THE STATUS OF AUSTRALIA

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25937, 1 September 1945, Page 6

THE STATUS OF AUSTRALIA

In referring recently to the successful demands made by Australia as a nation with separate identity in the Pacific, the Prime Minister, Mr Chifley, declared that the Commonwealth had won two “ big diplomatic battles.” The phrase is well chosen as defining the mood in which the Federal Government, with the full support of the press, has thrust forward the claims of Australia as a principal party to all matters concerning the future of the Pacific. Australia, as a result of the clamant urgings from Canberra, is now to be represented on the Council of Foreign Ministers set up by the Potsdam Conference. This development will give the Minister of External Affairs, Dr Evatt, equal voice, if not equal authority, with the representatives of the so-called Big Five Powers—Great Britain, the United States, Russia, China, and France. And it must be presumed to be because of the Australian Government’s emphatic attitude that the Commonwealth and the Dominion of New Zealand are now to take at least a minor part in the Japanese surrender negotiations and are * to sign the surrender documents, an act which in the interpretation of the Government at Canberra “automatically carries with it recognition of Australia as a major Pacific Power.” There must be admiration of the single-mindedness with which the Australian Government in its campaign as a diplomatic belligerent has pursued and achieved this desideratum. Nor would it be easy to deny the Australian demand for full • consultation on all matters

appertaining to the Pacific Ocean, in which the Commonwealth is both conspicuously and inevitably a landmark. A resolute insistence upon the identity of the South and Southwest Pacific as a system apart from, but inter-related to, the predominantly American system to the north-east, and the British EastAsian zone, is especially desirable in view of the very expansive nature of some American claims in the Pacific that are being unofficially advanced. There remains, however, a point which the Commonwealth of Australia, proved in the untried magnificence of what amounts to Great Power status in the Pacific basin, has still to prove. That is the Commonwealth’s capacity, in both spiritual and physical strength, to maintain its position. The spirit certainly is willing; but rumblings from New Guinea, where natives who served the A.1.F., often with hardship and under fire, have been denied compensation for injury or death, and are demanding a princely £3 a month in wages, suggest that it is still in need of moral tempering. The physical strength of the Commonwealth has been nobly shown in this war, notably in the Middle East and on New Guinea, Borneo, and Bougainville. But it was not sufficient in early 1942 to have saved the Commonwealth from invasion and probably from a Japanese occupation had no allies been near, after generations of Australian politicians had shouted warnings about “ white Australia ” and “ the Yellow Peril.” Strength in the post-war world must rest, meanwhile, in the hands of those with power to wield it. This conclusion Mr Fraser appears to have reached, somewhat reluctantly, to judge from his statement last week that “ the Great Powers were predominant in the world at the present, and we had to recognise that fact.” It is proper and necessary that Australia, and New Zealand also, should be consulted as full nations upon postarmistice dispositions in the Pacific.