What Mr. Lee Said

Britain’s Secretary of State for the Colonies, Mr. Frederick Lee, made several forthright public statements about the future of Britain’s four South Pacific territories — Fiji, the Solo mons, the New Hebrides and the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony—during his Pacific tour in August,

IN a radio broadcast from Suva, Mr. Lee said that Britain would not permit the rate of constitutional progress in Fiji to be determined by voices outside Fiji, however well-intentioned they might be.

Referring to the United Nations Committee of 24, which has repeatedly demanded indepen dence for Fiji, Mr. Lee said: “We are not in any way bound to honour the committee’s resolu tions. We think they lack ex perience and knowledge and, therefore, because we think they are not doing any particularly good service, we rather believe the thing to do is to go on in the way we are doing—proposing a new constitution whenever our friends in the dependencies feel they would like to make further progress.”

Mr. Lee also assured the people of Fiji that the British Govern ment had no further constitu tional changes in mind. All it wanted to do at present was to see what success was made of the new constitution. • Speaking in a radio inter view in Honiara, Mr. Lee said there were reasonable prospects of economic viability for the Solomons, based on forestry, agriculture and minerals, but

large doses of outside capital would have to be attracted, and existing private enterprise would have to be mobilised.

Mr. Lee also said that his visit to the Pacific—the first by a Colonial Secretary while in office—was the first step in deter mining the British Government’s policy in the area over the next 10 years. • In Vila, Mr. Lee denied a rumour that Britain was planning to pull out of the New Hebrides (see also p. 75). • On Tarawa, Mr. Lee told an informal meeting of the GEIC Advisory Council that his govern ment was willing to continue to assist the GEIC in every possible way, and to promote advance ment to eventual self-government when the people of the colony thought they were ready and equipped for it. • In Sydney, on the morning of his departure from Australia, Mr, Lee gave a PIM staff writer a personally hand-written note denying a Canberra report that he had come to Australia to launch the idea of a Melanesian Federation. Mr. Lee said he had come “simply to advocate the need for some process of consultation about economic and political development in the western and southern Pacific”.