Arthur Tange, page 21
The main lines of Australian policy on Confrontation were shaped when Barwick came into the department on 31 January to meet Tange, Waller (the head of the division responsible for South-East Asian policy, defence liaison and intelligence coordination) and Gordon Jockel (the head of the branch handling relations with South-East Asia). Barwick’s initial attitude was that ‘the Mother Country has called for help and we have to respond’, but the officials soon convinced him that the defence of Malaysia was primarily a matter for the British?297 Legally, morally and politically, Australia’s commitment was only secondary. Tange added that Australia should not be ‘sucked in’ by the British. He had already told London sharply that the British assessment of Sukarno’s ambitions had been very different when Australia had been seeking support over West New Guinea. Despite the reservations felt within the Prime Minister’s Department, Cabinet on 5 February supported the views that Barwick had developed with his officials. Australia would give clear support to Britain and Malaysia against Indonesia’s campaign but would at the same time try to improve relations with Indonesia. It would seek to persuade, rather than to force, Indonesia to accept the formation of Malaysia.298
Soon after the Cabinet meeting Tange flew to Washington to represent Australia at ‘quadripartite’ talks involving the United States, Britain, Australia and New Zealand. (The American Under-Secretary of State, Averell Harriman, advised his superior, Dean Rusk, that Tange was ‘level-headed, able and well-informed but rather deliberate and cautious in approach’—a hint that he could be long-winded.)299 Here the Americans made it clear that their first priority was to keep Indonesia out of the communist bloc. Support for Malaysia was primarily a matter for Britain, and secondarily for Australia and New Zealand, but only as a last resort a task for the United States. From here on Australia had to manage its two most important alliances with dexterity, seeking to ensure as much support as possible from the Americans while urging restraint upon the British. The task would become more complex in late 1963 and into 1964, as the Americans sought support for their growing commitment in South Vietnam. By 1964 the Americans were telling Australia that Vietnam was the real priority, while the Commonwealth countries should be able to handle Indonesia with relative ease. The British assessed the priorities quite differently, pressing Australia and New Zealand for support for their Commonwealth partner, Malaysia, while seeking to avoid military involvement in the developing disaster in Vietnam. The difference in priority was only sharpened when Labour defeated the Conservatives in the British election of October 1964.
Barwick and Tange had locked New Zealand into support for Australia’s approach to Confrontation even before the Cabinet meeting of 5 February 1963. Australia had long sought a quadripartite approach to South-East Asian affairs by the four English-speaking nations, but even the smallest partner had to be managed with care. Tange had a testy relationship with the New Zealanders who, as he saw it, sometimes misused confidential information from Australia. Just as Canberra was keen to show that it was acting independently of Washington and London, so Wellington was at pains to demonstrate independence from Canberra, sometimes deploying confidential information from Australian sources to this end. Tange was therefore reluctant to share as much information with New Zealand diplomats as they expected. As Confrontation dragged on into winter, officials from the New Zealand High Commission found it useful on a Saturday afternoon to attend whatever looked the most interesting rugby game in Canberra. There they could usually count on bumping into Tange, as if by chance, creating an opportunity to turn a discussion of the sporting confrontation into a conversation on the other Confrontation to the north.300
From February 1963 onwards, Tange’s department succeeded in dominating Australian policy on Confrontation in the face of a persistent challenge from the Prime Minister’s Department. As they saw it at the time, and sympathetic historians have endorsed, External Affairs developed a policy that was based on Australia’s national interests in its immediate region and refined, not defined, by alliance considerations.301 By contrast, the Prime Minister’s Department, especially Bunting and Griffith, from the outset placed greater emphasis on supporting Britain, conscious not only of Menzies’ predilections but also of the importance of British military strength in South-East Asia for Australia’s forward defence posture. The British were well aware of these differences and made full use of their prerogative of access