HOW TO PACIFY THE PACIFIC?

Evening Post, Volume CXXXIX, Issue 123, 26 May 1945, Page 6

HOW TO PACIFY THE PACIFIC?

When will the post-war Pacific responsibilities of Australia-and New Zealand, implied by the Canberra Pact, reach the plane of definition? The real meaning of these responsibilities will not be clear to the eyes of the public until they are expressed in terms of geographical location, of militairy effort, and of cost —that is to say, cost not only in money but in military service. There is as yet. no evidence that the proceedings of the San Francisco Conference will throw any light on the Pacific fronts of the United States, New Zealand, and Australia under the new order, and on how those fronts are to be maintained. Is a front to be maintained up to the standards of one Government's ideas of defence, or up to the standards of the security council's ideas of war prevention? The cabled summary of an article by the military correspondent of "The Times" this week should stimulate in New Zealand and Australia some selfexamination. The military correspondent sees it from the angle of "aid from the Pacific Dominions that may lighten the burden of Imperial defence." But have the Pacific Dominions any realistic idea of what a continuous peacetime participation in this burden means? In the thirties of this century the understanding was that the Pacific Dominions were x'esponsible for their "home defence." Evidently there was some vacuum between their home defence and Imperial defence, or Japan's southward march in 1941-42 would not have been so easy. What-is wanted today is not vague understandings about spheres of responsibility but definite war-prevention plans in which the burdens .of each and all are plainly defined.