South Pacific

Dr. Evatt’S Blunders

In The

IN a very outspoken but factual article, on January 20, the Sydney Morning Herald placed upon Dr. H.

V. Evatt (former Minister for External Affairs in Australia) the responsibility for denying to the United States the use of Manus as a base. Evatt thus robbed Australia of the benefit of having, on her northern frontier, a great bastion of America’s defence system against Asia.

When, in 1946, it first appeared that the United States, resentful of Evatt’s in comprehensible attitude, would abandon Manus to Australia, the people of the Pacific Territories were aghast. None fears more than they the ever-growing threat of an awakening Asia. Unless they are given the protection of a friendly North America, the nine millions of Europeans in the Southwest Pacific have not a chance of survival.

The Territorians already had had one dose of Dr. Evatt when he, in conjunction with Mr. Ward, wiped out the native labour organisation, and tried to wipe out private enterprise generally. They did not want another. They knew that Chifley was merely a cipher in inter national affairs —and that the denial of Manus to the United States was entirely the doing of this dangerous and im practical theorist from the High Court.

So directly, and through the PIM, they protested repeatedly against the abandon ment of Manus. But neither Parliament nor Press took any notice of what was happening. It has remained for the Sydney Morning Herald —fearlessly, if somewhat belatedly—to expose the

sheer political idiocy of this Manus affair.

MANUS, under United States occupa tion and control, might have been the most powerful base in the Western Pacific, and a great comfort to Australia in these troubled times. Instead, during the past five years, we of the Territories have seen that magnificent equipment practically given away to the Chinese, and—after the American with drawal—the return of most of the cleared areas to the jungle.

Only the other day, in Rabaul. old hands told the PIM editor of the way in which the Yanks used bulldozers to push enormous quantities of priceless machinery, which had never even been uncased, over the cliffs and into the sea.

It had been offered to Australia at a token price; but Australia haughtily declined.

A hundred million dollars’ worth of Australian defence literally thrown away because one little man did not think it

becoming of the little Australian nation to take second place to the United States in Manus! Some day, we hope, another W. S. Gilbert will arise to tell the priceless story.

The blundering of our Dr. Evatt in matters affecting the interests of the South Pacific Territories has not yet been half told.

It was Dr. Evatt who was primarily responsible for the creation of the South Pacific Commission, the purpose of which is the co-ordination and control of research and of policy in relation to native administration in all the Territories of the South Pacific. It was a sound idea, and might have been pro ductive of much good.

But, for reasons which seem to have been political, or idealistic and im practical, the headquarters of the Commission were established at Noumea, in a French Colony, instead of in Suva, or Sydney, or Auckland. The inevitable result is that, owing to difficulties of language, finance, transport, housing and

(above all) unwillingness of staff to make their permanent homes there, the Commission is making heavy weather of it. It now is feared that, if the head quarters venue is not changed, the Com mission will more or less cease to function in a very few years.

Many believe Dr. Evatt to have been responsible in the first place for the selection of Noumea. If that is so, a typical Evatt blunder will kill an Evatt

achievement. Which, if poetic justice, is grossly unfair to a number of excellent people, who have put into the South Pacific Commission plan the best they had.

It was. to a large extent, the blundering hand of Dr. Evatt, directing United Nations activities, which was responsible for the change-over in the Netherlands Indies. Because of that, Australia and all South Pacific countries lost the Dutch

as their good neighbours, and got in their place the babbling and mercurial Indonesians, who eventually will become an outpost of Red Asia.