The Evening Star. MONDAY, JUNE 11, 1934. CHOKED CHANNELS.

Evening Star, Issue 21743, 11 June 1934, Page 8

The Evening Star. MONDAY, JUNE 11, 1934. CHOKED CHANNELS.

Mr Stanley Bruce stands out from other men who have participated in Australian and New Zealand politics in the past few years. He has not always been consistent in the views he expresses, but consistency amidst conditions which change with bewildering rapidity is something near an impossibility. He seems now to have definitely returned to his former view that Australia has no option but to increase her production and market it in the face of falling prices. This, however, is what the wool trade in Australia has just decided not to do in the meantime. The fortnightly summary of trade appearing in this issue explains how the wool textile position in Germany has brought about a wait-and-see attitude in other countries which draw heavy supplies of raw material from Australia. Rather than submit early catalogues to buyers whoso instructions probably are to mark time, the wool growers and their selling agents have decided to postpone the June series of auctions which were to have been held in three important selling centres. This decision is in rather distinct contradiction to the advice both buying and selling brokers have so often given the grower—viz., to meet the market and not withhold clips in the hope of prices improving some time later. The more wool withheld from sale now, the more future catalogues will be swelled when the season begins in earnest, and the more chance there is of the market opening at lower levels than it closed at last season, because of offerings being in excess of the trade’s power to absorb them. However, on this occasion, unlike last year, there is understood to be a very small carry-over indeed from the previous season. Germany is providing yet another example of an isolation from the comity of nations, which leads to instability and harm all round. The peculiar position is that the German wardrobe so needs replenishing that her people are anticipating resort to woo! substitutes.

Economic nationalism is the world’s practice to-day, whatever may be its theory. Politicians may lament in public the shrinkage in the world’s trade, but their each successive action in their own Legislatures carries that shrinkage a step further. How long their overtaxed aud under-nourished peoples will put up with this process of slow strangulation it is difficult to say. Mr Bruce evidently has hopes that a revulsion must come as countries awake to the dangers of the position. “ Gradually, doubtless,” ho said, “ the world would come round to the wisdom of lowering tariff barriers and encouraging an exchange of commodities that would not restrict their production.” Restriction is now a double-edged weapon. Whereas primary producing countries have annoyed industrial countries by fostering their own secondary industries, the latter are now retaliating by placing embargoes and quotas on foodstuffs, and even in some cases on raw materials for manufacture. This may delight their own agrarians, because of the famine prices induced by very short supply, but it is a factor in semi-starvation of the masses and industrial unemployment. Leaving on one side the policies followed by foreign countries, it cannot bo said that within our own Empire any more broad-minded system is in evidence. It is some time since the Ottawa Conference was held, but even now in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand tariff boards or commissions have not finished their work of deciding how their countries are to fulfil their side of a bargain in which Britain fulfilled her part on the spot. The position in Canada at the moment is rather interesting. In 1932 tho Canadian Government undertook that, except in cases of industries not fully established, Canada’s protective duties would not exceed such a level as would give British manufacturers an equal chance with Canadian manufacturers in the Canadian market. The Tariff Board was set up in Canada to say what was an equal chance—“ full opportunity of reasonable competition ” was the phrase in the agreement. What tho Tariff Board is discovering, with the help of Canadian manufacturers, is that in one Canadian industry after another there has been such over-development that there’ is already far more plant and equipment than is required to supply the needs of the Canadian market. And, besides being seriously over-industrialised, Canada has very large surpluses of natural products to be marketed abroad, and it is now realised that the day has gone when these, wheat in particular, found a market abroad automatically. Under these circumstances Canada’s ability to carry out her undertaking with Britain must involve some sacrifice. The Conservative Government in office has given high tariffs a two and a-half years’ trial without economic salvation for anyone but sectional interests, while unemployment has increased and the plight of the farmer has gone from bad to worse. ■ Although latterly conditions have improved, the Government is given no credit, and the results of by-elections corroborate the opinion that a strong revulsion of feeling will bring the Liberals back to power in 1935 and probably before then. And the Liberals are pledged to tariff reduction. One incident that will tell against the Conservatives is the complaint of the chairman of the Tariff Board that Government officials are not co-operating as they should with the board. The latter, by common consent, has been industrious and impartial, but it has encountered persistent obstruction from certain officials of the Department of National Revenue, sympathisers with a high tariff policy, who have declined to implement the board’s orders and challenged its authority to interfere with their rulings.