INDUSTRIAL WORLD

Hokitika Guardian, 24 March 1933, Page 8

INDUSTRIAL WORLD

the of science

A LESSON PROM THE SOVIET

The Russian Soviets may be 'a great danger • but they are doing the world goto© good, and would do -more: if the truth about them were . frankly to;Q (reads an . article in the “Bulletin.”) Most of those of us who thought we were iCommunists had a.■ .few favorite phrases—among them that labour , produces all, wherefore the ,whole product of industry belongs, to the workers. “Unrealis bl P and. manifestly erroneousA declares Molotov, the chairman of the Russian Council. And anyhow. Stalin himself asked, Who Ao you think are the workers? Finding, that in s.ome places equal, pay was being handed' out t 0 all employees, he thundered that such a system must pease—Ah ere- must be a difference in the pay between skilled and unskilled work.•, . ... The brain-worker. was the bafts of the whole, undertaking, i After the spadework of organisation had been done.they produced a five T year plan, and after that a- fi econd five-year plan. It was for the pi Miner, the captain of industry, to decide what should b e done ; it was- I or, the manual, labourer to be speeded up till lue task .set him was accomplished. “The planned ris® ' n labour, productivity has been only partly realised,’’. Molotov declared a year ago. “There is a. big.minus, We must le;aye no stone unturned to remedy this, aided by a firmer proletarian. discip 1 * !® and bv technical developments.”. ■ ;The importance of the tochnic.inn_,the man who, eau apply science; to- industry •.yd ■ the arts—is continually stressed. “The Tnlesheviki”’ miwt .become , expert technicians,” Stalin gave "as h's watchword. “ ,r |hv. must be the watchword of the second five-year plan,” added M°'°tov. Brawn Ts pushed right into th € ' background. In thp view of its. leaders, the one hope, of success for th e great Busman experiment lies in the application of; science t<-> industry, . »„<• In Australja we have a little-known 'body called, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, and the pricki".near has be°n one of.its recent cares. This peet Ird taken such a hold' \n ''Queensland and the northern part of "V, : S, Wales that it was swamping a further million aci’ps a year—entire y destroying its value for any practical purpose. Many methods of 'attack had been tested, from the corhineal im»e c t jto poison g”is and the he.-vv roller, j But so difficult was the campaign'that ’ no substantial success ws*g reached until I the insect cactobla-tis was discovered and tried. That wa s in 1926-27. By 1929 arrangements wer P in hand for covering almost the whole of the infected area in the two States. • By the end of 1930 no less than 3000 million egg s of the insect had been produced , and distributed. In ‘another year the insect was on practically every The tremendous Ipear-infested country, in both States. Thereafter Alan - F- ; Dodd, of the Common-j wealth I’rickly Pear Board's invest!-, gations, reported > — i A, 3 an pxamplp of the remarkable progress achieved by . cactoblastig one ,instance may be given. In August, 1930, the continuous and almost unbroken pear belt along thp Moonie ißiver showed for 150 miles -no destruction, and so light an infestation of cactoblcistis that further distribution was considered. However, the increase of the jn-ect was - so rapid that i,u two years (August, ,1932) 90 per cent, of th e primary pear had disappeared. Thi s authority affirms that probably 60 per cent of Queensland’s deuce primary pear has been destroyed, and fiorn f>o to dt) per cent of ; that in N. SWales outside the Hunter Valley • and ‘Camden districts; and these areas and the secondary growth on the other areas are now having the special attention which their circumstance s _ca!l for. Not only has the advanc e Been stopped, but a territory greater than , that of all Victoria has been handed back to us; a.nd what 'was' a national danger has become an as'Set of enormous value. Already three million acres of recovered country has been reselected and resettled

And it is not only the professional scientist who does these amazing things. Thirty years ago Gogh,tan reported in hits ‘‘Seven Colonies” that in 1861 the average wool clip per sheep in' N. S. Wales was 3.281 b. and in Queensland 3.401b* For .1932, in jN. B.- Wales, according, to the Government statistician of to-day, it was B.Sib., and for five years had averaged 8.21 b. ~Thus IQO sheep ‘wilt produce to-dayjas much woof, as 245 did 70 years ago ; and most of the -progress has been made ip. th e last 30 years. Though figures to those « r e not common we shall , find, many others almost -as extraordinary in tin history of the land industries of Australia. Thus in 1891-19 CO the average Australian wheat yield, per acre was 7.32 bushels; thereafter, by 10-ye'r periods, it was 8.32, 10.69 and 11.99 bn he's. For S. Australia alone the average yield in 1890-99 was 4.69 bushels ; for 1920-29 it was 10.72 bushels. Science has done even more for. the workers in other industries. Forty-odd years ago, when the first zinc, was found in the Broken Hill mines, men fi hook their head s and prepared tor the end. There was noknown method <»i profitably treating a complex ere m which lead and zinc were so intimately a-sociated. But at once the, problem of the sulphides was ‘attacked ;• and gradually it yielded its answer, mainly through that fascinating flotation pro-

cess wit]i which Australian chamighi enrched the world. Between 1830 and 1895 we had exported £7677 worth of zinc ; between 1911 and 1916 we sent £6,'8i_1,489 worth. Broken Hill \vouiu have been ’a deserted field 30 ycarY ago had not the chemist thus cone to its re.jcud:; and what he did for Broken 'Hill he and th e engineer have don e ill

greater or less measure for Mt. Lyell .and -every, other milling field of 'Australia.

! 11 is quite true that our most urgent need of technicians—of chemists and engineers—is due to the fact that other peoples have them. But it is not- only beca.6i.-ie external competition calls for science in industry that it is of such vasty.consequence. Our Russian friends ' know 1 that. For . them foreign trade is but'a moans to an cud- The aim of t the second five-year plan, including its export programme, id “to supp’y the population with double or treble the present quantity o,f ; the most important commodities and foodstuffs.” In plain ■ words, .they expect that the application lof science to industry will in s 0 brief I a time give to .the millions of Russia twice or thrice as much food and other necessaries and. minor luxuries as they had e ver been able to achieve without it. The figures 0 f what we have done in Australia suggest that it is quite ' n v-sio e ior Russia to succeed in this: they have only ito follow where others have led. But what Russia can do ifl not the matter of real importance. The outstanding fact is the enormous part that something quite outside hard physical toil plays in industry and the world's progress. The Communist of the soap-box-—who is with few- exceptions .the only 'Communist Australia knows—would almost exclude from the army of ■‘workers’’ the most skilled tr {teamen : they are at least suspect. The truth ,as Lenin and the Russian leaders clearly see it is that without direction and the help of the technician die .casual and unskilled labourer counts for hardly anything in a nation's struggle for better conditions.