YouSaid · the spoken record

Hayden

THE RECORD WRITES THIS SPEAKER AS HAYDEN

lines on the record: 131
first: 1983-09-24
most recent: 1986-09-24
sittings or episodes: 4
sources: un-general-debate

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Our Government feels very strongly that the Organization is in danger so long as it refuses or postpones reform, but it believes equally strongly that there is no substitute for the United Nations in a multilateral system of co-operative management of global problems and the maintenance of world peace.”
1986-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 41 (1986)
“It has become the main platform and protector - for many people, the only platform and protector - of those who feel strong as members of the international community but weak when left to operate alone. I am not so unwise as to exaggerate Australia's influence on these matters, but I speak as the representative of a nation which feels strongly about threats to the capacity of the United Nations to maintain and defend the rights of individuals and nations in a just and effective world order. I reiterate the pledge given by the Australian Government at the fortieth session of the General Assembly of active, committed and profound loyalty to the United Nations and its ideals.”
1986-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 41 (1986)
“The United Nations has achieved steady progress on a whole range of practical matters: environmental control, for instance*, conditions of work; literacy, the codification of law, the orderly management of transport and communications. It has been instrumental in winning and protecting individual and national freedoms. It has helped keep the peace between nations. It has promoted in people's consciousness an awareness of the gravity and potential for destruction of the great scourges of humankind: oppression of individuals, poverty and the wastage of resources, the causes of war. It has established and defended a moral climate for the conduct of international affairs.”
1986-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 41 (1986)
“It should not be allowed to become the scapegoat because individual Members fail to subsume their national interests. As Dag Hammarskjold once said, that is like blaming the storm on the ship. The fact is, that the United Nations is no better or worse than the countries which control its purse-strings. If Member States have cause to quarrel with United Nations procedures or if large nations are frustrated because of the way small nations use the system, the solution is to stay and help the fight for sensible reform, not to walk away from the problem. There are many thousands - even millions - of people who owe their shelter, their food, their schooling and even their survival to the organizations of the United Nations.”
1986-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 41 (1986)
“It should be allowed to work more closely with the Secretary-General. I use the word "allowed" deliberately, because it is clear that the Council is inhibited by two factors: the trend that has turned it into a kind of mini-General Assembly and the failure of its permanent members always to remember the greater responsibility that goes with their privileged position. Australia will assist the Secretary-General in his aim of making the United Nations a more effective Organization as energetically and as positively as it can. It would be quite wrong to infer from this, however, that the Australian Government has any sympathy with those who act to diminish the United Nations itself and its various organizations. The United Nations has the firm support of the Australian Government.”
1986-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 41 (1986)
“We would argue that there is room for more efficient administration of the Organization, less wasteful duplication of function and operation and a more rational decision-making process for its budget. In view of its high mission and the poverty and exploitation against which it is struggling, it is quite wrong that the United Nations should be in any way an example of conspicuous consumption. In view of the high expectations of it in every part of the world, it would be a shame if the United Nations were to degenerate into a broadcasting agency for pointless, meaningless and ultimately useless declarations. Australia is among the vanguard of those who seek to make the Security Council more effective. It should, be allowed to act more flexibly, for instance, to play more of a mediator or preventive role.”
1986-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 41 (1986)
“There are many who would say that that pattern has not changed in any substantial way. Certainly, the Australian Government sees the Organization as the only viable alternative to the authority that prevailed previously, very often to the great detriment of huge numbers of humankind - the power of the prevailing empire or State. Yet, despite this, and despite the fact that the world is at a stage in its history when fewer problems can be solved by national measures alone, confidence in international organizations seems to have lessened. Reliance on unilateral action seems more attractive to some people. The Australian Government has some understanding of the impatience expressed about the United Nations and its operations.”
