Compromise, The

Key To Success

Of Spc Talks

From John Moses in Suva At the end of their meeting in Wellington early in March official: from member governments of th« South Pacific Commission returnee home with a feeling of guarded opi timism about reaching an agreemem on the way the SPC and the SoutH Pacific Conference could be mergedl After hours of intense discussion and some hard bargaining in th« board room of the NZ Trade De partment, they took home with then in their executive briefcases wha one participant described as a “pack age deal” which involved compn> mises all round.

Indeed, the bargaining was tougl enough to force an extension of tin talks beyond the scheduled thre* days, and delegates, bags already packed, met for a further few hour on Friday, March 8, before the: rushed to the airport to take thei planes home.

In those last few hours, they pu the finishing touches to the text o an agreement—still to be accepted of course, by the governments in volved—which will dismantle the ole two-tier structure now seoarating thi South Pacific Commission from the South Pacific Conference, and which hopefully, will give all island state and territories an equal voice in th< affairs of the Pacific with thi metropolitan powers and the islanc

sovereign states.

It was widely predicted that th< Wellington meeting might easih founder on the reefs of French in transigence over giving equal statu to its dependent states and over re sentment flowing from the Islands attitudes to nuclear testing.

However, I learned that the five strong high-powered French dele gation, led by French Ambassador U New Zealand Mr de Nicolay and in eluding that most experienced of al commissioners Mr Henri Nettre, ad mitted that they had “departed fron their brief” in agreeing to some o the suggestions put forward at th meeting: and words like “compro mise” and “concessions” were freel; used by conference delegates afte: the meeting to describe the essence of what happened.

The basis of the Wellington talk was a joint NZ-Australian pape: which sought a fairly loose am pragmatic structure to replace th'

1947 Canberra Agreement which established the SPC and which is now clearly out of date, and a basic aim was to convince both the Brit ish and the French that a much more democratic organisation would not be politically embarrassing to them.

In the event, and to the surprise of some of the participants, it was a British submission in reply to the Anzac paper which displayed a cer tain rigidity and insensitivity to Island aspirations, and was couched in the kind of formal and legalistic language the Antipodeans were try ing to avoid.

There was a feeling that Britain’s harder-than-expected line had some thing to do with France’s attitudes on the Common Market: but in any case, British attitudes may very easily be different now that a new government is in power.

Perhaps the most important thing about the Wellington talks, in fact, is what did not happen, rather than what did.

The pessimists felt that under no circumstances would France permit a situation which would give its Paci fic dependencies the right publicly to criticise, in a Pacific forum, the metropolitan power: and that in any case, there were basic constitutional difficulties involved which would give France an excuse for what would amount to a walk-out.

This did not happen, and the pre sence in the French delegation of a constitutional expert suggests that the French are seeking some way of remaining in whatever new organis ation eventually emerges without being pinned down to the kind of constitution and procedures which could create ructions in Paris.

Obviously, there are still difficul ties to overcome, some of them con ceptual, some of them practical: Fiji, for example, has reservations about noting proposals.

Its delegation, headed by Dr Vlacu Salato, reserved its decision m the proposal that the eight parti cipating governments forming the lew Administrative Committee—in essence the old commission—should etain their plural votes, their own md one for each of their dependent erritories. The Fiji Government will lave to decide on that one. It has dways been opposed to the principle.

But in concept, it is a great leap :orward in Pacific affairs that repre ientatives of the metropolitan pow ers, the independent Pacific states md the dependent territories should ie thinking of sitting down together vith equal votes and equal voices— ;ven when the votes and the voices nay be embarrassing to and critical if the non-island powers.