We have failed to lift the living standards of the Asians, we have suppressed their attempts at self-government, and we have secretly despised their colour.
We have given no encouragement to education or the improvement of the standard of health. Yet now we are astonished that Asia is going Communist! It did not simply generate a new political rhetoric for describing the Cold War but it was delivered on the eve of a period of significant political tumult—the ALP split.
In promoting the battle against communism, as a battle for the spirit of man, Menzies had pitched his comments to those anti-communist Catholic voters who would soon desert the ALP for the vehemently anticommunist Democratic Labor Party DLP.
The former Labor Member for Fremantle — , Carmen Lawrence, testifies to the power of the anti-communist message through her memories of the early Cold War period. Recalling the way that the Parliament had inspired her childhood fear of Chinese communism, she relates her nocturnal battle with slanted-eyed communists who cut the tongues from priests and pierced the eardrums of nuns—with chopsticks:.
I would wake in fright—although actually still deeply asleep—to see a large man looming in my bedroom door; a uniformed figure, complete with red-starred cap and slanted eyes, brandishing a knife. This was my childish construction of a Chinese communist, a figure our teachers taught us to fear because they tortured nuns and priests, cutting out their tongues and piercing their ear drums with chopsticks.
The anti-communist rhetoric became increasingly hysterical as the Cold War escalated. Such memories reinforce the way Parliament has operated as a site, even an originating site, for shaping popular understandings of China. Before examining the moment, some decades later, when Australia softened its anti-communist stance, it is worth noting two significant acts of Cold War diplomacy: the visit of a parliamentary delegation to Formosa Taiwan in and the establishment of an embassy in Taipei in An Australian Goodwill Mission, composed largely of federal parliamentarians, travelled to Formosa in The Mission was led by J.
Latham and included eight federal parliamentarians three from Opposition , one state parliamentarian, an academic and a former military officer. The Mission took place at a time when both Chinese governments were busily courting Western visitors. Killen, K. Beazley, W. The other significant event reflecting Australian Cold War attitudes to China was the establishment of an Australian Embassy in Taipei on 11 June Yet, while the establishment of the Embassy may have been a demonstration of Australian loyalty, Klintworth argues that it proved to be of little strategic or economic benefit.
Latham, W. The McMahon Government continued to reassert its commitment to the policy of non-recognition. On 15 July President Nixon announced on national television that Kissinger had just returned from Peking where he had discussed the possibility of establishing diplomatic contact between China and the United States.
This represented a substantial setback for McMahon, who only hours before, had addressed a Liberal Party National Conference in Tasmania and restated the importance of containing China. Never had an Opposition exerted so much pressure on foreign policy. We do not have to wait until after the elections but it can only be done if the McMahon Government is willing to put our national interests above what the Prime Minister believes to be smart, short-term political ploys … [80].
However, the government remained steadfast in their criticism of Whitlam. Whitlam was criticised for bargaining away Taiwan, and for trying to buy the votes of those in Australia with wheat interests. On 5 December , Whitlam held his first press conference as Prime Minister. However, statements were still being made in Parliament which warned about the dangers of recognising China.
Whittorn suggested that Australia had to toe the Peking line and agree to conditions more stringent than those accepted by other states. It is nonsense to suggest that we have been discriminated against by the Chinese and forced to accept a variety of pre-conditions. The negotiations in Paris covered only questions relating to the recognition of China and the status of Taiwan.
There was no secret agreement or understanding on other matters. Evatt, Percy Spender, R. Casey and Paul Hasluck had all attempted to develop a distinctive foreign policy, the election of the Whitlam Government was something of a watershed. Whitlam acted on the presumption that Australia had its own interests and could make an independent assessment of what those interests were. He spoke not only of a new course in Asia but also of the emergence of a distinctively Australian view of the world.
We are no longer a cipher or a satellite in world affairs. We are no longer stamped with the taint of racism. We are no longer a colonial power. We are no longer enthralled to bogies and obessions in our relations with China or the great powers.
When the Liberal-National Country Party coalition was elected to office in Malcolm Fraser pledged to continue to build the new relationship and forge closer political, economic and cultural ties. That this House records its sincere regret at the death of Chairman Mao Tse-tung, expresses to the people of China profound regret and tenders its deep sympathy to his family in their bereavement. Unlike the armies of the Chinese leaders before him, his armies did not loot, pillage or rape. He organised great land reform and just government.
He was a poet in the classical style and a humane head of a government which was the biggest bureaucracy on earth … [90]. Liberal Member for Mackellar, William Wentworth, was one of the few dissenting voices. He made a prison and called it peace … Maoism has subjected the Chinese people to an alien ideology and has denied them their traditional life and culture … Will the Chinese people now have the wisdom and courage to abandon these moronic aspects of Maoism and reassert their historic values?
