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Recognising China

By Gough Whitlam Extracted from Worksite

Gough Whitlam draws the links, past and present, between recognition of China and the continuing struggle to achieve a genuinely inclusive Australian democracy.

	Gough Whitlam, ALP Campaign Launch, 1972.

From the outset we must be very clear: We must resist any policy which purports to make Australia choose between China and the United States. We must resist any policy which purports to make Australian Chinese choose between Taiwan and China.

We must always insist upon honouring the premise and promise on which all our relations with China have been based since 1972. There is only one China. Anything less is dishonourable and destructive. There can be no unilateral withdrawal from our undertaking - except at the price of gross dishonour on the part of Australia and the United States.

The Founding Fathers of Federation, whose achievements we celebrate in Melbourne this week, all believed in the creation of a British nation in this continent. Some of the earliest acts of the Australian Parliament entrenched the concept of White Australia by excluding migrants from Asia and denying votes to settlers from Asia.

White Australia

The Founding Fathers defied the wishes of the British Government, which ruled hundreds of millions of Asians. After the end of the First World War, in which both Japan and China were allies of the British Empire, the Australian Prime Minister asserted the policy of White Australia in the crudest terms. Others objected to migrants from China and Japan not because they were uncivilised but because they would be too clever.

After the end of the Pacific War the United States, the United Kingdom, the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the Empire of Japan granted independence to the countries which they had occupied in Asia and the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

'Maintenance of White Australia' was placed at the top of the Australian Labor Party's platform. It was not removed from the party's platform till 1965. It was not removed from Australian statutes till 1973. The inevitable failure of the White Australia Policy is demonstrated by the census statistics.

The futility of conducting a British Commonwealth foreign policy in the Pacific was demonstrated half a century ago. When the People's Republic of China was proclaimed in Beijing on 1 October 1949 the Attlee Labour Government in Britain recommended to its fraternal governments in Australia and New Zealand that the three governments should simultaneously recognise the new entity. The Chifley and Fraser Governments, facing general elections on 10 December, decided to delay recognition until after those elections. Attlee went ahead alone. Chifley and Fraser were defeated. The long years of the Menzies ascendancy in Australia began and, with it, the long manipulation of the China issue as part of Australia's domestic politics.

The difficulty of conducting a British Commonwealth foreign policy in the Atlantic was demonstrated when the United Kingdom and Canada joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization drawn up in Washington on 4 April 1949. The other members were Belgium, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and the USA. Diplomatic relations were established between Denmark and China on 11 May 1950, just before negotiations broke down between the American and Russian forces regarding the future of Korea. On 25 June 1950 the North Korean forces invaded South Korea and the Security Council, in the absence of Russia, asked all members of the UN to render assistance to the South.

Korean Crisis

Menzies attended the Conference of Commonwealth Prime Ministers which opened in London on 4 January 1951, the day on which Seoul fell to the Chinese People's Army. Attlee reported on his anxious flight to the US, where he persuaded the US not to use the atomic bomb in Korea. The conference was given two documents which the British Joint Intelligence Committee had produced for the British Chiefs of Staff. The first concluded that Western forces would probably be able to hang on in Korea provided that there was no reliance on South Korean forces and provided that the Soviet Union made no large scale air intervention. More chillingly, the second memorandum decided, after exhaustive research, that open war with China, even without intervention from Russia, and even with the use of the atomic bomb, would almost inevitably involve a major defeat of the Western powers, with consequences that might well be fatal - in the words of the memorandum - "to the whole position of the present free world". In other words, war with China was ruled out not because it was unimaginable but because it was unwinnable.

Canada established diplomatic relations with China in October 1970, Australia on 22 December 1972 and New Zealand on 23 December 1972. Prime Ministers Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke, Keating and Howard all made early visits to China after taking office and all have supported the One China policy.

Under section 51 (xxix) of the Australian Constitution - 'External affairs' - Australia is entirely competent to decide questions of foreign affairs and trade, the two subjects which mostly determine relations between China and Australia. For historical reasons America and Britain from time to time exert pressure on Australia.

On Suez and Viet Nam America and Britain pursued different policies. In each case Australia supported the wrong policy. Due to its large immigrant population there are more people in Australia than in America or Britain who understand the politics of South-East Asia and the Balkans.

The White Australia policy was not required by the Australian Constitution. It was implemented by the Australian Parliament under section 51 of the Constitution to make laws with respect to:

(xxvi) The people of any race [other than the aboriginal race in any State] for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws;
(xxvii) Immigration and emigration.

It is often claimed that the people of the aboriginal race were given votes when the words "other than the aboriginal race in any State" were excised from the Constitution in the overwhelmingly successful referendum on 27 May 1967.