1986-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 41 (1986)
“As a country which has drawn new settlers from diverse parts of the Middle East, which contributes to United Nations peace-keeping efforts, which in simple human terms has not failed to be touched by the plight of refugees and the results of conflict and terrorism, Australia shares this hope. Progress can be made only if compromises and accommodations can be reached which take into account the rights and aspirations of all those involved. The late President Roosevelt saw the United Nations as a replacement for exclusive alliances, spheres of influence and other failed expedients. At the time, on the one hand stood the untrammeled influence of the victorious Powers and, on the other, the dispossessed. It fell to the United Nations to try to fill the vacuum of authority between them.”
1986-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 41 (1986)
“Australia and other Commonwealth countries have tried to persuade South Africa to set such basic reform in train, but without success. We believe that the United Nations should set up a mandatory system of concerted and coherent sanctions which would pressure South Africa into real reform. Certainly those Members that cannot or will not adopt sanction policies should refrain or should be discouraged by this Organization from taking commercial advantage of those who can and will. Already in this debate we have heard expressions of hope that some progress might be made in 1987 towards finding a solution of the intractable problems of the Middle East.”
1986-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 41 (1986)
“The Australian Government believes that the system by which South Africa is governed represents precisely that which the United Nations was designed to oppose; institutional inequity, injustice, violence, oppression and discrimination, it is surprising, therefore, that the South African situation has not been treated in all the statements made by members at this session so far as what it really is; a threat to fundamental United Nations values. The Australian Government's disgust with the system of government in South Africa and that country's continuing illegal occupation of Namibia is well known and needs no explanation here. We genuinely want to see apartheid eliminated quickly and peacefully before it plunges the region, and areas beyond, into wider conflict.”
1986-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 41 (1986)
“We believe that it will facilitate progress towards self-government and independence, through constructive dialog with all parties involved, including the French Government, to be reviewed regularly by this Organization. Freedom and participation are central also in two issues which concern Australia because of their capacity to threaten international peace. I refer to the continuing and deteriorating situations in South Africa and the Middle Bast.”
1986-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 41 (1986)
“Australia would like to see New Caledonia join the community of independent nations in the South Pacific as soon as it is realistically possible, with a system of multiracial independence which recognizes the rights of the indigenous Kanak people and other long-term residents, and which maintains the support and good will of France - a point which I have made repeatedly to my good friends in the Kanak movement. Australia supports the call by South Pacific Forum countries for re-inscribing New Caledonia on the United Nations list of Non-Self-Governing Territories, and we and our South Pacific neighbors will work to do so at this session.”
1986-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 41 (1986)
“Human freedoms and the agreement of the governed are at the heart of the divisions between the people of North and South Korea. The United Nations once went to war over these divisions. It seems only sensible that, by admitting both North and South Korea, the United Nations should promote the contact and dialog that will help heal those divisions. Freedom and the agreement of the governed are highly significant factors in a matter which is of special concern to Australia and our Pacific neighbors: New Caledonia.”
1986-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 41 (1986)
“On both the trade reform and debt adjustment issues, the lessons of the events of 50 or 60 years ago should be ominously clear; the results when nations refuse to co-operate can be devastating. No solutions to great economic problems will work if they do not have the approbation and support of those who are affected by them. No order can endure unless those who are subject to it believe themselves to have a stake in it. This principle applies to other natters on the agenda of this Organization in which Australia has a special interest. It is why the Australian Government continues to condemn the occupation of Afghanistan. It is the reason for our continuing denunciation of Viet Nam's occupation of Cambodia and the atrocities committed in Cambodia by the leadership of the Khmer Rouge.”
1986-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 41 (1986)
“I should observe that the Australian Government supports the general thrust of the Baker proposals for solution of this problem. We also support the general approach of the International Monetary Fund to adjustment and conditionality, noting that it should continue to be handled with care. Democratic institutions, sometimes at delicate stages of development, should not be undermined by the process. The economic benefits of conditionality have to be balanced against their potential for causing distress and dislocation. There is not a lot of profit, either for debtors or for creditors, in encouraging economic activity in nations whose export markets are closed off by trade subsidization and other protectionist policies.”