to the Prime Minister and his department as a way of circumscribing the influence of External Affairs. It was common ground for British diplomats and the officials in the Prime Minister’s Department to refer to the ‘starry-eyed optimism’ of External Affairs and that department’s ‘appeasement’ of Sukarno. A diplomat in the British High Commission in Canberra, no doubt recalling Clemenceau’s dictum that war was too serious a matter to be left to the generals, told his superiors in London that ‘Foreign policy in Australia is too important a matter to be left to the EA experts’.302 Tange knew something of this, but did not fully realise the significance of the briefing notes that Menzies received from his department, especially just before Cabinet meetings. He therefore underestimated the extent to which Menzies was advised by his department, for example, that External Affairs was ‘antipathetic to the British cause and judgment’.303 Not until the relevant volume of official war history was published in 1992 did Tange discover that Bunting had told Menzies in 1963 that the External Affairs approach to support for Malaysia was ‘flabby’, while that of Menzies and his department was ‘firm’.304
In the face of this antagonism, External Affairs was able to maintain its dominant role in policy-making, even in the Prime Minister’s ‘sacred preserve’ of relations with Britain.305 Barwick’s skill, vigour and willingness to challenge Menzies even in public were crucial, but so was his department’s less public success in ensuring the support of Defence for its line on most issues. Edwin Hicks was more interested in administration than in strategic questions, which he left largely to Gordon Blakers, a deputy secretary. Blakers generally supported the External Affairs approach while Tange was also able to use his influence effectively in the Defence Committee. Having an External Affairs official as chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee, a goal that Tange had set himself some years earlier and had by this time achieved, was also helpful. One potential exception to this pattern was the Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, Air Marshal Sir Frederick Scherger. A vigorous but erratic participant in strategic policy-making, Scherger supported British requests for Australian combat forces but his views were frequently overruled by ministers and civilian officials. The British maintained close contact with Scherger but his value to them was vitiated by his ‘consistently wrong forecasts … of the probable direction of government policy and decision-making in Cabinet’.306
Confrontation lasted until 1966. Australia declared a policy of military support for Malaysia and sent combat forces to Borneo, but its ‘graduated response’ was carefully calibrated to minimise the damage to relations with Indonesia. Even when Australian and Indonesian forces were in low-level combat, the two countries maintained diplomatic relations, Indonesian and Australian officers continued to attend each other’s defence colleges, and Australia maintained aid support. When Malaysia’s existence was formally declared in 1963, mobs in Jakarta burned down the British Embassy but left its Australian counterpart untouched. (The following year Tange, on a visit to Jakarta, discovered that the mobs had also destroyed the British church and the adjacent rectory, in which his mother had been born.) The handling of Confrontation quickly came to be regarded, especially but not solely by External Affairs, as a triumph of Australian policy-making and diplomacy.
Early accounts of this triumph tended to focus almost exclusively on the role of Keith ‘Mick’ Shann as ambassador in Jakarta. Shann certainly performed brilliantly and Tange (who, as one of his greatest admirers noted. was ‘too sparing in giving praise’) expressed his admiration of his wife’s cousin’s achievement in a gracious letter at the end of his term.307 But Shann was not the sole architect of the policy. It would be more accurate to see Confrontation as an outstanding example of policy formation and implementation by External Affairs, both in Canberra and abroad. Shann in Jakarta and Tom Critchley in Kuala Lumpur were outstanding heads of missions, while Waller and Jockel were the key policy advisers in Canberra. (When Waller was posted to Washington, Jockel was promoted to fill his position.) Barwick’s political leadership was essential, but so too was Tange’s role. He more than anyone else had promoted the key players and allocated them to their posts. Moreover he had consistently encouraged the development of a policy stance which, while sensitive to alliance considerations, was principally directed towards the promotion of Australia’s national interests in the region, especially by maintaining a positive relationship with Indonesia.
