New Zealand

Press, 23 May 1977, Page 16

New Zealand

lectured the school that the proper way to settle defence policy was to define national interests and to settle the paths to achieve those .national interests. Before the defence debate was taken up again, Sir Guy Powles, the former Chief Ombudsman, summarised his report on the Security Intelligence Service and urged that open government should be applicable to defence as it should be to other aspects of government. Mr Wolfgang Rosenberg, of the University of Canterbury, and chairman of the Canterbury Council for Civil Liberties, argued that suppression could come about if the country’s foreign policy was out of step with the consensus of the society.

Workshops discussed Australia and New Zealand. Sir Laurence Mclntyre, director of the Australian Institute

of International Affairs, and Australia’s former Ambassador to the United Nations, did not arrive to present his paper “Australia and New Zealand; how strong is the link?” But his paper did. The debate was continued when Mr Geoffrey Jukes, senior research fellow in the International Relations Department, Research Schoo! of Pacific Studies, Australian National University, and a former Foreign Office and British Defence Ministry official, argued that foreign policy should be conducted by professionals and that the world afforded many situations in which preventive diplomacy, the subject of his paper, could be applied — arms expenditure being only one.

Mr Jukes considered that defence policy should be subordinate to foreign policy, but that rivalry and other relations between government departments did not make this always the case. He cited an instance in which Soviet military' officials in the S.A.L.T. delegation asked American military officials not to reveaJ so many details about Soviet missiles to Soviet diplomats. Associate Professor J. Steven Hoadley discussed trade and aid rather than defence, but his paper helped to define one national interest. He provoked a comment from the floor that it was in New Zealand’s interests to promote stability in the Pacific islands to which it gives aid, including some defence aid.

Perhaps the great debate on defence did not progress ’•ery far. Nevertheless, as the saying goes, it made you think. ’ Where I think A.N.Z.U.S. has got to will be the subject of a second article.