FIJIAN INDIGATION

Hokitika Guardian, 9 January 1920, Page 4

FIJIAN INDIGATION

PROFITEERING IN FLOUR. AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND ASSAILED.

We in Fiji feel very much the unneighbourly acts of Australia and New Zealand in the matter of difference in prices (writes the Suva correspondent of the Sydney Daily Telegraph). We resent the fact that we as a kindred portion of the Empire are placed on a lower level than the German of Rabaul by Australia and the German of Samoa by New Zealand. We hear a great deal of the brotherly affection felt for Fiji by Australia and New Zealand, how we are all fellosv kinsmen, members of the one Empire, devotees of the one Motherland, living under the one flag. The whole atmosphere is flooded with platitudes and tears of affection. But while the voice is that of Jacob the hands are those of Esau.

It will come as a shock to our people to know that all those who eat local bread are helping to pay off the Australian war debt at the rate of Id a loaf, and the war debt of New Zealand at the rate of id a loaf. Yet suoh is a fact. The fact may be called by some other name, but it hurts just the same. The price to-day of flour from Australia is £lB 15s, f.0.b., Sydney. That is what it costs the Fiji baker, plus freight and landing charges. The Australian baker can get all the flour he wants at £l3 10s. That is, £5 os less than the Fiji maker can start baking at, or Id per loaf on the {Customs return of flour imported for the year. The New Zealand baker gets his flour at £ls 10s, while the Fiji man has to pay £lB 7s 6d f.o.b. Auckland. As there is a difference in freight between New Zealand and Australia of 12s 6d a ton, the Fiji baker can land flour here from New Zealand at 20s less than lie can from Australia. Australian wheat is very largely used in making tke_New Zealand flour. The Commonwealth Government is selling wheat for flour for local consumption at £5 5s less than wheat for exported flour. The millers, we are informed, are not the profitinakers. It is actually the Government which is- profiteering. While the, Government is posing before the electors as the enemy of profiteering, it is a sinner of a bad type itself. We can understand Australia soiling wheat to foreign countries at a higher rate than locally, but we candidly cannot understand her attitude in talking platitudes, denouncing profiteering, proclaiming her comradeship for other parts of the Empire, her desire for a Customs union with Fiji, while all the time she is penalising the colony in the most mercenary way possible—in a way which hits every man, woman, and child in Fiji.

The same applies in every way to New Zealand, which has camouflaged her profiteering under the smug and evil term of a “bonus.” The Fiji baking industry is suffering heavily from this profiteering. Bread has risen, not by reason of ordinary yeast, but because of the yeast of veiled hostility. So dear is bread that the natives who ure at ordinary times largely bread eaters cannot afford it, and have fallen back on native foods. So, less Hour is required in Fiji, and the revenue is suffering.

I am glad to see that the Sydney Chamber of Commerce has taken the matter in hand. Such a big injustice is causing a very sore feeling in Fiji, where over a third of the whites are Australians.