AUSTRALIA’S IRON ORES

Hokitika Guardian, 26 February 1932, Page 8

AUSTRALIA’S IRON ORES

, AMERICAN EXPERTS OPIN'. ON. MAKING OF HIGH-GRADE STEEL. WELLINGTON, February 22, With some of the finest iron ores in thp world, Australia has all the facilities to manufacture steel of the highest quality, is the opinion ol Mr Thomas „\l. dewell, a Chicago consulting engineer. who was a through passenger by the Monowai i'rojn Sydney to San Francisco. Mr Mewei) has spent tin 1 last two years in his professional capacity at the Broken Hill Propriety's steel works at'Newcastle, where he has been advising the firm on merchant mill practice. He regards the basic wage in Australia as detrimental to industry in Australia.

They had some of the best ores in the world, and the prospects were veiy good, Mr Jewell said ; but the industry was not so far developed, nor the amounts required sufficient, to warrant production on a really profitable basis. If New Zealand were talking now, as he understood it to be, of building automobiles, it would probably have to go to England for its steel. In Australia they had' not got the industry to the stage where they could put their high productive .steel mills on a paying basis. In the building of the new Sydney bridge, about 50,000 tons of steel had. been used, of which perhaps 11,000 tons had been made by the Broken Hill Proprietary and the Australian Iron a.vu ■Steel Company. Nevertheless they had facilities in Australia for making just as good steal as was made anywhere else. All -the tin plate used in Australia came from England; but they were making for themselves a goou proportion of the iron they required. "One of the greatest curses over there in Australia,” said Mr Jewell, “is the Government setting up a basic wage. It shuts out all individual efforts. 1 wouldn’t be anywhere if 1 had been raised in a country like that. I am on \ a practical mail. All mv life has been spent in a steel plant. On my last job in ifhe States I had charge of 750 men. EThe trouble about the basic wage is ju s t 'what I have, stated. A healthier condition is created when capital an labour realise that their interests are identically the same, and when capital always is ready to pay labour a. That’s 'the. way 1 feel about it.