Support For Test Ban

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30830, 16 August 1965, Page 3

Support For Test Ban

(N.Z. Press Association)

AUCKLAND, Aug. 15. The president of the Federation of Labour (Mr T. E. Skinner) received support for New Zealand and Australian attempts to stop French nuclear tests in the Pacific everywhere he went during a threemonth trip to Europe, Britain and the United States.

Mr Skinner returned today from a three-month overseas trip during which he attended the conference of the International Labour Organisation and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions.

He said the F.O.L. and the Australian Council of Trade Unions were inviting 11 other Pacific trade union movements to a conference in Sydney later this year, when ways to deter the French Government from testing on Gambia Island or anywhere would be discussed.

Mr Skinner said the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, whose conference he attended in Amsterdam, endorsed the New Zealand and Australian stand. “And we have strong support from the French trade union movement which has already made approaches to

President de Gaulle without positive results,” he said. “The Federation of Labour is prepared to go to the limit, notwithstanding the . consequences to trade and political relationships with France. “We feel that President de Gaulle is flouting world opinion at a time when the Russians have announced their readiness to extend the partial nuclear testing ban to in-

clude underground tests which would make it a complete ban. “If there is no danger of fall-out—as the French experts tell us—then why doesn’t de Gaulle test the bomb in the Sahara where he conducted his earlier tests?”