1986-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 41 (1986)
“This, in the main, means the economies of developing countries, which have to make their way at a time when the international economy as a whole is undergoing difficulty, uncertainty and challenge. The Australian Government has been involved in the recent General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) discussions in Uruguay and elsewhere in the cause of fairer and freer trade. We hope that these discussions will continue so that the issues of trade subsidies, and particularly agricultural trade reform, can be dealt with on a basis which is fair and realistic. We also hope that the spirit that prevailed in Uruguay will continue to be applied to the other great problem for many developing countries: the scope and terms of their formidable debt.”
1986-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 41 (1986)
“If military spending is such an obviously important ingredient in the economic problems of developing countries, reduction in military spending is an obviously important ingredient in solutions to those problems. As it is, developing countries particularly face grave economic difficulties from the plague of protectionism in world trade and the complicated and fragile issue of international debt adjustment. The World Bank has estimated that farm subsidies by members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in 1986 will total more than $US 100 billion. This is a policy that, if permitted to continue, will lead to ruin for agriculture-based economies.”
1986-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 41 (1986)
“Thirty years later, the Thorssen report on the relationship between disarmament and development still saw the need to point out that the world can choose to pursue either the arms race or a more stable social and economic order. It cannot do both. The logic cannot be challenged. Poverty, hunger and disease are major causes of social and political instability. They cannot be tackled effectively when scarce resources are being used for armaments. Experience shows that unrest leads to government repression in so many countries, leading to the spread of authoritarianism. It is no wonder that, in so many countries, democracy has come to be seen as a luxury, the dessert course of economically sound societies.”
1986-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 41 (1986)
“Brandt, Palme, the Panel of Eminent Personalities, the Secretary-General*, these are among a long list of authorities who have described the contradiction between the demands of militarization and the demands of development; that is, the waste of scarce human, capital and material resources on the arms race. Dwight Eisenhower was a leader in war and in recovery from war. He had good reason as President of the United states to warn that "every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”
1986-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 41 (1986)
“As a first step and at the very least, all States should release more information on their conventional arsenals and transfers, and subscribe to the Secretary-General's standardized reporting instrument on military expenditures so that a more accurate picture of the problem can be built up. More than 80 per cent of the world's military expenditure - estimated at more than $US 900 billion a year and rising - goes on conventional weapons, outlays on conventional arms by developing countries are estimated as being roughly equal to the development assistance they get from developed countries.”
1986-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 41 (1986)
“In the Australian Government's view, they should not be allowed to do so. Right now conventional weapons are being used to kill people in northern and southern Africa, Afghanistan, Central America and Cambodia. It is a shameful fact that respectable Members of this Organization ace providing the weapons with which Iranians and Iraqis are killing each other. The Australian Government believes that countries contributing to such tragedies should be held accountable for doing so, as with pollution which crosses national borders. Members of the United Nations should agree not to export defense materials to nations engaged in military conflict or where the potential for conflict is high, or where it is likely to be used to suppress human rights.”
1986-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 41 (1986)
“Australia also wishes to draw attention to the disarmament provisions of the Antarctic Treaty, which has provided the effective manner in which Antarctica has been managed in support of the principles and purposes of the United Nations Charter. We re-emphasize our commitment to the existing system for the management of Antarctica and, accordingly, we disagree on this matter with my good friend the Prime Minister of Malaysia. Australia was disappointed that the fortieth session of the General Assembly broke with the tradition of consensus on this issue. This was not due to the Consultative Parties, and we hope that that tradition can be restored at this forty-first session. The fact and the implications of nuclear arms understandably overshadow the issue of the trade in conventional arms.”
