EFFECT OF THE WAR ON AUSTRALIA

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 89, Issue 214, 10 September 1945, Page 5

EFFECT OF THE WAR ON AUSTRALIA

“RE-DISCOVERY” OF N.Z.

In a talk broadcast to New Zealand listeners over the Dominion stations last night, Mr. R. J. F. Boyer, chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Commission, spoke on the effects of the war on Australia. “Four things, we now realise, the facts of our position demand of us he said. “One is, that although we value our European origin, culture and standards of life, and particularly our place in the British Commonwealth of Nations, we simply have to learn to live amicably and undcrstandingly with our 'Asiatic neighbours. China looms large in our horizon. The world has shrunk too much for us or for you to think that our only neighbours are these scatterred islands around our shores, with their charming native peoples. The second thing we have learned is that our future history is the history of the whole Pacific Basin, and that America, now the N0..1 power of the whole world, is immensely important to us and to the whole British Empire. Anglo-American co-operation is no vague sentiment to us any longer—lt is tne keystone of our national survival. The third thing, and a very delightful one, is that we have rediscovered New Zealand, and equally, New Zealand has re-discovered Australia.

“Although you and we have had such close and happy associations through our lighting men campaigning together on foreign battlefields, it is true to say that in between the two wars we have tended to become over-absorbed in our own domestic affairs. We have even had a trade squabble or two. Mos. certainly we have not had that close association that two young British peoples liv‘ig as neighbours in a vast alien Eastc.n world could be expected to have. Tha. was because we both had an illusion that we were living in one of the world’s safe areas, and could afford to play a lone hand. This war has altered all that. The first step in facing trie realities of our common perils as Pacific peoples has been the Anzac Pact making us partners in a common foreign policy. This leads me lo the fourth major effect of the war on Australia. We have become infinitely more world minded, and the last remnants of our old isolationism seem to be falling away. We have come to realise that even the best that Australia can do in her own defence, or the British Empire can do, is not enough in a world which will survive or perish as a unit. The idea of collective security has taken a long time to grip the minds of Australians—longer, I think, than in New Zealand. But it has been burnt into our consciousness at last and we are taking our place in world politics and world economics with a conviction that nothing less can serve <Atr survival.”