Colombo Planners

Some Realism for the Colombo Planners

AUSTRALIA is throwing herself with spendthrift energy into the Colombo Plan; and there is not even a squeak of protest from any direction. Australia already is com mitted to gifts to Asiatic countries totalling £31,000,000, and that is by no means the end of it.

The Colombo Plan is typical of the wave of idealism—amounting at times to hysteria—under which a section of the West, since World War 11, has been trying to avoid World War 111 by insisting that all other races are friends and brothers.

The assumption apparently is that other races hate us because we “colonised” them; and that, if we now take them to our bosom, they will love us and leave us alone.

Under the Colombo Plan, a group of European nations with interests in Asia are making food, education and technical facilities available to Southeast Asia peoples, without any charge.

There lies before this writer news paper cuttings showing that Aus tralia, at this moment, is among other things (a) handing over a fully equipped hospital ship to India, to enable India to give better service to the Andaman Islanders; (b) maintaining a number of In donesian students in Australian schools; (c) building a series of radio stations in Pakistan: (d) showing a group of eight Indian farmers the primary producing organisation of Australia, from college to pig-farm. All this, at Australia’s expense.

It is a beautiful and ennobling conception. Now, take a look at the population figures in Statesman’s Year Book : India 356,891,000 Pakistan 75,842,000 Ceylon 8,103,000 Indonesia (est.) ... 80,000,000 Indo-China (est.) .. 28,500,000 China (Communist) (est.) 602,000,000 Malaya and Singapore (est.) 6,000,000

In other words, Australia, w* 9,000,000 people, is spending its tsJ payers’ hard-earned money onr. puny attempt to assist 1,157,000„( Asiatics, the great majority of whr have never heard of Australia, s who are too hungry and undb privileged to care, anyway.

Instead of fiddling around m the Colombo Plan, why cannot Ai tralia and New Zealand leave Asiatics to pull themselves sociologically, as the Europeans hi done, and spend the money in doc everything possible to prepare the inevitable day when thri countless masses of Asiatics bea their march southwards into fertile, desirable and almost emr lands of the South Pacific?

Idealism has its place in hum affairs, of course—but so has re' ism. Anyone who imagines ti Asia will not soon begin to s over into Oceania is blind to the lessons of racialism and of corded history. If he still clings his belief that the expenditures Colombo Plan funds will turn ar the menace, he should look records which are not yet 15 ye old, and read of that other E 3 which brought the Japanese swau ing into the South Pacific in 19(