Malaya's Call For Arms

Wanganui Chronicle, 18 August 1948, Page 5

Malaya's Call For Arms

AUSTRALIAN PROBLEM SHARP REACTION TO THE COMMUNIST OPPOSITION Reed: 7.20 p.m. Sydney, Aug. 17 When he told Newcastle Communists that Australia must not intervene on behalf of “imperialism” against “armed insurrection” in Malaya, Mr. L. L. Sharkey, general secretary of the Australian Communist Party, provoked strong reaction from a large section of the Australian press.

Reports of terrorism in Malaya, culminating in appeals by planters and business firms for defensive arms with which to protect white families against Sten guns of Chinese Communists, are causing many Australians to ask why more effective measures cannot be undertaken. Another viewpoint on the situation is that of Mr. J. McCormick, an Australian manager of a Malayan tin mine, who says that Australian capital finances more than half the mines in Malaya, and that two thirds of the technicians employed in the mines are Australians. An original investment of £10,000,000 of Australian money in Malayan tin now has a market value of £25,000,000. Australia depends on Malaya for most of her crude rubber imports, which totalled 479,055 hundredweight last year. Some 335,095 hundredweight of this came from Malaya. So far Australian action to protect this investment, and the lives of Australians operating the mines, has been to send a small number of revolvers and ammunition and 100 Sten guns which were held in Australia on behalf of the British Government. The Australian citizen, however, is less concerned with the danger to the investment than with the rule of terrorism implied in such incidents as the murder from ambush of an Australian dredgemaster, Mr. G. P. Wills, who was cut down by Sten fire while riding a bicycle to the company property.

"The Communists are tub thumping propaganda that the Malays are lighting for their national independence against British Imperialists and cutthroat mercenaries,” savs the “Sydney Daily Telegraph.” "This is tommyrot. The Malays are not lighting against, but with, the British. If there is any imperialist expansion in the picture it is expansion by Chinese, who have infiltrated Malaya for so long that they now outnumber the native Malays. Those Chinese who are now murdering the British and Malays are representatives of a partv which has the closest ties with Moscow, and has received all its orders from the Kremlin.”

The Sydney “Morning Herald” charges the Australian Government with procrastinating. "Appearances do the Chifley Government wrong if its inclination is not to avoid sending Australian arms to Malaya, or to send as few of them as possible at the last possible moment,” says the "Herald.” "At. the latest advice a fortnight after a Cabinet decision to supply some arms if asked, further information was still being awaited from the Government of Malaya. Observing Canberra’s apparent embarrassment and reluctance to help. the Malayan authorities may well have decided to turn elsewhere for equipment.”