Fighting Defended

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31188, 12 October 1966, Page 17

Fighting Defended

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyright)

NEW YORK, October 11.

Tlie Australian Minister of External Affairs, Mr Paul Hasluck, yesterday warned critics of American policy in Vietnam against forcing an end to the fighting before its purpose had been achieved.

"Irrespective of whether there is fighting,’’ he told a

luncheon meeting of the American-Australian association at the University Club, "there is a conflict of interest that will remain.” Mr Hasluck asserted the present fighting was necessary.

adding that the main concern should be only to do as much fighting as might be needed to accomplish the purpose of bringing to the South Vietnamese people the freedom to make their own choice.

And freedom of choice for Vietnam meant freedom of choice for the whole of Southeast Asia, he said. “Woolliness In Thinking” “It seems to me that there is a good deal of woolliness in the thinking of those liberals in our own countries who seem to be saying that South Vietnam or Thailand or some other country should not be defended because it does not have at present a system of Government identical with American or Australian or British democracy,” he said. Mr Hasluck continued: “What we are fighting for is to preserve their freedom of choice now and in the future —the freedom of their peoples [to shape their own national

life—and we are not fighting so as to get a chance to impose on them a system of our choosing.” The Australian Minister, in whose, honour the luncheon was given, said “the struggle is one for the future of Asia and certainly not one to uphold or restore some dead colonial situation or to impose some non-Asian solution. We are fighting because otherwise there would be only one solution in Asia, and that imposed by force. “The repressive, reactionary force in Asia is Peking. That is the one that would impose a system not of their own choosing on countries at present free and bind them to it,” Mr Hasluck said.