The Press Monday, December 1, 1930. Australia and the United States.

Press, Volume LXVI, Issue 20099, 1 December 1930, Page 10

The Press Monday, December 1, 1930. Australia and the United States.

How much the Australian Commis-sioner-General has been able to do for his country during liis term in the United States is not an easy question to answer. Perhaps the fact that he has been recalled, though without being superseded, suggests that his Government thinks that little has been accomplished, probably because in the existing conditions little was possible; but if Mr Brookes always spoke and acted as wisely u3 in his farewell statement, published in the New York Times and cabled on Saturday, then his must have been an exceedingly useful influence. Its being withdrawn from tho United States is not entirely regrettable, only because it may be exercised in Australia, which unquestionably needs it. Other voices will urge the United States to abandon harmfully narrow economic policies, or at least to modify them so as to reduce their worst effects. Their arguments are of course now being powerfully reinforced by the downward movement of American industry. But courage and commonsense in Australia urgently need strong recruits, especially i,uch as stand in experience and authority outside the divisions of Party. Mr Brookes can serve his country well, on his return, if he will boldly tell his countrymen what he has just told the Americans. The essence of it is that an exclusionist trade policy is bad—bad even in the United States, where conditions are most favourable to it, and fatal in Australia, where they are quite unfavourable.

Tho political isolationist force • • • • b-iilds America's tariffs and hems her in on all sides by barriers, seeking to make her too narrowly self-contained . . . . It is the "Little" American who, by means of internal inflation and the closing of American markets to foreign goods, is in a considerable degree responsible for the conditions of the present world-wide depression. We in Australia should bo the last to cast a stone, since our house is built in a great measure of brittle glass. . . . We lifted prices in the same way, maintained those priees by borrowed capital. For twelve years both countries staved off the inevitable, but now Australia for some time has been reaping the whirlwind, while the United States is really only beginning to feel the effects of her violations of economic laws.

This looks at first glance like an attack upon tariffs and nothing more. If that were all it would still be an attack very necessary to deliver. But it drives in the end at every one of the industrial evils connected with tariffs — at the wage-fixing awards which raise the costs of industry and necessitate its defence by further tariff increases, at the consequent rise in the cost of living, which justifies a new award and so leads to yet another tariff increase, and at the whole monstrous circle round which prices and costs pursue each other. A country like Australia —or like New Zealand—completely dependent on the ability to produce anc sell to the outside world at prices which the outside world will pay, only courts disaster by such policy. Yet so indurated are many Australians in their dangerous confidence, after thirty years, and more, of good fortune, that they still applaud nonsense like this:

We say that all unsheltered Industries can be sheltered so that the highest wages can be paid. In the case of imports, protection even to the extent of prohibition will do the job. In the case of exports, the surpluses over Australia's requirements could be sold at the world's parity, and all legitimate charges, including high wages, could be met.

Although it sometimes seems as if the tongues of archangels could not prevail over this seductive folly, Australia will not be safe until she is persuaded against it.