AGREEMENT SIGNED

Timaru Herald, Volume CLVIII, Issue 23376, 6 December 1945, Page 5

AGREEMENT SIGNED

T elecommunications Conference Significant Advances <8.35 n.m.) BERMUDA, Dec. 4. The telecommunications conference completed its work with the signing of an agreement by the delegations from ail the Governments represented. The head of the American delegation. Mr Paul Porter, speaking at the final plenary session of the conference, said the documents which the delegations signed represented many significant advances in the brood objective of establishing a more efficient system of world-wide communications. “It is a charter of principles that, if universally adopted, should ultimately extend to the peoples of all countries the opportunity to communicate cheaply and swiftly between one and another. We have agreed to the following fundamental concepts: (1) Communications should be cheap and efficient. (2) Artificial barriers should be eliminated where there is justification for direct communications. (3) Press intelligence should move rapidly, and its widest dissemination should be encouraged by the greatest possible reduction in cost. (4) Advances in science and new techniques have been recognised, and we have agreed to press for the widest possible utilisation of these modern miraculous developments.” Mr Porter said the underlying reason for the success of the conference was the plain speaking which eliminated any suspicion and mistrust that might have existed. The British Commonwealth had not only made concessions to the new technology, but had consciously undertaken to make it possible for communications to perform their fullest and most effective function in future. The United States desired to co-operate in that broad constructive attitude which Americans greatly admired. Mr P. N. Cryer (New Zealand) said a spirit of compromise prevailed at the conference, but the real test was ahead. The outcome would depend on how co-operation would be carried on in the future. He was optimistic that in the telecommunications conference a spirit of co-operation would prevail which might be an example to the world for winning the peace.