AUSTRALIA IS WIDE OPEN TO ANARCHY

Hokitika Guardian, 31 October 1928, Page 2

AUSTRALIA IS WIDE OPEN TO ANARCHY

(Sydney Bulletin)

Twenty-four hours after 5000 strikers had taken charge on the Adelaide waterfront and sent a number of peaceful citizens to the hospital, the Premier of South Australia, announced :

“The Government, with all ■ the forces at its command, will see that the rights of the citizens are upheld.” .1.

But what are the forces at the South Australian Government’s command? What, for that matter, are the forces at the command of the Federal Government in face of organised anarchy? The whole world knows what forces aro at the command of, say, the British Government in such circumstances. A couple of years ago a general strike menaced the United Kingdom. It never really began—the Government weapon was too strong, and .it was applied too swiftly. If the strikers had been given so much as- a (lav in which to organise, demonstrate and attempt support tßev might have held up . transport and starved, first,. London, and then Fng--I,olid. into some form of surrender Tin fact, tliev were not/ given five minutes. On last May Day a transport strike Was to have paralysed Paris. Premier Poincare forestalled the strikers by a manifestation of , the powers of the French Government, and the threatened upheaval dwindled to a refusal to ply for hire on the part of. a few taxi-drivers.

, Suppose the Adelaide rioters had bod a gonuipe revolutionary leadera Lenin or even a Harry Poll it t—and suppose he had directed them, not towards the wharves, hut towards the city. It is 'imaginable that their numbers might have swelled from' five thousand to ten or twenty thousand. That is how revolutionary mobs are recruited, as a rule. To cope with a situation of this sort an Australian State Premier might enroll special constables, which amounts, at v the best, to setting a mob to catch n moh. Or he might call on the militia partially, trained hodv of young men whose natural sympathies, in about seven cases out of fen, might he expected to lie with the strikers. As a last resort he might ask for help from the national Government. A national Government is the true repository of all those powers to which a country looks for the preservation of its life and liberties from the terrors ( of mob rule. But under,, our Constitution a great State capital might he stormed and pillaged before the functionaries in Canberra were -able to decide what steps they could legally take, and issue the requisite authorisations. prance’s last transport strike was brought to ftaught by the Garde Repubticaine, and the chief factor in killing Britain’s _ general strike 1 -at birth was the Brigade of Guards. Australia’s regular army, as General Chauvel never fails to point out in his annual report, is the merest skeleton. It could do no more against a mob, that meant business, even if the - widely-scattered little units could be brought together in time, than a girls’ school. Which is another way of i saying that the security of Australia depend* on the providential incapacity which it has so far displayed to produce an agitator of first rate organising abil ity.