Thoughts from Australia
William Deedes
They were digging up the middle square of the huge Melbourne cricket ground while I was there. The old wicket was said to be possessed of devils. So that struck off the visiting list one of the familiar land- marks which forms a bond for many of us. Such bonds are weakening, I reflected on the journey home. Australia revisited after a three-year interval seems further away than ever, and not only because as you get older a 24-hour journey takes longer. We are drawing apart.
What extraordinary items, incidentally, the copytasters of Australia's newspapers select from Britain to keep Australians in touch with the old country — though Australians here may think the same about our own copytasters. During one of the Queen's recent visits an Australian newspaper observed sourly that Australia seemed to be seeing plenty of her. That unrepresentative comment found no echo among Australians I met. The Queen and her children remain an exception to what the Australian historian, Geoffrey Blainey, has called the the Tyranny of Distance; not least because they clearly like Australians, who are quick to notice these things.
Our respective trade unions form another, more melancholy bond, but their troubles at t'mill are on a scale unimaginable here. I was driven, after reading some accounts in Australia of trade union goings-on, to conclude that I had grievously misjudged our own brothers. They seem, by contrast with some of Australia's, to be pure as driven snow.
At the Melbourne Club, which enjoys a standard of comfort and service attained by only the best London clubs 50 years ago, I spotted a billiard table in the library and asked about this. The club had set about converting two small billiard rooms into one. Members of the notorious Builders Labourers Union employed on this soon found that the staff of the club belonged to no union. They invited the brothers tO remedy this, even called a staff meeting. The staff reacted as Jeeves might have done when asked to join the T & GWU. Ho, said the BLU, the brothers are deprived and this club is black. So it remains, and the billiard table stays in the library.
However, for a lot of young people the tyrannies of distance and unions have no reality. I visited a family friend, still in his very early thirties, in a south Melbourne of- fice which he runs single-handed with four Australian secretaries. The business he has established is to freight racehorses (a thriv- ing Australian industry) across the world in rented Boeing 747s — a hundred at a time. Clearly a profitable enterprise, though I would have thought an anxious one. What on earth do thoroughbred racehorses do when they experience turbulence?
Glancing round his expensively book- lined office through half-closed eyes I tried to envisage his counterparts in London or Birmingham, not altogether successfully. There are a lot of him about. The young 'man or woman with intelligence and a wish to work, unions or no unions, has a long horizon, and more and more of ours seem to be finding this out.
None of these marginal notes, however, takes us to the heart of the matter: the reason why in matters which count the distance between us has grown. I asked a senior minister at a private meeting why it seemed to us that on certain paramount in- ternational issues Mrs Thatcher and Mr Fraser were not always quite as one. (The Rhodesia/Zimbabwe affair was one il- lustration of this.) Nor is there much of an ANZ front over South Africa, an issue on which Mr Fraser and Mr Muldoon seem poles apart.
The Minister offered some insight into this, which I pursued. Australia, let us recall, is surrounded by three of the biggest oceans in the world. In the vast region of the southern Pacific a delicate role has evolved for her. As a senior officer in the Ministry of Defence in Canberra put it suc- cinctly: 'The Pacific is full of islands we don't want to see occupied. The Soviets will, if we don't watch — and help.' fie might have added: and our trade with the islands is twice as much as anyone else's. Vigilance over and close friendship with the Asian populations of vulnerable places in this vast region is the chosen course. 11., on occasion, that gives Australia the alY pearance of siding with the non-aligned, s° it has to be. This tells us something about Australian attitudes to South Africa, on which I predict Mr Fraser's ministers wilt take an increasingly tough attitude. Forward defence has been abandoned since Vietnam. We here know little of the bitterness that issue aroused in Australia at, the time. It lingers. In any case, a country with a population of 15 million cannot af- ford to get bogged down anywhere on the Asian mainland. The chosen policy has to be even-handed to succeed. Aid on an increasing scale iS proffered to those who might otherwise be tempted by whatever passes in the Kremlin for carrots. A constant watch is kept from the air; and this, for Australia, is the significance of the Invincible deal (although' as it turns out, Britain's need has proved to be greater than Australia's). The ah;" craft carrier adds a new dimension; it af- fords Australian aircraft longer range- In all this Australia is not unmindful that, however many people fly to and from her shores, 99 per cent of her trade is by sea. In planning her modern defences Australia is handicapped on two counts' Three years, the fixed term of an Australian government, is a very short span for consis" tent long-term defence planning. The Australian public do not instinctively drive their governments to increasing defence ex' penditure. NATO countries can offer their people a tangible threat; Australia has no enemy on the Elbe. There is no imperative in the public mind. Furthermore, for her defence procurement she must depend On others. None of her production runs are long enough to produce modern' sophisticated weapons. She must shop around for all the hardware. The deepest bond which endures between Australia and ourselves, NATO and the West is defence of the free world, no less; and they have to do it their way. It seems to me that is not everywhere perceived and aP" preciated in our quarter, and before we grow even further apart, it ought to be. During the recent argument about Invin- cible, I advanced certain of these reflections in halting words to an angry, retired and in- telligent admiral. Yes, yes, he said, I dare say; but for the life of me I cannot see what it has to do with us and the future of ctr navy. That is not how we talked bef°'' Gallipoli.
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