TOO MUCH LOAFING

Hokitika Guardian, 15 November 1929, Page 8

TOO MUCH LOAFING

(Sydney Bulletin.) It is pretty generally agreed l>y those who do any thinking at all that Australia is producing If a r too little for a country with £120,000,000 of debt due for redemption inside fourteen months, and a foreign interest hill amounting to £30,000,000 a year. It is also agreed pretty generally by those who let their thoughts carry them so far that, unless we can reduce our incitements to loaf and send money abroad, a catastrophe is only a matter of time. The thing to consider therefore is how best to get rid of some of these incitements.

For three weeks past, in two cities, production has been held up to quite a large extent Ifor the spring racing carnival. These recurrent celebrations at least bring money to two States. But who or what benefits by the 70 pony meetings which occur in Sydney every year, two-thirds of them on week-days, or by the 41 trotting fixtures, all of which are on week-days ? Ponies and trotters are as useless, nationally, as roulette-boards, and their cost to production is not to be measured by the laige crowds who watch them perform. Ten times as many away-from-the-course punters are prevented from doing a fair day’s work on race days by their manoeuvres to discover “what won the last” at the earliest moment.

Canada produces as many motor-cars as France. Australia, though it threatens before long to achieve the TJ.S.A. motor-owning standard of 10 cars to every 56 persons, is in the position of Siam and Siberia as regards car production. The whole olf the cars by which 800 to 900 Australians are killed and 14,000 or 15,000 injured every year come from abroad—over 90 per cent from America. The growing workingclass habit of owning a (mostly timepayment) car is as strong an incentive to waste time and over-spend earnings ns the racing habit. And this applies in an even greater degree to the pic-ture-show habit which, moreover, is incidentally turning this country into a dependency of Uncle Samuel. Little more than 10 per cent of the films shown here are British, and few good British films are imported. “ The Royal Navy Ashore and Afloat,” for example, an eight-reeler which is said to be equal to any feature film that has been made, will not be seen by Australians, because it threatens the extraordinarily fine propaganda work which Uncle Sam’s films are doing here for Old Glory.

The pictures stand supreme as time and money-wasters. They function every day barring Sundays, and their prices are so graduated—from Is fid in the morning to 6s fid at night on week days, and from 2s 5-)d to 7s 7d at night on Saturdays—that practically every financial class is tapped. The IJ.S.A. Department of Commerce estimated this year that 2 3 million Australians, or a third of the population, are habitual picture-goers, and that 50 per cent of their contributions to the trade finds its way to U.S.A.

Australia cannot afford to race, motor or attend picture-shows on the present scale. A New South Wales Government had a report from a Select Committee as far back as 1924 which set forth the need for a drastic reduction of racing days, and in face of the move against proprietary racing oif the Victorian and Queensland Governments, the Bavin administration can hardly afford to delay reform much longer. As regards the other two evils—and carried to their present excess they represent very serious economic evils—a good deal could be done by giving Uncle Sam a dose of his own restrictive medicine.