It says much for the changing attitudes of Australian politicians as it does for the greatness of Mao himself that we are paying tribute in this place to a man and thus to a nation and a people who until a short time ago were the objects of widespread hostility and suspicion in this country. The Fraser years coincided with radical change in China, for the death of Mao would open the way for a comprehensive change in foreign policy and the introduction of a program of substantial economic liberalisation.
Deng replaced ideological purity with a program of economic development, announcing his intention that China become a developed economy by the year Optimism about the Australia—China relationship spread through government, business and educational sectors. Australians tried to build China into whatever they did: China became almost obligatory for government ministers, China business seminars proliferated, tertiary institutions signed up for exchanges with China, PhD scholarships were offered to people from China with no degree at all.
In a service at the Great Hall in Parliament House on 9 June, commemorating the lives of those killed, Prime Minister Hawke wept as he quoted from an Australian embassy cable which described the events in detail. Unarmed young men and women were sprayed with bullets and crushed by tanks.
Innocent people were shot and beaten in the streets and in their homes … Thousands have been killed and injured, victims of a leadership that seems determined to hang on to the reins of power at any cost—at awful human cost.
This was followed by a motion in which Parliament expressed:. The Hawke Government also committed to extending the visas of thousands of Chinese students in Australia.
This chapter has offered an account of the profound transformation that took place in Australian self-perceptions from the s. The type of Australia that was imagined in the first decades after Federation—racially pure, separate from Asia and committed to pursuing imperial interests—was gradually replaced by an Australia which began to imagine Asia as part of its future. For a nation emerging out of the experience of the Great Depression, Australian policy makers looked upon Asia to help drag the nation out of economic depression.
After this initial period of engagement we have observed the various shifts that took place in parliamentary perceptions of China during the post-War period. The next chapter examines a different type of Australia—China relationship, a relationship that developed under the Howard Government and was predicated upon broad economic complementarity. Prime Minister Stanley Bruce appointed R.
Casey operated as an Australian Liaison Officer within the Foreign and Colonial Office, acting as a point of liaison for communications between Britain and Australia. Shannon L. Latham made this comment during a radio broadcast in Japan, J.
The significance of the Mission is further underscored by the fact that it was accompanied by two Australia journalists, Frank Murray of the Sydney Sun and F.
Cutlack from the Sydney Morning Herald. Throughout this period there was growing parliamentary concern over increased Japanese militarism during the Sino-Japanese War — As quoted in Warren G. The advantages of trade would later be raised by H. Does the Government imagine for a moment that communism means anything to them? They probably do not know the meaning of the word. The Communist Party of Australia was established in , three years after the Russian revolution.
The Leader of the Opposition, H. Evatt, became embroiled in the controversy over communist subversion when he attempted to defend Allan Dalziel, a member of his staff who was found to have supplied information to the Soviet Embassy. Spender announces, therefore, that the Government proposes to establish a standing committee on foreign affairs which can give constant attention to issues of foreign policy.
The Committee was formally established in Percy Spender, op. See, for example, K. For him the opportunity to study that he was given, particularly the Colombo Plan scholarship to Australia, defined his life. It gave him opportunities he would never otherwise have had and enabled him to climb out of the poverty he experienced as a child in Malaysia.
It is a large part of how I come to be here today. Whitlam claimed that the government had not permitted parliamentary debate on foreign affairs for more than three years, or during the period of the 20th Parliament. Whitlam suggests that the last debate of any length on foreign affairs occurred on 10 July and occupied 2 hours 40 minutes. Wesley, Journalist Brian Penton said the prosperity of Asia is far more important to Australia than the prosperity of American or Britain.
The root of crime in society is all acts of. Here was an ideology to threaten and challenge the sacred ideals of American capitalist democracy, and those in the US who had climbed to power through this system saw the possible undoing of this in communism. As the US-soviet Union cold war developed, the national security council advised the president for the creation.
Conversely, Kevin Rudd's speech, apologising to the indigenous Australia communities for past indiscretions, stemmed off a need to right past wrongs.
Both texts offer varying responses to the statement above and the ambiguity of political motivations of groups and individuals. The play, 'The Crucible,' is set in the. This provision bore no relation to the defence power.
Half a century later, in response to the September 11 attack, the Howard government created legislature on a sequence of counter terrorism measures. In reality, its influence was minor but at various times during the s and s beliefs about communist influence in the trade union movement and the Australian Labor Party ALP led to vague fears that Australia's democratic way of life was under threat. In the five years following the end of World War II, these vague fears assumed a more substantial form as Australians witnessed much of Eastern Europe and a significant part of Asia fall behind the 'Iron Curtain' of communism.
Menzies had campaigned, at least in part, on an anti-socialist and anti-communist platform. It was against this background that a number of political crises developed in Australia in the first half of the s. Australia's Democracy pp —40 details the role of communists in the trade unions during the s and the efforts of the Prime Minister, Stanley Melbourne Bruce photo right , to control communism.
Introduction Why was communism feared?
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