Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [313]
I was due to attend the Bicentennial celebration in Australia in the late summer of 1988. I had really rather doubted whether my presence was necessary at all. I had earlier suggested to the Australian Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, that, with the Queen, other members of the Royal Family and numerous foreign dignitaries, perhaps I would be one Englishwoman too many. But he insisted that I should come, and so I did. Although I had some famous rows with Bob Hawke, I found him easy to deal with: like me, he was blunt and direct. But on this occasion, he was to prove consideration itself.
I had decided to combine this Australian visit with another foray into South-East Asia. On this occasion I was able to spend rather longer than previously in Singapore. That little island’s economy continued to astonish. Its GDP was rising at over 9 per cent a year and its total trade was up over the same period by a third. It was therefore pleasant to receive congratulations from Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew about the state of the British economy, though I said that in my view we were growing somewhat too fast. His only criticism was of me personally — for undertaking a programme of foreign visits which he described as ‘absolute madness’, adding that he did not know anyone else who would even contemplate it. He was full of his usual shrewd observations about world trouble spots like Cambodia, North Korea and the Middle East. I always found him most perceptive about China. He maintained that although entrenched habits in China were deeply authoritarian, communism itself went against the grain of the Chinese character and could not in the very long term succeed. Lee Kuan Yew is of course by origin Chinese himself: I used to tell him that in many ways I wished he had stayed at home — that way China might have found its way to capitalism twenty years earlier.
Then it was on to Australia. I arrived in Perth, went on to Alice Springs, and arrived at Canberra. Here I visited the new Parliament building, erected to celebrate the Bicentennial, and was met by Bob Hawke, who introduced me to his Cabinet, in which Paul Keating was then Finance minister. Whatever differences of outlook we had on other matters, I found Mr Keating refreshingly orthodox on finance — a far cry from the British Labour Party. In my speech at the lunch which followed I stressed the importance of Australia’s role as a regional power. The fact was that the economic growth of many countries in the area was going ahead far faster than political progress. I believed that Australia, as one of the world’s oldest and most developed democracies, could make a vital contribution to regional stability.
My tour finished up in Brisbane. I visited the British Pavilion at the EXPO ’88 World Trade Fair. I was disappointed by what I saw and said so with some vigour on my return to England. It was not the fault of those directly concerned, but rather of cheese-paring by the British Government, that our pavilion just did not match those of other major countries. As with embassy buildings, I always insisted that cutting back on expenditure on generating the right image of Britain abroad is sheer foolishness. From now on I took a direct interest in the matter: for example, I told David Young, as Trade and Industry Secretary, that we must have the best national exhibition at the Seville EXPO in 1992, and I believe we did.
My day ended in Brisbane with attendance at a splendid production of the ‘Last Night of the Proms’ — which the Australians immediately christened the ‘Last Night of the Poms’. Whatever the shortcomings of the pavilion, British popular culture was on vigorous form.
From Australia