SUGAR INDUSTRY

Hokitika Guardian, 23 February 1932, Page 5

SUGAR INDUSTRY

MONOPOLY IN AUSTRALIA. AUDITOR-GENERAL’S ATTACK. (Australian Press Association.) SYDNEY, February 22. The Commonwealth Auditor-General’s annual icport describes the sugar industry as being a burden, rather than an advantage, to Australia. He says that under the arrangement for financing the sugar industry, the Australian price is £35 per ton, which, compareu with the world price of Java and Cuban .sugar, of six pounds per ton, meant that the Australian consumers were paving seven million a year more than was necessary., He suggested that the thirty thousand workers who are now employed in tin* sugar industry could he more advantageously employed in some other form of production. -Moreover, lie says that the sugar agreement, in conjunction with other restrictions, had artificially inflated, unduly and unsodndly, the price of land that is suitable for sugar growing. Commenting on the great success of the Colonial Sugar Refining Company, the Auditor-General expressed the opinion that its present “prosperous monopolistic position is due to the high price which the consumers in Australia have to pay, and are continuing to pay, for the sugar grown in their own country,”