Lang Hancock, “Saving Australia from socialism,”
The West Australian, April 10, 1974, p. 6, as a letter to the editor.

LANG HANCOCK, Perth: Every loyal West Australian will wish Sir Charles Court well in his approaches to the Commonwealth Government.

Unfortunately for Sir Charles, matters are beyond his control. His suggested conciliatory approach, or a straight-out confrontation, will have little effect on the Canberra bureaucracy which wants, and takes, more and more of the control of government from WA to build up its own ever-growing departmental empires.

The message from Canberra is loud and clear. Sir Charles Court’s praiseworthy hopes of WA development will in all probability be stymied.

The bureaucracy has resolved that there is to be no relaxation of any count for any project by any government (Labor or Liberal) of the Reserve Bank’s requirement of 33 1/3 per cent non-interest bearing lodgement with respect to overseas borrowings. The bureaucracy is adamant on this point.

Mr Whitlam could not shift them to aid the Tonkin Government or his friend Rupert Murdoch in the Alwest case. Admittedly with its large foreign content it was a bad one to try on.

Though he lost the State election, the result was a personal triumph for Mr Tonkin in the metropolitan area which has not yet been visibly affected by Canberra.

Sir Charles’s victory was an overwhelming reaction against the ALP government in localities where people were brought more into contact with the devastating effects of Canberra and its policies; Sir Charles must now try to do better than Mr Tonkin. Reality indicates that this is well nigh impossible.

The Senate is of greater importance than the so-called unity of four non-socialist States in defeating Canberra socialism. WA’s only hope then is to try to strengthen the resolve of the three anti-Labor parties in the Senate to reject all of the Bills which contain socialist-nationalisation machinery.

People in WA are coming round to the view that the best way of saving Australia from back-door nationalisation is to get effective representation in the Senate by electing candidates on the secessionist issue, instead of the usual party hacks. If the Senate should fail in its duty to protect WA then West Australians could secede. That would preserve this State from the dead hand of Allende-style nationalisation of private industry and people’s livelihood which brought Chile to a standstill.

There is no thought in any secessionist’s mind of dividing the nation. It is more a campaign to preserve WA’s economic and defence positions and by doing so helping to safeguard all of Australia.

Secessionists want nothing to do with mischievous talk of incitement to arms. This is ridiculous: Australia’s army has been reduced to an ineffective size (it is only one quarter the size that tiny Portugal keeps in just one of its territories) and therefore could not, and certainly would not, do anything to invade WA.

West Australians deplore Australia’s total lack of defence and the Brisbane-line outlook of Canberra involving total abandonment of WA to potential enemies.

West Australians deplore abandonment of the only allies that could possibly afford Australia and WA an umbrella of safety. They deplore the lowering standards of parliamentary government in Canberra as evidenced by Senator Gair in his defection to Labor Party interests and the defection of Liberal Party leaders (Messrs Lynch, McMahon and Snedden) to socialist philosophy in their sell-out to the Labor Party in supporting the Government’s Financial Corporation Bill.

Fortunately in WA all major parties are blessed with leaders of quality.

Fair-minded people of all political parties can see that secession has a much wider aspect than just promoting the welfare of WA as a prosperous free-trade, fast-developing territory. Secessionists have the welfare and safety of the whole of Australia at heart, not just the western part of the continent.

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Lang Hancock, “DEVELOPMENT — A BENEFIT FOR ALL,”
The West Australian, April 18, 1974, p. 6, as a letter to the editor.

LANG HANCOCK, Perth: In reply to Mr Hooton and Mr Page (April 16), the words “most of the people will be working to enrich the lives of a favoured few” could only be true if the proposed nationalisation Bills are not thrown out by the Senate, as advocated by the WA secessionist movement — the favoured few being the power-hungry “fat cats” in Canberra.

In the secessionists’ vision of a “prosperous free-trade fast-developing WA” in which the standard of living of the average person — not only the favoured few — would probably double in five years, it would certainly not be a case of “workers swarming over every undeveloped square mile, digging, blasting etc.”

Every Australian should be aware that the digging and blasting by the mining industry, without which Australia’s living standards would fall drastically, occupies less than a quarter of 1 per cent of Australia’s total land surface. Surely a very small price to pay for the very high standard of living enjoyed by Australian generally — not just a favoured few.

We all want clean air and clean water. I believe that I have worked as hard as anybody to obtain this for Australia because I honestly believe that the answer to Australia’s energy and industrial pollution problems lies in developing clean, safe, nuclear power.

If we develop our country and by so doing raise our standard of living, it seems to be the only guarantee of safety that we have. As you know Australia is not defendable by only 14 million Australians — any one of our near neighbours could take us by telephone.

Therefore if we are to survive, the only course that seems open to us is to make ourselves indispensable to one or more of the major nuclear powers, by developing our natural resources.

My advocacy is that we reverse the ALP Government’s “resources diplomacy” and develop our resources as fast as possible to supply the needs of powers who would be forced to defend us in order to maintain their own standard of living.

I believe that we could make ourselves indispensable, not only to Japan, but to the United States who will, over the next quarter of a century, need: 7,000 million tons of iron ore, more than 1,000 million tons of bauxite, 1,000 million tons of phosphate rock, 100 million tons of copper, 20,000 million tons of coal and 100,000 million tons of stone, sand and gravel.

Quite a proportion of these huge quantities can be developed and exported without in any way seriously depleting WA’s reserves — such is WA’s untapped wealth.

While not quarrelling with the concept of “a magnificent place to escape to during a weekend,” I do not lose sight of the fact that it is only through mining the road-making sealing material that these sanctuaries (sometimes hundreds of miles away from the cities) can be reached, otherwise it would be a case of having to walk.