Comments on Nuclear Testing in the South Pacific
Parliament, Wellington
The French government carried out extensive nuclear testing in the South Pacific between 1966 and 1996, despite repeated international protest. In 1974, the Labour Government had sent two frigates to Moruroa Atoll in protest for a nuclear-free Pacific. Then in 1985, just two years after the following speech, the Greenpeace activist ship the Rainbow Warrior, which was due to sail to the atoll to protest nuclear testing, was sunk while still at port in Auckland by two explosives placed on board by French intelligence service operatives.
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Many disturbing trends are emerging in New Zealand society. There is increasing violence. I believe that the long-term answers lie in social and economic reconstruction, in the rebuilding of the welfare state, and in the promotion of full employment and a caring society. The police do have a role to play in rebuilding New Zealand, yet the role that they are cast in by the government will, over time, work to tear our society apart by serving to heighten, rather than to diminish, existing tensions. These days, of course, the rigid views of the government must win out at all costs. Apartheid sport must be played in New Zealand to prove some obscure notion about freedom, at the risk of splitting open our society. The ritual Waitangi celebrations must take place, even if they do so behind barriers of riot shields and police.
Is that New Zealand the way we want it, or is there a better way?
Are New Zealanders not fed up to the teeth with that kind of confrontation and division, and are they not ready for a change geared around a new consensus?
Won’t Rob’s mob have to give way to the concern of decent citizens for social justice across the board? That is the clear message I take from the polls, and it is the clear message that Labour Opposition members are getting throughout the country. As the Dominion reported on 19 April in reference to his appearance at Eden Park with the royal couple, the Prime Minister may still ‘prove a runaway success as a side show’, but as a serious solution to the political, economic, social and moral crisis that New Zealand now faces he and his accomplices among government members should be immediately dismissed.
It is not just New Zealand’s political leaders who are taking flight from reality these days. They have their counterparts at the highest level in other important nations. Just as I am struck by the inadequacy of the government’s response to New Zealand’s present crisis, so I am appalled at the inappropriateness of the response by major world leaders to the most critical issue confronting the international community—that of disarmament. I must say that Opposition members note with particular sadness the recent announcements by the socialist government in France concerning its increased spending on nuclear defence. Its four-year military programme announced last week gives clear priority to nuclear weapons. That is especially bad news for South Pacific nations like New Zealand, because it indicates a continuing commitment by the French government to further develop its own nuclear deterrent, and that means a continuation of the nuclear weapons testing programme at Moruroa.
It is pleasing to note that the Leader of the Opposition took the earliest possible opportunity to express the unanimous opposition of the New Zealand Labour Party to continued French nuclear weapons testing in the South Pacific. That message must be driven home to France—the message that all democratic political forces in the South Pacific deplore its nuclear weapons testing, and that that, indeed, is the unanimous view of all nations that take part in the South Pacific Forum. While the Labour Party is opposed to nuclear weapons testing by any nation, wherever it may occur, it is particularly concerned that it should be carried out in our region, in a colonial territory, by a colonial power operating from half a world away.
While I have singled out the French government for particular criticism, the continuing antics of the two major superpowers concerning their nuclear arsenals also warrant some comment. Each is engaged in a deadly game of blindfold bluff, each trying to perpetrate the fiction—and it is no more than that—that the other side has assumed nuclear superiority, and, therefore, that it poses a greater threat to security than before, and that massive expenditure to close the alleged gap is required.
The alleged nuclear gap has as much validity as Major Douglas’s. It exists purely in the mind. An article in the influential British Observer of Sunday 27 March reported that the concept that the Russians were ahead of the Americans in the nuclear arms race was one that ‘even the most hawkish American generals concede is nonsense’. Unfortunately, it is highly dangerous nonsense. It leads to the promulgation of the most fantastic plans for so-called defence. The ‘Star Wars’ scenario or Buck Rogers schemes announced by the American President a few weeks ago are the most fanciful yet.
Surely small nations such as New Zealand have a moral duty to voice their concern about the escalation of the arms race between the superpowers. Have we not the right to ask where all this arms expenditure has got us? Could anybody argue with any credibility that after 45 years of East–West rivalry and the expenditure of billions of dollars on nuclear weaponry any of us feel more secure than we did before it all started? I doubt it. The irony is that the more that has been spent on nuclear weapons the more insecure we have all felt. We have ended up frightening ourselves with the size and the power of the arsenals constructed to defend us, let alone those arraigned against us.
