloof, they are in fact often acutely and embarrassingly aware of the great gangling and casual giant across the Tasman,” Professor Tapp said. He said that many New Zealanders would see political ties with Australia as a threat to their own high standard of living and comfortable life, and especially to their country’s social security.