Canberra, 24 January 1973
Confidential
On 25 January the British Home Secretary will table revised Immigration Rules in the House of Commons. The revised Rules will replace those rejected by the House of Commons on 22 November.
The Rules will be separated into two sets, one covering citizens of the European Economic Communities and other foreign nationals, and the second covering Commonwealth nationals.
In comparison with the Rules rejected on 22 November the revised Rules show the following principal changes affecting Commonwealth citizens wishing to enter Britain:
(a) Commonwealth citizens who have a grandparent born in the United Kingdom will be exempted from the need to obtain a work permit should they wish to take up full-time employment:
(b) The non-patrial husband of a woman settled in the United Kingdom will be given an entry certificate for settlement if he himself has a grandparent born in the United Kingdom.
(c) The maximum period for a working holiday will be extended from three to five years.
The designation of Anglo–Australian relations as ‘foreign affairs’
In November 1972, responsibility for the administration of the Australian High Commission in London was transferred from the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet to the Department of Foreign Affairs. The origins of Australia House lay in the Edwardian era, when Australia had no diplomatic service and Australia’s foreign relations were largely conducted through British channels. It had therefore seemed perfectly logical that the Prime Minister’s department should control this key conduit of Australia’s political and economic relations with Great Britain. But in the post-World War II era, when the activities and overseas representation of Australia’s Department of External Affairs expanded markedly, this situation became something of an anomaly. By the early 1970s Australia’s oldest and largest diplomatic post abroad lay outside the remit of Australia’s diplomatic service. One of the final diplomatic initiatives of the McMahon Government was to bring the administrative arrangements for Australia House into line with the new realities in the conduct of Australian foreign policy.
On the face of it, this move represented little more than an administrative convenience, with few if any direct policy implications. Yet, as the documents in this section illustrate, it also involved a difficult process of adjustment in how Australia’s relations with the United Kingdom were conceived and conducted. The idea that Britain should be regarded as part of a complex of Australia’S relations with foreign’ countries was difficult to reconcile with older assumptions about the nature of the British Commonwealth and Australia’s standing in the world as a ‘British’ country. As a consequence, the transfer of Australia House became fraught with difficulty, and revealed sharp cleavages between the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet and the Department of Foreign Affairs that involved far more than interdepartmental rivalry. Whereas Foreign Affairs insisted that there was no longer any sound reason for setting relations with Britain apart from those with other foreign’ countries, the Prime Minister’s Department continued to emphasise the unique nature of Australia House and of the Anglo-Australian relationship more generally. Senior figures at Australia House (including the High Commissioner, Alexander Downer) became deeply concerned that Foreign Affairs seemed to regard Australia House as ‘just another post’ (Document 385).
The timing of the transfer in 1972 was largely determined by Britain’s impending membership of the European Economic Community in January 1973 (although the McMahon Government was at pains to ensure that this should not seem to be the determining factor). With Britain in the EEC, it would become all the more imperative to secure close coordination in the conduct of relations with Britain and the other EEC member states where Australia had diplomatic posts (Paris, Bonn, Rome and Brussels). The document series begins with some of the initial proposals in the late 1960s (from the Liberal Party backbench) to transfer Australia House to Foreign Affairs. These illustrate the depth of the reluctance to relinquish a conception of Australia’s relations with Britain rooted in ideas of organic unity and family ties. The remainder of the section traces the key decision-making process through 1971–72 and the difficult interdepartmental negotiations that ensued. The decision itself seems to have had its origins in a misunderstanding. The Labor Opposition Leader, Gough Whit/am, had raised the issue on a number of occasions in Parliament in the early 1970s, and it was discussed informally between McMahon and various department heads. As a result of these (unrecorded) exchanges, the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet set the wheels in motion in July 1971, much to McMahon’s initial alarm (Documents 374 and 375).
These documents provide a valuable insight into the changing conceptual foundations of Australia’s relations with Britain during these years, representing the culmination of one of the overriding themes of this volume.
[NAA: A446, 1973/95155]