In the 1890s Aborigines, both men and women, had acquired the right to vote at elections for the House of Assembly of South Australia, which included the Northern Territory of South Australia. They retained that right to vote in the Northern Territory until 1911, when the Northern Territory became the Northern Territory of Australia and all its residents lost the right to vote.

All vestiges of the White Australia policy had to be removed when my Government enacted the 1966 United Nations International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. The Parliament passed the Racial Discrimination Act in June 1975 and I ratified it in September 1975. The Racial Discrimination Act is the basis of all the rights enjoyed by migrants and Aborigines in Australia.

Strengthening Australian Democracy

All aspects of responsible government in Australia are based on acts of parliament. The Federal Parliament initiated these reforms:

• Votes for women in 1902
• Preferential voting for the House of Representatives in 1918
• Compulsory voting in 1924
• Proportional voting for the Senate in 1949
• Voting age dropped from 21 to 18 in 1973
• One vote one value and periodic redistributions for the House of Representatives in 1974.

The Federal Parliament should take the following legislative and constitutional steps to enhance and entrench parliamentary democracy in Australia.

Legislation

1. To repeal subsection 394(1) of the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918, which prevents simultaneous elections for the Federal and State Parliaments. (The sub-section was inserted in 1922. The Hawke Government's Constitutional Commission in 1988 recommended that it be repealed. In the United States, elections have been held on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November in even-numbered years (a) since 1845, by an Act of Congress, for the President and the House of Representatives, (b) for more than a century, by consensus, for the Governors and the State legislatures and (c) since 1913, by the Seventeenth Amendment, for the Senate.)
2. to enact the 1948 Genocide Convention, which entered into force in 1951. (In the debate on the Genocide Convention Act 1949 both Menzies and Evatt acknowledged that "Legislation must follow to enact the Convention".)
3. to enact the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which entered into force in 1976. (This would achieve equal suffrage in elections of the Legislative Assembly and Legislative Council of Western Australia, the only State Houses of Parliament which do not conform to the requirements of Article 25 of the Covenant, and it would override many provisions of the mandatory sentencing laws of Western Australia and the Northern Territory.)
4. to enact ILO Convention No.169 - Indigenous and Tribal Peoples, 1989, which Australia supported and which entered into force in September 1991. (This would give Aborigines access to the ILO monitoring bodies.)
5. to enact the eight ILO conventions on occupational health and safety, (Governments, employers and workers equally participate in the work of the ILO. My Government ratified nine ILO conventions; the Howard Government has ratified none.)
6. to enact the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Australia supported and which entered into force generally in September 1990. (This would override the other provisions of the mandatory sentencing laws.)

Referendums

1. to appoint an Australian Head of State and to define the power and duties of the Head of State
2. to have simultaneous elections for the House of Representatives and Senate on a fixed date every four years. (The House of Representatives and the Queensland Legislative Assembly are the only Houses of Parliament in Australia which are limited to three years' duration.)
3. to remove section 44 with its irrelevant and archaic provisions on the disqualifications of members of the Federal Parliament. (There have been half a dozen challenges in the High Court since 1987.)
4. to remove the Senate's power to delay or reject appropriation bills. (The Senate in South Africa was denied this power by the British Union of South Africa Act 1909. The House of Lords was denied it by the British Parliament Act 1911. The Legislative Council of NSW was denied it by the State Constitution Amendment (Legislative Council) Act 1932, approved by referendum in 1933.)

E.G. Whitlam served as the Prime Minister of Australia 1972-1975.

  See also Gough Whitlam Archive

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  Issue 120 contents

»	Calls for ALP Fundraising Code
»	Mad Monk Keeps IR
»	Ignored Warnings Bring Tragic Results
»	ACTU Executive To Mark Union Bounce Back
»	Workers Will Lose from Unfair Contract Changes
»	Tassie On Top, While NSW And WA Slip
»	Costa Gets First Union Call
»	Hamberger in Hot Water
»	Egan to Pay for Welfare Win
»	Sweet Victory for Sugar Workers
»	Selectron Demise Spells Death of Tech Inustry
»	Telco Industry Growth Hits The Wall
»	Shocking Conditions in Clothing Industry
»	Workers Force Council Backdown
»	New Dili Project Launched
»	Airport Guards Welcome Work Study Case
»	No News is Bad News for the Bush
»	Getonboard Closes Doors
»	Activists Notebook
»	Organiser of the Year Nominations Open

»	The Soapbox
»	The Soapbox
»	Trades Hall
»	Tool Shed

»	The Cost a Costa
»	Unionism and the ALP - a Workers View.
»	Is 60-40 Good Odds?
»	Ancient OHS - The Wergild Sysstem

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