NEW APPROACH TO PEACE TREATY

Rotorua Morning Post, Issue 5311, 25 January 1947, Page 5

NEW APPROACH TO PEACE TREATY

(Press Assn.-

AUSTRALIAN' VIEW INTERIM .AGREEMENT IS SUGGESTED

— Rec . 980 p.m.)

■"i LONDON, Jan. 24. Despite.the instructions of the chairman, M. Gusev (Russia) that he must confine himself to matters of substance, Australia's representative, Colonel Hodgson, in a three-hour address, succeeded in delivering Australia's views on the procedure for the German settlement in a manner which won the Foreign Ministers' Deputies, including M. Gusev's outspoken . commendation. o "It is the clearest exposition of general principles we have heard and has revealed an entirely new attitude," stated Mr. R. Murphy (America).

Colonel Hodgson ai'giued that instead of working on the peace treaty for Germany all the active belligerents should be engaged on drawing up an interim agreemfent which would would settle all the current political, economic and frontier problems. Permanent features of the settlement should then be carried for-ward into the peace treaty to be signed by a German Government when there was one in existenee. "The agreement should be in fact, an enlargement of the Potsdam Agreement, but it will have what Potsdam lacked — the sanction of all the belligerents," he said. Colonel Hodgson said that the Germans were >unfit for self-govern-ment. There should be no German Government for years. Nothing* would be worse for peace than to hasten its formation. The Foreign Alinisters at Moscow should authorise the drafting of an interim agreement and the active belligerents should be invited to attend and discuss the dix-ective. They should set up fact-finding and other committees and be actively associated right ihrough to the discussion of the final text and sigming. Australia did npt want a repetition of the Versailles Treaty or the Paris Conference.