School for Revolutionaries

In the late 18th century, Australia was a British penal colony. Nowadays, to hear Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew tell it, the place is not a bad reform school. Lee has been dealing with budding campus revolutionaries in his tight little island nation by packing them off with scholarships to universities in affluent industrial democracies like Australia. "What you want to do is disperse them and open them up to new ideas," Lee says enthusiastically. Results? "They've come back fairly middle class and comfortable, although still armchair critics."

Lee's revelation prompted a flurry of embarrassed denials from Australian Prime Minister William McMahon's government. Officials insisted that only one Communist student has been admitted to Australia since it quietly agreed to try Lee's novel "rehabilitation" program last year. But more than 1,000 young Singaporeans come to Australian campuses each year, and it is no secret that some of them have been Maoists or assorted other troublemakers. Unhappy Australian conservatives are not impressed by the fact that Singaporean firebrands have also been sent, with no disastrous effects, to Canada and New Zealand (although not to Britain, Lee explained, "because there you go to the London School of Economics and come back an even more convinced revolutionary"). Australian Senator John T. Kane, a leader of the right-wing Democratic Labor Party, suggested that McMahon should demand reciprocal rights from Lee.

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