6.
there was a fear of what was called world communism. And when world communism split
up, many Australians especially feared China. But since the early 1970s a calm has
descended, a calm almost unique in our history, and our cordial relations with China are a
crucial cause of that calm. What I am saying is obvious, so obvious that I don't think I
have seen it expressed before.
So here we are, living in a freak phase of our history: no longer very worried
(except those who live in the north) about our northern shores, possessing healthy
relations with Japan and exceptionally friendly relations with China, having tetchy but
manageable relations with Indonesia, and feeling uneasy about the Soviet Union but
thinking Afghanistan is far away. It is not entirely a period of serenity because so many
especially the young are perturbed by fears of nuclear war or some kind of
technological disaster; but these are fears about the whole world, not particulary fears
about Australia's vulnerability,
In this last decade we have felt unusually secure in our possession of this
continent:
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we have come to feel almost too secure. Even our surveillance is
inadequate. We are not very capable of preventing the illegal importing of drugs or
exporting of gold; and we are not sufficiently capable of exercising the quarantine
human and animal and plant which this isolated continent especially requires and which
any self-respecting nation exercises. We are not even very capable of directing and
regulating our immigration policies. Unless we have sensible attitudes to defence and
surveillance we cannot even exercise the normal sovereignty of a banana republic or a
sheepskin republic. Even to control our own internal destiny, even to be masters of our
own society, we need far more control over our coast than we at present possess.
We were pretty proud when our yacht won the America's Cup, and the delight was
compounded because victory was won in foreign waters. It will be ironical if, in the next
quarter century, we are unable sufficiently to control our own coastal waters even to