For the Ministers, the pressure from the Labor Party, the media and interest groups for more information remained. In the Department we found it difficult to find new suggestions to offer, given the constraints. The best I could suggest, without injury to the truth, was for the Government to declare that ‘neither station is part of a weapons system and neither station can be used to attack any country’. This formula was used by Barnard in the February statement to Parliament. (Beazley’s statement 16 years later was not very different, although he was then free to add much more).^[3]

In his statement Barnard listed all the installations in which US activities were conducted. He described the functions of several installations that were contributing to the monitoring of conformity to the Test Ban Treaty.

As to the Pine Gap/Nurrungar twins he said that, in the light of what Labor now knew, they would want to make some changes; but they were governed by treaties that gave them current tenure. We would protect them from unauthorised disclosure; and he declared that, more widely, Labor would protect all classified information entrusted to us by the United States, Britain and others. He certified that ‘the details of the techniques employed, and of the data being tested and analysed at the two stations must be kept highly secret if the two stations are to continue to serve their objectives’.

He went on to offer a political palliative. Members of Parliament must have a special right of access to the two installations, which will enable them ‘to see something of the nature of the operations’—all subject to orderly procedures. In passing, he said that ‘only the very few people directly associated with the central execution of the defence programmes of the United States and Australia’ would have greater access to information.

His words confirmed publicly that the limitation that I had exercised on dissemination of information in the Departments and Services would continue under Ministerial authority.

There ensued a visit to me by a team of American officials, led by Ambassador Walter Rice, expressing concern about the consequences for security of disclosure of further details about the operations of the Facilities. They complained about the intention to allow visits by Australian Parliamentarians when there was uncertainty as to what seeing ‘something of the nature of the operations’ would mean in practice. I had the Minister’s authority to tell the Americans that access would not be unlimited and that their secrets would be protected. I was not able to predict how little interest our politicians later showed in visiting the sites. But I had to speak bluntly to the visitors following some remarks to me about the erosion of American rights and the lack of an equivalent right of American Congressmen to pay such visits. I said that ‘they would be a long way from their electorate whereas some of our members of Parliament would not be’. Our Parliament had to be satisfied for its part that Australian sovereignty was being respected.

I have observed that American engineers responsible for the brilliant technologies of the stations working in outer space, like those in the US Navy on occasions, were not always sensitive to the political facts of life in sovereign states. Moreover, confidentiality about the Facilities was sometimes eroded by leakages to journals in America, probably as a result of much of the research and production of equipment being contracted out to private industries.

When Caucus was shown the intended statement, there was, according to press reports (including one by Toohey, Barnard’s lately departed Private Secretary), a storm of criticism and a heavy vote of opposition which delayed presentation to Parliament. It was reported that only the strongest intervention by the Prime Minister saved Barnard from having the plan repudiated. A prompt offer by the Americans to discuss changes helped, I was told, to placate the Party critics.