The Australian strike.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 19175, 5 December 1927, Page 8

The Australian strike.

If the Australian shipping dispute hod developed about two days earlier, it might have been regarded as a warning by Providence to the people and Government , of our own Dominion. Although we do not know all the facts yet in New Zealand, and will perhaps not know somo of them for months, no one can suppose, whatever hia political ideas may be, that this " dire "calamity" which has been filling the cables for tho last four or five days, would have been inflictod on the people of the Commonwealth if the watersiders had possessed any real regard for the idea behind the Arbitration Court. Whether we call it a lock-out or a strike, a repudiation of the law or a simple breach of agreement, it has taken place not merely in spite of but almost because of the existence of a Court in Australia more or less identical with our own. Nor is there any essential difference, so far as this dispute i 3 concerned, between the principles and machinery of arbitration in Australia and New Zealand. In both cases one party to the award can be made to keep it and the other can not, and in both cases this is known before an award is made. The most that can be said for arbitration by those employers who still so stoutly defend it is that it may give them peace, and that if it docs not they will be no worse off than if they had never committed their fortunes to the Court. They know also, though they do not often say, that it does not usually make demands on them which they cannot compel someone else to pay in whole or in part, and—an important consideration for the timid and inefficient — it stabilises working conditions and lets them know where they are. No one can say that there would not have been a shipping strike in Australia if there had been no Arbitration Court in existence anywhere in the world, but it is clear that if there had been no arbitration system, on the one hand putting the employers at a disadvantage, and on the other giving the publio a belief in a security that does not exist, there would have been two very strong checks on the irresponsible agitators who are of course really responsible for tho whole trouble. Even if we allow for the fact that a very large proportion

of Australian -waterside workers are not Australian born, or Australians by habit or accepted tradition, it can bo said quite safely that there would have been no strike if the Bolsheviks iu control of the unions had not seen an opportunity, or supposed that they had seen one, to increase their own power and weaken the forces of law and order. But we need not worry ourselves very much in New Zealand about the Bolsheviks in Australia. The lesson of the strike for us ought to be the folly—if folly is a strong enough word —of continuing to keep the stage set in our own Dominion for a precisely similar assault on the public welfare. We have Bolsheviks of our own—perhaps not as many in proportion as in Australia, but still far too many for our good—and we shall never be safe as long as our only security is the fact that a small proportion of our wage-earners are parties to awards registered in a court of law.