NEW ZEALAND'S ROLE IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS

Evening Post, Volume CXL, Issue 148, 20 December 1945, Page 6

NEW ZEALAND'S ROLE IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS

From the point of view of Cabinet machinery, and of efficient working, a Prime Minister should not be also Foreign Minister (or, in New Zealand's phraseology, Minister of External Affairs). The duties of the Prime Ministership and the Foreign Ministership are too great to be loaded on to one man; and, as Mr. W, Dovvnie Stewart points out in a signed communication to the "Evening Post," the duties are not only exacting, but are diverse. The Foreign Ministership calls the Minister abroad to international meetings when the Prime Ministership insists that ne be' at, home. The arrangement is barely workable; and, unless Mr. Fraser divests himself of the portfolio of External Affairs, may soon become unworkable, as Mr". Downie Stewart shows. A bad piece of machinery can be justified—if justifiable at all—only by the lack of an alternative; and possibly the plea that there is at present no alternative —the plea justifying the Anglo-American loan and trade agreement—may be raised in the present case; for if there is any man in the Cabinet who could step .immediately into Mr. Fraser's shoes as Minister of External Affairs and do as well as Mr. Fraser did at the San Francisco Conference, we know not who he is. The Minister of Finance, Mr. Nash, is as much loaded a: is the Prime Minister, and who else in the Cabinet could be regarded as "the Shadow Minister of External Affairs"? If, for lack of a persona} substitute, Mr. Fraser continues his dual role, he should not be blind to its disadvantages, or to the need of having in training a man to replace him in the difficult region of Foreign Affairs, which New Zealand, willy-nilly, must enter, and for which, by a singular lack of foresight, few New Zealand Parliamentarians have prepared themselves.