the corpse of white supremacy

The man who built New Guinea on the corpse of white supremacy

By Stuart Inder

When, in 1951, Mr Paul Hasluck took over the responsibility for the direction of Papua New Guinea as Australia's Minister for Territories, he asked the then- Administrator of that big territory.

Colonel J. K. Murray, to tell him what he thought his most urgent problems were.

Murray, he recalls, “at once started to tell me of a dispute between himself and the naval officer-in-charge about the number of guns he was entitled to receive in salute from a visiting French warship.”

Hasluck fell that Murray had “developed an obsession for his own rank and status”, but worse, Murray believed that the government of the territory should be run by himself and his staff, who were “to be left free to do good as they saw it.”

Long before Hasluck relinquished his post as minister 13 years later, he had got rid of Murray as Administrator, and he had firmly established the principle of ministerial responsibility for PNG, but he never did succeed in streamlining the post of Administrator itself.

To the end, he continued to regard it as badly conceived, its functions beyond the compass of any one man. What he fell was needed were at least two men, one to act as a sort of Port Moresby deputy to the Australian Governor-General, a figure head who opened parliament and annual shows; the other man to get on with the real business of administering the country without distraction.

As it happened, Hasluck did a pretty

good job of administering the country

himself, and his 452-page autobiography, A Time for Building: Australian Ad ministration in Papua New' Guinea 1951- 63, becomes not merely a basic account of those important years in PNG's history but a fine record of the work of one man.

History will remember Hasluck for what he did in Papua New Guinea, not for his later term as Minister for Foreign Af fairs and then as Australian Governor- General, and this book will help ensure it.

It's a highly-compelenl, quite invaluable history objective, sensitive, honest. It will dispel some myths about the man, and some myths about how the development of PNG was a achieved.

Hasluck, of course, would disagree that he ever administered the country or that he even established remote control from Canberra. “My whole endeavour,” he says, “was to make other people do the job but to do it the proper way, and my im patience was with bad method, disregard of the rules or lack of diligence.”

The minister saw his role as that of the circus rider, circling the ring with two galloping horses, one the PNG Ad ministration, the other the Canberra Department of Territories, one foot on the back of each, directing their pace and direction.

He managed it successfully because he knew his horses, he came to know the ring intimately and learned to judge the temper of the crowd. But pacing these horses was, of necessity, a lonely and exacting respon sibility, and he himself never felt it was en tirely successful.

“My failure as minister was that perfor mance did not match intention, and I did not gel the Administration of the territory to do all that I wanted it to do,” he says.

In this big book he repeatedly surveys his work in various areas and berates himself for not having worked harder for results in one area or another; frequently he feels he was not ruthless enough.

Repeatedly he was exasperated by inef ficiency in Canberra or Port Moresby, es pecially at long public service delays in get ting a task done.

His own integrity, which shows through clearly, will bring many to his defence, for one can hardly avoid being impressed, not by the failures that he berates himself for, but for his achievements. They were clear ly the result of Hasluck's determination, stamina and intelligence although “intellect” might be the belter word.

If he were a different kind of man, a dominating, outgoing personality who noisily kicked bums, and took short cuts

and even risks where the occasion seemed to demand it, perhaps he might have won some of the achievements he pines after.

But then, that kind of man would not have the qualities of a Hasluck, qualities of con centration and attention to detail, a deter mination to first lay down a firm base on which to build, and not be attracted to the more colourful, more politically rewarding, aspects of his position. It is a measure of Hasluck’s success that not at any time during his long service as Territories Minister was PNG ever a party-political issue. All sides of

Canberra’s political life supported

Hasluck’s work.

He was a planner who never took one step unless he saw where it might lead, and one can’t escape the realisation that it was lucky for PNG that Australia was then un dergoing a long period of stable govern

ment by the Liberal-Country Party coali

tion, which enabled one minister to hold the reins for 13 years.

He spent his first five years, he says, “lacking experience”, and thus he worked to check tendencies that were wrong rather than attempting to introduce anything that was new. Meanwhile he “groped towards some broad statement of principle and policy” to guide his activities.

In 1951 he found that PNG was quite colonial, with some racist tendencies as a result. Senior Administration officers par ticularly lived very much “in club”, visiting, eating, drinking and gossiping in the same circles and looking for esteem from the members of the circle “a colonial Main Street”, as he puts it. It was an apt description of Port Moresby or Rabaul in those years, and in fact of Apia, or Suva, or Noumea.

Of the planners and businessmen, he writes that they were “not the unpleasant people that sections of politicians and the press made them out to be.”

“There was much about them that was kindly, unselfish, and in Territory terms, patriotic,” he says. “They were attached to the Territory as to their home and they had good intentions towards its people. But even the kindliest had a limited view. They saw the good of the Territory as the good that would be given to it by themselves . . .

Both in peace and in war, or so I un derstood the attitude of the majority, the

indigenous and the expatriate people had

worked together satisfactorily, in. as much as it was in a way that was understood and was acceptable to both.

“Security, good order, a better way of

Sir Paul Hasluck

living, an end to savagery and some gradual improvement in the standard of living of all would continue to grow out of the old relationship. Such growth would be menaced by those, either native or Euro pean, who broke away from the old relationship. They might break away dangerously at either end of the scale. The over-indulgent employer and the harsh employer were both dangerous, and so were the over-familiar or ‘sophisticated’ natives as well as the rebellious ones. To keep both while and black in their ‘proper place’ was not an unkind or intenlionally repressive code.