1986-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 41 (1986)
“The Australian Government hopes that these developments will pave the way for substantial negotiations and early agreement on deep reductions in offensive nuclear forces. We hope for agreement on practical arrangements and understandings on the issue of strategic defense and the future of the anti-ballistic missile Treaty. We hope that both sides can now show willingness on the issue of a comprehensive test-ban treaty, which the Australian Government considers a most urgent practical step on the road to nuclear arms control. It is in this context of multilateral action and agreement on forms of arms control that I draw attention to the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty, which the Australian Government supports as a significant step against the proliferation of nuclear weapons.”
1986-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 41 (1986)
“The discussions last November between President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev gave significant impetus to the arms-control process: for instance, the agreement to accelerate negotiations and the call for early progress on matters where there was common ground, such as the principle of reductions in the nuclear arms of the United States and the USSR -appropriately measured - and the idea of an interim intermediate-range nuclear force agreement. Both super-Powers have now put forward a number of detailed proposals for reductions in their nuclear arsenals. Recent meetings have taken place between United States and Soviet arms-control experts. Mow we have the welcome announcement that President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev will meet in Iceland next week.”
1986-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 41 (1986)
“We are on the threshold of developments that could so change the nature of the strategic relationship that it could be many unstable years before the super-Powers are sufficiently confident once more to engage in productive negotiations. The Australian Government believes that it would be highly dangerous to stunt)le - as we risk doing - into the competitive development of ballistic missile defenses and an arms race in space.”
1986-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 41 (1986)
“They fear the consequences when distant, arcane and often seemingly trivial disagreement is taken up and used in the kind of ideological, nationalist or economic competitiveness that has set off two world wars so far this century. Australians, like other normal people, yearn for an end to this insecurity. Their Government believes that the multilateral process, and this Organization particularly, offer the most effective ways to deal with the tensions and problems that disturb world peace. This forty-first session of the General Assembly in the International Year of Peace is an opportune moment to measure the durability of those tensions, and the problems and the efficacy of the multilateral way of solving them. The most obviously urgent of these tensions is the instability caused by nuclear weapons.”
1986-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 41 (1986)
“Anxiety about the threat - and even conviction about the inevitability - of nuclear war has been found to be widespread, especially among young people in Australia, as in other parts of the world. This is a terrible heritage to hand on. The early reality of people my age was economic insecurity, if not deprivation. That was bad enough. The experience of young people these days is worse: of terrorism and assassination brought into their homes by television, children starving to death, nuclear explosion and threat. No wonder so many young people are found to be so cynical and pessimistic. They appreciate that - such is the state of the art of war - it needs only the tiniest miscalculation or mistake to set off events that can transform all life into instant archeology.”
1986-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 41 (1986)
“Australians have reacted to the idea of the Year of Peace in an extraordinarily energetic and committed way, and at all levels in our community, from the most junior of school-children to the highest levels of government. It is not hard to think of reasons for this degree of interest. Australia is in an area of the world which seems to be growing more attractive in the configurations of great-Power interests and forces. It is in an area which has known great stress from colonization and the winning of independence. It is in an area which has been - for whatever reason - a major killing field over the past 40 years or so. It is true that Australians have been protected more than most from the worst effects of all this, but they have not been hidden from it.”
1986-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 41 (1986)
“A predecessor of mine, as Minister for Foreign Affairs of Australia, was President of the Assembly in its third turbulent year. In this forty-first year of the united Nations Australia is reaching the end of its fourth term on the Security Council. It has been a period of high significance, both to the cause of global security and to the effectiveness of the Council itself. There is another good reason why Australians have been more acutely aware than usual of these developments: 1986 is the International Year of Peace, and Australia has invested great resources into making it more than just a rhetorical event. The concept of peace - what it actually is, what obstacles stand in its way, what its maintenance asks of individual citizens - has been very much on our minds in the course of this year.”
