Invited comments on PNG decolonisation, made in hindsight

Hindsight: A Workshop for Participants in the Decolonisation of Papua New Guinea

University House, Canberra, 3 November 2002

Summary

Gough Whitlam addresses the issue of corruption in PNG administration. He calls on critics in Governments everywhere to show that the common law system can be honest and accessible. 'When we show that the parliamentary and ministerial systems have accountability in Australia, then we are in a position to lecture, to monitor, to patronize our former colony,'he said.

I am sorry I won't be here tomorrow. It has been very enlightening to see the variety of backgrounds of the considerable number of participants today.

I wanted to say something about corruption. PNG was exceptional in that except for Algeria. There was no colony which was so close to its imperial power.

My obsession was always to get things on the statute book and to have international conventions enacted - administered by Australian ministers and public servants - and monitored by Australian courts. I've had very limited success in getting all these things up.

What impressed me very early was the Tariff Board system. The Tariff Board would give very informative reports on the history and the economics of all the matters that could come before it. You could see all the arguments and the statistics. They were very illuminating. But there was a procedure that the minister could always impose a provisional emergency tariff. That would operate for a year or so before it could come to be confirmed or rejected by the Tariff Board itself.

This always happens where there are executive exemptions such as in tariffs or where there are colonies where decisions are made by the executive, and the general population do not have the votes or political power.

There have been examples mentioned again during this afternoon about decisions on what PNG could produce. For example, PNG people were discouraged from growing peanuts, rice, or coffee. That is because there was a very strong domestic constituency in Australia wanting to see that PNG and the Northern Territory did not compete with existing producers in Australia. When we mention sugar - well, sugar is not in too good a position in Australia now - but in each of these cases, one must ask why it is that a political unit such as PNG did not produce things which some parts of Australia produced.

The great thing we have to do is to look at our procedures in Australia, which was the origin, the 'inspiration', of governance in PNG.

As my Government was consummating the independence of PNG, it was thwarted in its efforts to keep the bastards honest in Australia.

A departmental head commented to me that officers in the services and officials in departments awarded contracts during their last years in such a way as to attract consultancies and directorships after they retired.

In May 1975 my Government introduced a Purchasing Commission Bill to supervise Government procurement activities in relation to stores, services and works. In August 1975 the Senate rejected the bill.

On 30 September 1975 Joe Riordan in the House of Representatives and John Marriott in the Senate presented unanimous recommendations from a Joint Committee on Pecuniary Interests that members of parliament, the staff of ministers and shadow ministers and journalists using the facilities of Parliament House should disclose the names of the companies in which they hold shares, the location of any properties in which they have a beneficial interest, the names of all companies of which they are directors and any sponsored travel. No debate took place before the 11 November double dissolution and Marriott was dumped from the Coalition Senate team in Tasmania. The Federal Parliament has still not established a code for ministers or service chiefs who retire.

England's system of common law has not proved a basis for democracy and corporate honesty in many Anglophone countries in Africa or in Malaysia, Singapore, Fiji and other former colonies in our region.

There are constant calls in Australia for judges to be appointed to hold royal commissions into administrative and commercial transgressions. There is an impression that judges can then investigate and punish the transgressors as they do in the Roman law systems that operate in France and, since Napoleon, in most European countries. In Australia royal commissions can compel witnesses to give evidence and can make recommendations that they be sent to trial but they cannot themselves impose penalties on the witnesses. The evidence that the witnesses give unwillingly to royal commissioners cannot usually be used against them before trial judges.

In Britain there is a requirement that a minister or head of a department shall not take a position related to his former department until two years after he has left it. There is no such requirement in Australia. The recently retired Ministers for Health and Defence immediately accepted retainers and directorships. I can well imagine citizens of PNG asking us, 'Who are you to tell us how to go about our affairs'.

I gather that PNG does not have so much corruption as you get in places like Indonesia, where you often have to pay for an ordinary certificate or service. We have to take the motes out of our own eyes where we see systems being rorted.

We have to show that the common law system can be honest and accessible. When we show that the parliamentary and ministerial systems have accountability in Australia, then we are in a position to lecture, to monitor, to patronize our former colony.

Summary of second commentary

Gough gives a candid overview of the personalities and issues involved in the long debate over the speed and direction of of PNG decolonisation.

I was always depressed that it was taking us so long to do, in our own colony and trust territory, what was already being done in Africa or the Caribbean, by the British and the French. As I've mentioned, I said in my first speech on foreign affairs in 1954 that the British and French and Portuguese and Americans and we would have to get a move on in the territories which were not yet independent in the Pacific or Indian Oceans. I deal with some of these things in the passages I mention in The Whitlam Government which I did in 1985, but I will pick out a couple here.

In the Roy Milne lecture in September 1956 Paul Hasluck said

'There is not, at present, and cannot be for many years to come, any possibility of a territory-wide franchise for the native people'.

I remember asking questions at that time about which trust territories or colonies is it not possible for all the indigenous people to have a vote for their representative body. I think [Hasluck's] answer was Fiji. He had been Minister for, I think, three years already. In 1951, six months after he had become Minister for Territories he said

'It might be more than a century before a large majority of the native peoples could participate in management of the life, industry and politics of the country'.