Appropriately for a public servant, especially the head of a foreign office, Tange was generally out of public view throughout this protracted crisis, although his hand was evident in shaping many policy statements. His reluctance to have a public profile and his discomfort in handling the media were obvious. When he returned from the quadripartite talks in Washington in February 1963, reporters at Sydney airport pressed him for comment. A more diplomatic diplomat might have turned them away with a polite but firm comment that his duty was to report to his minister. Instead Tange deployed one of his most formidable weapons, a silent glare, before he was ‘[w]hisked away from the airport by a fast black car, [contributing] to the air of dark mystery surrounding his rushed Washington mission’.308 A photographer captured the glare and it appeared in a tabloid newspaper directly over an unrelated story with the headline ‘Quiet Killer Hunted’. External Affairs officials cut out the photograph and the headline and inserted them, without further comment, in departmental files. The press was less restrained and editorials appeared denouncing Tange for his ‘arrogance’ and ‘secrecy’. The episode helped to shape his image for years to come.
If Tange was still little known to the public, those closer to the seat of government were aware of his importance, and not all were admirers. Sir Wilfrid Kent Hughes, who had been dropped from the ministry in 1955 by his long-standing rival Menzies, was the most prominent of the right-wing Liberals who repeatedly criticised the government for being insufficiently supportive of Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) and too willing to appease Sukarno. In September 1963, when Jakarta mobs burned the British Embassy and External Affairs’ reaction seemed unduly passive, Kent Hughes urged Menzies to sack both Barwick and Tange, replacing the latter with Plimsoll. Menzies had generally withstood criticism from this quarter without difficulty but on this occasion, according to Kent Hughes, he reacted calmly, noting that ‘E.A. had given him a shockingly weak draft for his statement’ that day.309 No immediate action was taken, and Menzies evidently did not hint that he had been trying to remove Tange for two years, but it was a straw in the wind.
Running parallel to Tange’s involvement in the Confrontation crisis was his continuing concern over the adequacy of Australia’s defence capacity. Far from accepting the Cabinet’s ruling in 1959 as final, he continued to press the Defence Committee towards improving Australia’s ability to give military backing to its diplomacy, especially vis-a-vis Indonesia. He could not accept the apparent willingness of Hicks and the service chiefs to rely on American support under the ANZUS and SEATO treaties. Tange was pressing this line in late 1962, even before the Indonesians adopted their policy of Confrontation, and it clearly owed much to the experience of the West New Guinea dispute. Confrontation only strengthened Tange’s attitude as it further underlined American reluctance to offend the Indonesians, no matter how provocative their policies.
Moreover, the Americans themselves were clearly expecting Australia to strengthen their hand. Tange was particularly struck by the tone of an interview he had with Secretary of State Dean Rusk during the quadripartite talks of February 1963.310 Rusk pressed him on the adequacy of Australia’s defence resources, especially the number of trained men it had available. Tange reported to Canberra that Rusk was ‘serious and emphatic’ and that ‘he was not seeking information but conveying an opinion’.311 Tange well understood what opinion Rusk was conveying but he did not think that either the senior ministers or their advisers in Defence comprehended it. The previous year, when Rusk had come to Canberra for an ANZUS Council meeting, he had pointedly said that the United States would ‘like to see many other free nations lend a helping hand’ in South-East Asia, especially Vietnam.312 In response Australia had sent a squadron of RAAF Sabre jet fighters to Thailand and a ‘training team’ of Army advisers to Vietnam. This team numbered 30, when the United States had about 12 OOO advisers in Vietnam.
Tange was responding, therefore, both to American pressure for Australia to do more on the South-East Asian mainland and to American reluctance to act militarily in Indonesia when he pressed the government, through the Defence Committee, to improve Australia’s defence capacity. Cabinet initiated a defence review in March 1963 but Tange was not impressed by the immediate reaction, a submission by the Minister for Defence outlining proposed measures for the three armed services. Tange told Barwick that this was merely ‘three shopping lists’ of items the services wished to purchase, without any clear rationale.313 Defence and the services had to work long and hard before the Defence Review produced more substantial results in mid-1963. They included a commitment to a substantially larger army (which would lead to the introduction of selective conscription in 1964) and the acquisition of a medium bomber (eventually the F-l11) for the Air Force, clearly aimed at a potentially hostile Indonesia. The impetus for the major defence decisions of 1963 and 1964 therefore came mainly from the strategic thinking of Tange and External Affairs, rather than from Defence. The inadequacies of the way in which this review was handled also contributed greatly to Tange’s conviction of the need for major administrative and structural reforms in the Defence group of departments.