1986-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 41 (1986)
“My country, Australia, is delighted to see you, the Foreign Minister of Bangladesh, presiding over the forty-first session of the General Assembly. Coming from a major third-world country, you will bring special sensitivity to so many of the problems with which we shall be concerned during this session. I should also like to express Australia's sincere appreciation to your predecessor, the former Permanent Representative of Spain, for his skill in presiding so effectively over the fortieth session of the General Assembly. Australia has historical reasons to be conscious of the United Nations, of the grave responsibilities that it bears and the great hopes invested in it. Our nation was the first to have a permanent mission accredited to the United Nations in New York. An Australian was the first President of the Security Council.”
1986-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 41 (1986)
“We should therefore take our fortieth anniversary as an opportunity to renew this idealism, committed to ensuring that the operations and structure of the United Nations are not vehicles for our own shortcomings or ambitions, but are relevant to a world whose complexity and needs could not have been even imagined 40 years ago.”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“In all these activities, the Australian Government has had the benefit of the great goodwill of the Australian people. We appreciate the complications of the system. We understand the drawbacks of the political process. We know that nations cannot be expected to ignore genuine national interests. But we also realize that the United Nations will get nowhere if we are not also fueled by the idealism which created such concepts as the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the United Nations Development Program and the Conference on Disarmament.”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“They are heard more often as the United Nations advances into respectable maturity. They were raised at the Security Council last week, where a degree of consensus evolved in favor of the need for greater commitment and efficiency. Australia raises them here in an attempt to get the issues that they raise examined while we are of a mind to reflect on our achievements and our failures. We raise these questions in a spirit of active and profound loyalty to the United Nations and its ideals. Australia is one of the founding and original Members of the United Nations. We are a member of the Security Council. We have provided moral, physical and financial support for a vast range of United Nations activities: from control over narcotics, keeping the peace, improving the status of women and the health of children to the survival of refugees.”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“But the ramifications of arms control arrangements, or lack of such arrangements, flow beyond the borders and responsibilities of those immediately involved. Is there a case for the proposal by my colleague from Burkina Faso for the Security Council, the world's paramount peace-keeping organization, to meet especially to discuss peace and disarmament in the context of world economic and social development? Should the Council be reformed to reflect more accurately the world as it is today? The United Nations and its institutions have contributed to peace and progress on a scale and in ways that almost defy valuation. Could it do even better without structures which may be found, after careful evaluation, to be perhaps imperfect or outdated? These questions, of course, have been heard before.”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“The record of the United Nations in easing the decolonization process is an immutable one, as I have pointed out. But colonization survives and even in its last moments it causes pain and tension. We see something of this especially in the Pacific region. The question perhaps might be ashed: Should decolonization, its pace and its extent, be left to the colonizing Power or should it be a matter for involvement by this Organization? Prevention of nuclear war is the most immediately pressing task facing us today. This demands nuclear disarmament. Negotiations on the issue are proceeding in Geneva, and we are all grateful for that. It has to be appreciated that the minutiae of arms control arrangements can practically be dealt with only by those immediately involved.”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“The question arises: Should wider potentially destabilizing issues, as well as military threats, be considered by the Security Council? Hundreds of thousands of people are being destroyed by the war between Iraq and Iran. Twenty-five Members of this Organization - some of them with great influence - sell arms to one or other of the combatants. Nine Member nations sell arms to both. Should United Nations Members be allowed without penalty to turn the Iraq-Iran war into a gigantic arms bazaar as well as a channel house? Practical answers to these terrible problems are available and they can be forged by this Organization. It is my Government's hope that the Security Council will be able, impartially, to assist both countries in moving towards a resolution of this terrible conflict.”