Empowerment for people

Abstract

The visit of Dr Helen Caldicott, an Australian paediatrician working in the United States, may have been the major factor in the explosive growth in 1982 of the Australian branch of the Medical Association for Prevention of War. It gained 200 members a month until almost reaching the present figure of over 1600. In that year, in the largest United States referendum ever, some seven out of ten people voted for a verifiable nuclear freeze. Veteran American news commentator Walter Cronkite attributed this, or the unprecedented demonstrations which preceded it, to the media impact of the same doctor. At that time moves had also begun to upgrade disarmament concerns in our federal government. The Australian Labor (sic) Party (ALP) has been in office here federally since 1980. The Foreign Minister since then has been William George Hayden. His initiatives have included doubling and upgrading staff of the disarmament section of his Department; appointing our first Ambassador for Disarmament (Mr Richard Butler, since elected President of the Second Pledging Conference for the UN World Disarmament Campaign); appointing Mrs Stella Cornelius, initiator of the Media Peace Prize and other activities of the United Nations Association of Australia, as Director of International Peace Year 1986 activities; instituting funds for Peace and Development Studies at the Australian National University, Canberra; and supporting a 'nuclear-free zone' in the South Pacific, contiguous with those of Latin America and Antarctica (Australia, however, unlike New Zealand, endorsing the 'right' of nuclear armed sea and air craft to enter the zone and use berthing facilities). There has been no marked outcry against these inexpensive but significant changes. Indeed, at the last federal election in 1984 a message may have reached all political parties here that the nuclear threat was something voters expected their government to act upon, in particular perhaps to press upon our allies across the Pacific that we want more adult behaviour from them in this regard. Peter Garrett, a lawyer turned pop singer, gave the 'Establishment' a shake by narrowly missing election to the Senate. Another member of his hastily formed Nuclear Disarmament Party, Josephine Vallentine, did win a Senate seat. This required greater than one-eighth of the valid vote for a State. Pre-existing ALP policies have not fared well under Bill Hayden, who was induced by parliamentary power wielders in his party to step down from the leadership in favour of the present Prime Minister. Thus the decisions of the biennial National Policy Conference, supposedly binding on all party members, have been circumvented on such issues as military aid to Indonesia while it is failing to entertain an internationally accepted plebiscite on self-determination for (Portuguese) East Timor, which it has annexed; mining of uranium for power plants; and allowing communication stations on Australian soil for spy satellites and for nuclear submarines while US authorities refuse to notify Australia before using them for nuclear alerts. However, the Hawke government has firmly maintained those peace policies which it shares with the conservative opposition parties, namely, no French nuclear tests in the Pacific, and preserving the ANZUS treaty, which is a token undertaking of Australia, New Zealand and the USA to consult on possible action if any of them feels threatened.