One cannot say that there was very great foresight in such a comment. He speeded up a bit after he came back with Menzies from the Commonwealth Prime Ministers conference in London in 1960. When Menzies came back from the only visit he made to Moresby, he said that he had come to see that independence should come sooner rather later. But in October that year Hasluck declared that an expatriate public service would be needed for 20 to 30 years. He was moving ahead a bit. But we were terribly isolated here. I remember particularly that when Hasluck took over, he noticed - as Eddie Ward and Percy Spender had not noticed when they had responsibility - that at Government House in Port Moresby they flew the Union Jack.

It was not until he became minister that Hasluck said 'Let's fly the Australian flag.'

Also, there was pressure on the government parties from 1949 onwards to have soldier settlement in PNG for returned soldiers, many of whom had fought there. That was particularly strong in Papua where people were Australian citizens.

Although I discovered about six years later that the Papuans who were Australian citizens were not allowed to leave the airport until they had given a guarantee of one hundred pounds, that they would leave in a certain time. That is, our own citizens had to get permission to visit our country. These things had a bit of an impression on me.

After the 1963 federal elections, there was a new minister, a new departmental head, and a new Public Service commissioner. The previous administration arrangements, that is, the ones under Hasluck, had stood for a singularly long time. Hasluck became the first minister for the Department of Territories in 1951, Lambert the first secretary. But it was not until 1963 that Hasluck was made Minister for Defence and CEB Barnes was made Minister for Territories. Hasluck was sixth in the ministry, Barnes the 21st.

At the beginning of 1964 Lambert retired and Gunther, a very great public servant of New Guinea and Australia whom Hasluck had promised to appoint as Lambert's successor, was passed over in favour of George Warwick Smith.

The Public Service Commissioner, whom Hasluck had recruited from the NSW Public Service seven years before, resigned and was replaced by an Army paymaster. So there was a big change; but for an extraordinarily long time - from 1951 to 1963 - there was the same Administration, ministerial and bureaucratic. Then Barnes was brought in with a new hierarchy.

The other thing that impressed me about Hasluck when I became a member at the end of 1952 was that in my local RSL Club - it used to be quite a respectable organization - there were some young men who wanted to go on the land in Papua. I went to see Hasluck who was very approachable in these things. He said 'No, I see what has happened in Africa - Rhodesia and so on. I do not favour soldier settlement in our colony or our trust territory.' He was quite unequivocal in those two things.

Now CEB Barnes was a real gentleman, an honourable man. I pestered him with incessant questions later on, but he always answered them candidly. But the trouble was that the Country Party wanted the portfolio for Territories (covering at first the Northern Territory, and PNG) because it did not want those tropical areas to grow anything that was not already being grown in Australia. PNG could not only grow copra, cocoa, it could grow tea, coffee, sugar, pineapples; but the production of those things was discouraged, and CEB was a prisoner of that.

There is one other thing I want to mention in this context. There has been a recent biography of John Gorton which portrays him as setting out on the course of self-government for PNG. There is no doubt that CEB Barnes would do whatever a Prime Minister told him to do, but anybody who reads Hansard at the time would realize that Gorton was conducting what would now be done by every Premier and Prime Minister, a law and order campaign, based on fear of the Mataungans. He said there would be 'blood on his hands'. This was after that great meeting of 11,000 people inaugurated by the Catholic and Methodist church choirs. I would be having blood on my hands in devout company.

The real change came when Billy McMahon was Prime Minister. On 2 February 1972 he appointed Andrew Peacock. Peacock's people skills are very great. He is more than a show pony; he does have gifts in diplomacy, and of course he ingratiated himself with all the emerging people in PNG and he got on very well with them. In the debates on the departmental estimates every year I used to quote what was said in the Trusteeship Council's resolutions and every third year what we said to its visiting missions. They were always urging us to do more. In fact, the old Mandates Commission, between the two world wars, used to complain that we were not doing enough for education in New Guinea, that is, in the mandate.

The visiting missions were headed by distinguished people like Lord Caradon, as he later became, and by French people and so on, people who did have experience in running dependent territories. They were all saying that we were moving too slowly. Hasluck realized that it was no longer sufficient, as other colonial powers had done, to leave clinics and schools to missionaries.

One of the terrible consequences of our administration of Papua and New Guinea is that there is no national language. All the colonies ruled in the Caribbean, or Africa, or South America by Portuguese, Spanish, French -- leave out the British - have the national language of the imperial power. We have this appalling position that there isn't a national language in Vanuatu, or Solomons, or Papua New Guinea. PNG has been handicapped because there was no national language encouraged early by the British and the Australians.

We had a lot of way to make up and we were far too slow in doing these things. There are people like Gunther and Les Johnson to whom I give very great credit for picking up the opportunity to use the teachers' training college to train the future governors, future leaders of PNG. And then at the universities. I tried to get the Hawke government to carry on national language, literacy for all, but they did not go ahead with it.

I don't think we ought to forget the situation that between the two world wars we paid little heed to what the Mandates Commission was doing; and afterwards, even under Hasluck who was a meticulous and scrupulous administrator, we were saying 'Wait till everybody's literate before we give them any higher jobs, or train them.'

That's the response that I make to Sir David. I hope you see what was behind what I say. A lot of people take the attitude that I would go ahead rather than have consultation, but at least I was one leader of my party who, if the party had a particular policy and I didn't like it, I'd persuade them to get it changed. But if there was a particular policy and I liked it, then I would take the first opportunity to carry it out. All of my visits to PNG were based on policies which had been publicly developed in the Parliament.