UN declaration never required Australia to slash manufacturing, fact-checkers confirm

A viral claim that the Whitlam government signed away 30 per cent of Australia’s manufacturing capabilities in 1975 has been debunked by experts, the AAP FactCheck service revealed on Monday.

The false claim, which has resurfaced on social media, alleged that Australia was required to slash its manufacturing sector by 30 per cent under a UN declaration signed by former prime minister Gough Whitlam.

Multiple experts confirmed the 1975 Lima Declaration was never legally binding and did not require any reduction in Australia’s manufacturing.

“Like all UN agreements, it was reached through open negotiations by the 190-odd UN member countries, and was never a legally binding agreement, but consisted of aspirational recommendations only,” said Patricia Ranald, a globalisation expert from the University of Sydney.

Australia never actually signed the declaration, according to then-industry minister Barry Jones, who explained in 1986 that Australia’s delegation expressed specific reservations about several paragraphs in the document.

The Lima Declaration was part of the “new international economic order” pursued by developing nations, but “was only ever symbolic and was never a significant constraint on the policies of the developed countries,” according to University of Melbourne expert Andrew Walter.

Caroline Henckels from Monash University noted that multilateral declarations don’t impose obligations but express goals and aspirations, highlighted by the use of the word “should” rather than binding language.

Any changes to Australian manufacturing since the 1970s have been attributed to successive governments reducing tariffs and entering bilateral and regional trade agreements from the 1990s onwards.

Picture: Gough Whitlam at the Lodge, 1974 (credit National Archives of Australia)