A Time To Reflect

Gerard Henderson, executive director of the Sydney Institute, reminds us in a piece the Sydney Morning Herald that New Year's Day next year will see the release of the Whitlam cabinet papers for 1975.

This should provide some insight into government thinking during the period when Pol Pot's communist Khmer Rouge came to power in Cambodia.

The suggestion is that Australia's left at that time was naive, simplistic and typical of Western myopia.

He [Whitlam in September 1978] was particularly emphatic about Cambodia, declaring: "I make bold to doubt all the stories that appear in the newspapers about the treatment of people in Cambodia." This was a severe case of denial.