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“Despite the deplorable Israeli violation of the sovereignty of Tunisia, we still hope that all sides will work towards early and substantive negotiations. In these and other cases, the ability of this Organization to effect solutions has been limited in various ways. The veto has been used in the Security Council, not in the dispassionate, tutelary manner envisaged 40 years ago, but more to protect the interests of the veto Powers. Threats to the international system come from the effects of underdevelopment and trade inequity, as well as from war. But the Security Council, despite its peace-keeping obligations, shares little if any of the power wielded on these issues through such bodies as the International Monetary Fund (IMF).”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“Disarmament and the problems of southern Africa are but two of the major issues before the world community which have caused speculation about the capacity of the international system to resolve long-standing issues on its agenda. I have in mind those problems which threaten international or regional security, such as the tragic turmoil in Lebanon and the continuing occupation of Afghanistan, which we continue to condemn. I repeat Australia's condemnation of Viet Nam's continuing occupation of Cambodia, though we are encouraged by recent signs of progress towards political settlement brought about by the good offices of our friends Indonesia and Malaysia. We have also been heartened by some signs of forward movement towards a comprehensive settlement in the Middle Bast.”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“Moreover, it continues to conduct tests in the Pacific, far from metropolitan France, in what is now within the area of the South Pacific nuclear-free zone. It continues to do so over the vehement and consistent protest of the nations in the area. Australia takes no pleasure in disputes with France. But France insists on provoking dispute through its testing policy and activities in the region, which President Mitterrand himself has admitted are an absurd crime and sabotage. This makes us all the more bitter to be told by France that it will not conduct these so-called harmless nuclear tests in France, rather than where we and our friends live. That is why we resent so much acts of so described sabotage on the territory of a nation which considered France to be its friend.”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“If delay continues, the Australian Government intends to search for an alternative means of settling the problems of scope, verification and compliance. In other words, if there are nuclear-weapon States that have problems with the details of scope, verification and compliance, we intend to work with like-minded non-nuclear-weapon States to establish a working alternative. Before I leave the disarmament issue, I wish to record the Australian Government's appreciation of the decision by the Government of China, earlier this year, that it would participate in work on a comprehensive test-ban treaty as soon as it is able to be started in the Committee on Disarmament. One nuclear-weapon State, France, chooses by contrast to take no part in discussing the test-ban issue.”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“I propose to take up this call at the Assembly, I direct it particularly at those members of the Conference on Disarmament who have withheld consensus on proposals which Australia, New Zealand and others have made so that practical work can be started without delay on the comprehensive test-ban treaty. Procedural wrangling about how that work should be described does a terrible disservice to the community that we represent here. We all know that there are differences of view on the issues of scope, verification and compliance in such a comprehensive test-ban arrangement. But the only way these differences will be resolved is for us to sit down together and work on them. As the Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference proposes, this should be done without more delay.”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“Our most immediate concern on arms control and disarmament is the failure to agree on a treaty which would prohibit all nuclear tests by all States in all environments for all time. Such a comprehensive ban is essential to an end to an arms race. This is why it has been sought for the best part of 25 years. This is why commitments to negotiate such a treaty have been made in so many existing international agreements, including the non-proliferation Treaty. And this is why progress towards such a treaty has been so frustratingly slow. The concluding document of the non-proliferation Treaty Review Conference called on the nuclear-weapon states to resume negotiations on a comprehensive test-ban treaty as a matter of urgency and before the end of this year.”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“If there are such systems, and if those who propose the exclusively peaceful use of space have such systems already there, they should remove them. If there is an honest difference in interpreting what constitutes permissible research under the anti-ballistic missile Treaty, those who want to preserve the anti-ballistic missile regime should be able to work the differences out. The Soviet Union has proposed to the Assembly that we should take a new step towards international co-operation in space. The Australian Government will study the proposal carefully and critically, bearing in mind all the ramifications of the extensive research on this matter which has already been conducted over many years by the Soviet Union.”