A DEBACLE IN QUEENSLAND

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 661, 13 May 1929, Page 8

A DEBACLE IN QUEENSLAND

LABOUR in Australia has suffered perhaps the severest setback in its history in the overwhelming defeat of the McCormack Government at the Queensland polls. The reverse comes partly as the natural and almost inevitable sequel to fourteen years in power, but a process that would normally begin with slow and almost imperceptible attrition has been accelerated by misgovernment and corruption. So ends the Labour rule initiated in 1915 under the Ryan Government, and continued beneath the successive control of Theodore, Gillies and McCormack. Ryan and Theodore were conspicuous political figures. They acclaimed their intention of converting Queensland into a Utopia in quick time, and they plunged the State into costly experiments in the socialisation of both primary and secondary industries. The ultimate results were disastrous. State sheep-runs lost £10,000,000; coppermines and smelters an equal sum. To cover these and corresponding losses heavy borrowing was necessary, and to avoid imposing too severely on an already strained credit in London, Queensland adopted "the unusual course of going to America for money. Of itself there was nothing seriously objectionable in this principle which has since been followed by at least one other Australian State; hut it stressed the indifference of the Labour Government to the quarter in which it pledged the credit of future generations of Queenslanders. In the meantime a railway system that before Labour took office had paid its way every year for seven years, began to suffer in the general maladministration. Deficit piled on deficit, and for thirteen years now the Queensland railways have been a losing proposition. The Government was obliged to ally itself with radical Labour elements whose influence brought its attitude to strikes and other disturbances under the deepest suspicion. Far from being a wage-earner’s paradise, Queensland became a place of high costs, with Italian labour replacing Australian labour on the canefields, and with the heaviest taxation per head of population of any Australian State. The Government that was to make Queensland a L'topia failed to rise above the narrow atmosphere of sectional councils. Under better leaders, moved by finer motives, Labour may yet elevate Queensland among the nations; but all that can be said, at the moment, is that a change was overdue.