Defence was not the only department that Tange challenged on its home turf. In August 1962 the Sydney Sun reported, under the frontpage headlines ‘Grave Issues for Australia: Indonesia Expands’, that the government had ‘sent a top adviser secretly to Australian New Guinea to investigate its readiness for self-government’. Naming Tange, the report stated that officials were not permitted to discuss his visit and the airlines had been asked not to mention his presence.314 Tange had not been sent by the government but had gone on his own initiative. He had arranged the visit with the Department of Territories, which had responsibility for the administration of the eastern half of New Guinea. It was not unusual for senior External Affairs officers to visit Papua New Guinea, for they had to endure and respond to the criticisms, in the United Nations and elsewhere, that were directed against all colonial powers in the 1960s. The two departments were often at odds. External Affairs was convinced that Territories was too slow and conservative in moving towards self-government. Territories thought that External Affairs was excessively influenced by the bloc of newly independent Afro-Asian nations at the United Nations and did not understand the difficulties that the Australian administration faced. Tange decided to see for himself and he was not impressed.
In a report, distributed only within External Affairs, he expressed his concern that the Australian territory was being governed in a way that would keep it dependent on external support for years to come. Tange believed that Hasluck was allocating too many resources to social policies, especially education, and too few to commercial and strategic infrastructure, particularly roads and harbours. In a personal letter to a fellow permanent head, Harry Bland, he expressed astonishment at the balance in government spending ‘between the “hand-out” sector and the generative side of the economy’. The last sentences of his External Affairs report noted that, while PNG was a matter for the Department of Territories, DEA was potentially involved, as trouble there could provoke intervention by other countries. ‘Perhaps’, he concluded, ‘Algeria’s relations with France are the only comparable case in colonial history.’ As Algeria had just concluded a long and bloody war of independence from France, that had cost thousands of lives and poisoned French politics, this was an extremely bleak analogy?315 In his history of his time as Minister for Territories, Paul Hasluck said nothing of this incident and little of the Department of External Affairs,316 but he must have known of Tange’s visit and probably regarded it as an unwelcome and unwarranted intrusion into his responsibilities.
A slow passage to India
For a little more than two years from December 1961, Tange enjoyed a period that was almost ‘as good as it gets’ for a permanent head. Cooperating effectively with a politically strong and intellectually forceful minister, Tange led a department that was shaping policy on major issues, even dominating the contrary attitudes of the Prime Minister’s Department and prompting new energy in the clumsy and lethargic machinery of the Defence group. External Affairs was now a leading contender in the league of government departments, possessing an established area of expertise and willing to confront others on what they considered their home ground. Tange was even hopeful that External Affairs might be able to work more effectively with Trade and, by using interdepartmental bodies, to recover some degree of influence over Australia’s relations with Japan. But in April 1964 two threads of Australian political life came together to force a drastic change in Tange’s, and the department’s, fortunes.
Throughout 1963, as the Confrontation crisis deepened, Australian ministers had sought an assurance from Washington that ANZUS guarantees would apply if the Indonesian-Malaysian dispute worsened. The Kennedy Administration was markedly cautious in offering any such assurance. Barwick pressed the matter in discussions with Kennedy and Rusk in Washington in October 1963, resulting in a document that linked ANZUS to an overt attack by Indonesia, but with numerous qualifications and limitations. In April 1964, just after Australia had committed a squadron of army engineers to Borneo, Barwick stated emphatically that ANZUS applied to Australian servicemen there. He was not factually wrong, but the strength of his assertion was clearly unwelcome to Washington and exposed the Menzies government to embarrassing criticism. Barwick’s many critics, who had labelled him an appeaser of Indonesia, had another issue with which to assail him.