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“They would also arise if agreement on reductions is made conditional on other issues. We would be deeply concerned, for instance, if linkage with other, perhaps related, but clearly separate matters held up movement towards reduction of weapons. Another of our concerns is the possibility of an arms race in space. The Australian Government has declined to endorse the United States strategic defense initiative. We prefer that maximum attention be given to eliminating existing weapons systems, preserving the anti-ballistic missile regime and enhancing international efforts to ensure that activities in space remain exclusively for peaceful purposes. It is necessary to speak plainly in a situation in which there is inadequate clarity about the facts. There should be no weapons system in space, in our view.”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“In making this decision, those States earned the right to influence the disarmament process, rather than leave it to an exclusive coterie of nuclear Powers. They have earned the right to point out aspects of the process which give them cause for concern. We in Australia, of course, appreciate the complexities of the process. Our view is that the foremost goal of disarmament negotiations is early and radical reductions in the number of nuclear weapons. If negotiations focus on this and if they take fair account of the valid interest of each party in the maintenance of stability, it should not be all that difficult to identify the numbers and types of weapon systems which could be reduced. Difficulties would arise if the negotiations are not conducted in the fair way I have just described.”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“We have a right to express this frustration. We understand that the major and primary responsibility for nuclear disarmament and the prevention of nuclear war rests with the nuclear-weapon States, and particularly the super-Powers. In this sense, disarmament suffers from the same irony that afflicts the united Nations as a whole: though the effects of nuclear war would be felt by all, direct power to prevent it is restricted to a few. The few should reflect on this. Probably as many as 30 States, including Australia, have considered acquiring nuclear weapons at one time or other because of the security and status they were thought to provide. Those countries have decided not to do so because they accept the norm laid down in the non-proliferation Treaty that nuclear weapons are simply not acceptable in the progressive world order.”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“The agreement on a treaty for a South Pacific nuclear-free zone, reached by member States of the South Pacific forum last month, was welcomed at the conference. Nuclear-weapon States are invited to adhere to the relevant protocols of this Treaty. Of course, I repeat the invitation today. The Antarctic is exempted from the international arms race by specific provisions against its militarization. As an Antarctic Treaty party we applaud this and the general manner in which the Antarctic is managed. So progress has been made on this potentially most destructive problem facing us, But it must also be said that the progress has been slow, often limited and often grudging. The Australian Government says this, not as a bystander wringing its hands, but as an active and sometimes frustrated participant in the disarmament process.”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“I have especially in mind the non-proliferation Treaty where the Review Conference ended its deliberations only 10 days ago. The non-proliferation Treaty has made an extraordinary contribution to stability in the nuclear age, providing security for all of us - signatories or not. The Review Conference itself was an encouraging example of international co-operation. Treaty partners reaffirmed its validity and strength. But they also argued that it needs to be more effectively implemented in such key areas as the development of the safeguards regime. They drew attention to the urgent need for article VI of the Treaty to be fully implemented and to the particular responsibilities of the nuclear-weapon States.”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“United Nations resolutions set out a simple and workable plan for the handover of Namibia to its people through free elections. The South African Government's refusal to do this has led to South Africa's forces rampaging in their neighbors' territory and murdering their neighbors' citizens. We condemn South Africa's behavior in this matter, which adds another reason for the Security Council imposing mandatory economic sanctions on a government which is rapidly running out of friends. Nuclear disarmament is an example of an issue on which significant advance has been achieved; but not so significant as to dispel the fear that many people have about it. By progress, I mean such fundamentally important arrangements as the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the SALT I and II agreements.”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)
“Recent overtures by white businessmen to black leaders indicate that business has a clearer vision of reality than the zealots in the South African Government. Australia believes that it is especially important that those countries who are major investors in South Africa should take up an active role in the campaign for sanctions for which Australia will be working. The case of Namibia is a closely-related problem. As a member of the Council for Namibia and a nation with a close interest in decolonization, Australia is especially concerned at South Africa's flagrant defiance of the United Nations in this matter. The United Nations terminated South Africa's mandate over Namibia nearly 20 years ago. It established the Council as the legal Administering Authority.”
1985-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 40 (1985)