Michael Brunson, ITN
Prime Minister, you made it clear that you wanted to repair relations with Australia, but to put it rather bluntly, is Australia really that important to us that you needed to spend five days here doing it?
Prime Minister
Yes, Australia is very important to us. She has an extremely important role in the South Pacific. There is no-one else there quite like Australia, quite with our common heritage of values and our common ideals and way of life, so yes, she is important.
She is also becoming very important as a trading partner and she is going to go on getting more and more important. She has more than doubled her population since the last World War. The potential here is enormous, so added to fundamental friendship and common heritage, there is a defence interest and also, there is a great big trading interest for us both. [end p1]
Michael Brunson, ITN
That defence interest, is that partly born out of worries that when we lose Hong Kong, as it were, we don't have quite the foot in this area that you would like to keep communism in check?
Prime Minister
Our navies still sail the seas of the world. We still have the largest navy after the United States, leaving aside the Soviet Union. They are still extremely welcome almost wherever they go and they still have a very important out of NATO-area role to play.
Certainly, after 1997, they will not have to go up to as much as Hong Kong but, you know, they were very welcome in Singapore the other day and I hope they will continue to go on naval visits. It is a great sorrow to us that they cannot go to New Zealand at the moment.
Michael Brunson, ITN
You have spoken quite a lot during trip about South Africa—it has come up—and you have made some intriguing references to getting the dialogue going, posing the question that we now have a dialogue with the Soviet Union but we don't really seem to have that same dialogue with South Africa.
What have you got in mind that might start that dialogue up? [end p2]
Prime Minister
I think it is rather too late for that. It really has been very strange that we have talked frequently to nations with whom we fundamentally disagree and made a point of taking it, saying that it is better to talk to them, ever since the Helsinki Accord—it is much better to talk to them than to have a kind of Cold War.
With South Africa, we fundamentally disagree on their policy of apartheid. It is a policy that was started well after South Africa's independence, well after, and yet their politicians have really been alienated from the rest of the world.
I remember when President Botha came to Europe and to Britain—I think it was just about at the celebration of the Normandy landings and of course, South Africans, black and white, were heavily involved in fighting in both World War One and World War Two—and I certainly saw him, but he was not welcome I remember in France, although he went to visit graves there and, you know, had we talked to them more and had they seen how things are in our country, then they might have got the dialogue going much more quickly, particularly with the moderate African leaders—and there are quite a number—some African leaders who will have nothing to do with violence because they say: “There will be a dialogue and we would like to be part of it!”
I think it is too late to go back now and I certainly have no plans myself to go to South Africa, but it is worth making the comment that I did. [end p3]
Michael Brunson, ITN
But might it be that you would adopt the tactics you did when you were making your overtures to the Soviet Union? Might you go, say, to the Front Line States first, rather in the way that you went to Eastern Europe to see what could be achieved there and then think about a visit to South Africa after that?
Prime Minister
Well at the beginning of this year, again I felt we had not been to Africa enough and President Moi had invited me and also President Babangida and so we visited Kenya and Nigeria and, of course, the matter came up there. Mr. Mugabe has also quite often asked me to go to Zimbabwe, so perhaps I shall be able to go to some of those states. I am not quite sure how soon because we have done a very big visit this year. It may be one way. We helped Mozambique a lot. We helped Zimbabwe a lot.
Our contribution is not just negative—it is very very practical and very very positive, both to educate black South Africans, to help with things like “Operation Hunger” there, to help in Mozambique with about £50 million to help to train some of their armed forces,to help in Zimbabwe, to help them to build roads and railways that do not have to go through South Africa. So we do not talk so much, but we make a very very positive contribution—a constructive contribution—to helping to resolve the apartheid situation. [end p4]
Michael Brunson, ITN
Why were you so determined, as apparently we saw you there, to carry on with your walkabout in Melbourne when things seemed to be going fairly chaotically wrong? You could presumably have called it off in the middle when you saw what you did. Why did you decide to go on?
Prime Minister
You don't run just because a few people are troublesome, when you know a lot of people have waited there to see you and you know they will still be there, so you go on through and do the best you can and one was able, through something of a cordon, to shake hands and see quite a lot of people who were most warmly encouraging and very very angry with some of the Irish demonstrators who were there and I might say that Charles Haugheythe Taoiseach would have been just as angry with them.