A few months ago a very influential report was published by an international commission formed to consider international security issues and headed by Mr Olaf Palme, who is now the Prime Minister of Sweden. The report, entitled ‘Common Security’, made the point that no nation’s security can be guaranteed by the unilateral measures it adopts to defend itself. The report states that a doctrine of common security should replace what it calls the present expedient of deterrence through armaments. International peace, it states, must rest on a joint commitment to survival rather than on a threat of mutual destruction. I certainly agree with that. The Palme Commission advocates that all nations should adopt certain principles of common security as the basis for their own defence policies. States should recognise that all nations have a legitimate right to security, that military force is not a legitimate instrument with which to resolve disputes between nations, and that security cannot be gained through military superiority. The first consequence of military superiority is, of course, the insecurity felt by everyone round about.
The report states also that reductions and quantitative limitations on armaments are necessary for common security to be effective, and that linkages between arms negotiations and political events should be avoided. A small nation such as New Zealand should have little difficulty in recognising the sound common sense of those principles. We should also give our support to the proposals made by the Palme Commission for strengthening the United Nations.
When the United Nations was established, the Rt Hon. Peter Fraser, on behalf of New Zealand, pressed for it to play a strong role in guaranteeing collective security. Unlike the League of Nations, the new international organisation was to have teeth in that respect. It was envisaged that the United Nations would be able to rely on trained military units earmarked for United Nations service to deter wars and enforce peace, but, sadly, the cold war and subsequent East–West confrontations put paid to those early hopes, and the United Nations was left to play only a strictly limited role in peace-keeping.
The Palme Commission has proposed afresh that the United Nations should have at its disposal standby forces recruited from a wide base with adequate and automatic funding. It proposes in the first instance that the United Nations should commit itself to invoke collective security procedures whenever a border dispute threatens or provokes armed conflict between two or more Third World countries. The report states that Third World countries should commit themselves to settle disputes without interference from the great powers, which should resolve not to become involved. Invoking such collective security measures would not mean taking a position on the merits of any particular dispute, but it would mean that all nation states could be absolutely confident that the United Nations would tolerate no violation of territorial integrity. The certain knowledge that the United Nations would intervene would act as a deterrent to aggressors and diminish the tendency for small countries to look to great powers for protection.
Just as Peter Fraser did almost 40 years ago, it is now time for the New Zealand Government to join in fresh initiatives such as those proposed by the Palme Commission to enhance the effectiveness of the United Nations. It is time to bring issues of security under the umbrella of that organisation, and not to leave them to the whims of the superpowers, whose guarantees of protection are only ever offered if it is in their own interests to do so, and have little to do with profound respect for territorial integrity and independence.
Finally, I want to draw the attention of the House to the linkage that exists between the issues of disarmament and aid and development. While the major economies of the world bankrupt themselves to pay for increased defence budgets, the considerations of sharing out the world’s resources more equitably, widening trade possibilities and raising living standards take a back seat.
In addition, in the present international recession it is easy for nations in crisis to cut back on aid spending in the belief that that cutback, unlike others, will not have domestic repercussions. If New Zealanders have a conscience they will not allow the government to get away with the shabby cuts it has made to its aid programmes. People should be aware that New Zealand’s credibility as a donor country to the developing world has been seriously undermined by the massive cuts in its aid. In this, as in so many other aspects, New Zealand’s image abroad has been seriously damaged by the government.
Consider that inflation and diminishing allocations have brought New Zealand’s present aid commitment down to less than half of what it was under the Third Labour Goverment. In 1982 the aid commitment stood at only 0.22 per cent of the gross domestic product—light years and millions of dollars away from the internationally agreed target of 1 per cent. The downward trend is even more serious when one considers what has happened to the buying power of the New Zealand dollar in recent years. The government has tried to make a virtue out of its declining aid commitments by concentrating much of what is left on the Pacific. That has been done to the virtual neglect of almost all other potential recipient countries. The most savagely treated have been those on the African continent, where the level of New Zealand aid spending has declined by more than 97 per cent, from $1.27 million in 1980–81 to $35,000 in 1982–83.
The present government also concentrates its aid on those countries that follow a narrow capitalist model of development, and might be potential trading partners. In doing that, New Zealand is following its OECD partners. Officially they show scepticism about assisting those who want to follow policies of self-reliance—a model of development, it should be remembered, that has been extremely successful hitherto in the People’s Republic of China. Just as increased economic aid abroad could do much to restore the shattered reputation of this country, so policies of economic construction at home could do much to rebuild the social consensus that the government has done so much to destroy.
I look forward after the next election to being part of the fourth Labour Government, which can commence that task—and it cannot happen a moment too soon.