“It was the maintenance of a relationship that had been found to work well in the past. In 1951, as I read this situation, this code of conduct was largely accepted in both native and non-native communities, and by a great number of of ficers in the Administration. It was equally plain to me that such a relationship would not last and that such a code would block

change.”

He decided in this situation to find “something good on which to build”. He saw that perhaps the most valuable product of the then-existing code, “was the trust and confidence that had grown up between native persons and those most closely in touch with them. The native peo ple believed what the ‘master’ said and the whiles respected the native people”.

Surveying PNG’s problems, the new minister found he had no worries about health, because this was under the direc tion of the extraordinary Dr John Gunther as PNG’s active Director of Health. (“If there had been six other senior officers of the Administration as good as Gunther in 1951 the whole of the story I am telling would have been vastly different”, he writes.) He found it impossible to get down to earth with his Education Director, Mr W.

C. Groves, and deliberately eased him out, although he was never in all his time as minister satisfied with PNG’s achievements in education. “We made some headway but not enough. My own error was not any error in trying to es tablish a broad base of primary education on which the education pyramid would rest, but my lack of ruthlessness in taking measures to produce the results I wanted”.

Land administration, like education, always remained a difficult problem, but it is on land that Hasluck can undoubtedly lake the greatest credit for an enlightened policy. In the early years he admits his ad ministration of land matters was “protec tive but not constructive ... I permit myself some satisfaction at what I prevented, if not in what I achieved".

What he achieved was, in fact, the safeguarding of native land.

One of his early wars was with Eastern Highlands District Commissioner lan Downs, who was making land available in

the glamour Highlands to selected applicants, and encouraging development which Downs felt was for the good of all races. But the minister was insistent that the distribution of native land must be un der strong central control and not left to various area officers, no matter how well intentioned.

His comments on Downs show an objec tivity in summing up a situation or a per sonality, without rancour, that is seen throughout his book. “Downs was not one of my admirers’’, he says, with typical un derstatement. “Although I thought him something of a prima donna, I regarded very highly his services. He was one of the few senior people with energy. He was closely in touch with the native people and kept their interests at heart. He was a good first contact district commissioner . . . His work was self-centred, and so this zealous, energetic, capable officer, acting on his own interpretation of land policy, was ac tually helping to promote a land grab that seemed to me to be very

dangerous’’. Hasluck’s land policy

developed slowly but was thought out

carefully so as to work in closely with his economic policy. His economic policy simply was that the foundation of a prosperous New Guinea economy could be built only on the foundation of native society, and that plans for rapid develop ment of European enterprise could end only in frustration, and serve neither the natives, nor the commercial or political in terests of Australia.

Once he was satisfied of his direction he stuck to it unswervingly, although it brought him into collision with opponents of every colour and interest, some of them in his own department, some of them in his own party.

He survived because of his undoubted integrity and fearlessness, and history has proved his attitude right. This is not to say that PNG’s economic development could not have gone ahead faster alongside the considerable social developments that were his main interest. But with so many priorities, all urgent, being faced by him at that time, one has to say that the order of priorities he did choose simply has to be accepted, if for no other reason than he couldn’t have done more. With astonish ment one recalls his ministerial respon sibilities also included Australia’s Northern Territory, Nauru and Norfolk Island.

On political development, Hasluck stresses that when he began work in the Territory there was no native pressure towards constitutional change, and that in any case his own view was that he was “somewhat sceptical about theories that pointed to a quick transformation”, nor did he believe that “the only way to measure political advancement in PNG was to count the number of native politicians in the legislature”.

He believes that political advancement, when it did come, would not have been pushed even then if he had not personally pushed it.

There will be other views on that (indeed there will be discussion on just about every aspect of the issues raised in this book, and it is certainly beyond the compass of any one reviewer to competently examine the issues) but I am one of those who felt that towards the end of his time the minister misjudged the grass roots pressures for constitutional change. Involved as he was with so many other basic problems, and with his continual efforts in Canberra to get regular increases in the amount of money which the Australian Government needed to spend in PNG, he might have been inclined to overlook the stirring, but the young Somares and Kikis were active if then unknown.

But in at least one important question his defence is water-tight. He explains that the increase in the numbers of the Legislative Council occurred as late as 1960 only because a long fight in which he was involved over introduction of income tax had brought a constitutional challenge to the very existence of the legislature. This had delayed a plan to increase the size of the council as early as 1957 or 1958.

Hasluck is inclined to blame the press and public for not understanding his motives and his direction at various times, despite the fact that he says they could have been read in some of those long ad dresses to learned societies, and in long policy statements, which were features of his reign.

To prove his point he quotes from many of these addresses, underlining in italics as it were, the clues that we all missed. But the failure was not always, or even most frequently, with the press or public (including his fellow parliamentarians). It was with the somewhat turgid, academic prose that he chose to use on many of these occasions prose that was never as specific is he seems to feel it was. His were not so much statements as long lectures

requiring deep analysis.

That Paul Hasluck is capable of direct speech, and colourful speech, there is abundant evidence in this fine contribution to PNG’s history. ■ Here is his colourful description of some Highlands dancing; “One soon becomes accustomed to the breasts of nubile girls when, glistening with oil or grease or sweat, they bob around in thousands of pairs as the highland dancing goes on for hours. Like male genitalia, breasts become as unimportant, unvaried and impersonal as the nose or the chin.

Seen one, seen all, and seeing so many, one ceased to see any.’’ (fl TIME FOR BUILDING; Australian Administration in Papua New Guinea 1951-1963. By Paul Hasluck. Published by Melbourne University Press. 5A15.50, or can be obtained by PIM mail order coupon at JA17.00 posted).