The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET, AUCKLAND MONDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 1929 LESSONS FOR LABOUR

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 823, 18 November 1929, Page 8

The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET, AUCKLAND MONDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 1929 LESSONS FOR LABOUR

I ABOLIt i-. learning' essential lessons in responsible administrati tion. And it lias yet a great deal to learn about administrative responsibility. This is demonstrated today in messages from two different centres ot so-called pure democratic polities within the Empire. Mr. Philip Snow den. British Labour's Chancellor of the Exchequer, has found it necessary to apply “The Hague touch" to extremists within the rank and file of the Labour Party, who are not content with the Government’s proposed increase of A. 12.500,000 over the present futile expenditure on unemployment insurance payments. It is reported that the new “Iron Chancellor” resists demands for even greater allowances for idle men with families, and that his resistance is based on the hard ground that the requisite money is not available. Then, on this side of the earth, Mr. E. G. Theodore, Labour Treasurer in Australia s new Labour Government for the Commonwealth, has been compelled by his acquired knowledge of adverse financial and economic conditions to .tell the idle miners on the stricken coalfields of Mew South Wales that his Ministry was looking to them for help, not for embarrassment, in a difficult situation. Plain talk of this sort from Labour Ministers may vex their supporters and perhaps disillusion extremists, in time, but it happens to be the right speech for the occasion. In Hot 1 1 eases the administrators have learnt in quick time that there is no royal road for Labour, or indeed for any other Government, to an easy settlement of industrial strife or to the abolition of unemployment. As far as the British Labour Government is concerned it must know that ffs legislative proposal to increase State expenditure on unemployment insurance to the extent of £24.500.000 a year will, if carried into efljpet, contribute nothing effectual toward the solution of the nation’s stubborn problem of enforced idleness and industrial depression. Since the inception of the humanitarian scheme the State, employers, and contributory insured workers have squandered close on £600,000,000 on the social relief of the unemployed without providing a pennyworth of new work for able-bodied men and women who want employment and would be all the better if they had it. If that colossal sum had been spent on labour-providing enterprises, such as* road-construction, land settlement, reclamation of swamps, and in direct grants for industrial expansion, the muster of Unemployed in Great. Britain would have been, long ago, reduced from over a million to the normal tally which for years was well below half a million. Xow that a relentless logician is in charge of the Exchequer perhaps all kinds of extremists and sobexperts will be taught that not even the strongest administration the world might produce could overcome economic conditions with a wave of a wizard’s hand. The Australian Labour Treasurer’s plight is not much better. In many ways it is much worse, for, although he lias had considerable experience as an administrator—experience that did not enhance his reputation for wisdom—most of his Ministerial colleagues are crude apprentices in administrative work. The miners’ strike in the northern coalfields is bad enough in itself, but, it is only a relatively minor difficulty. Mr. Theodore has now to realise that, the national debt of the Commonwealth is £1.200.000.000. and that within fourteen months the main financial task will be to redeem £120,000.000. to say nothing about finding the annual interest charges amounting to close on A 34.000,000. The miners’ strike has been going on stupidly for the better part of the year. All parties and even the miners themselves, who have been living on the charity of trade unionists, are tired of it. The bitter struggle has added a great sum to the Australian workers’ direct loss of wages in the past eighteen years—an aggregate now running close to £20,000.000. That loss liars been attributable wholly to strikes, none of which has given the strikers any noteworthy advantage. It has been said that the loss on this latest strike is already equal to ten years of the margin of wages and profits upon which the deadlock occurred. Many people sympathise with the miners (and beyond doubt the mineowners are not entitled to any praise for their obstinacy), but impartial experts have declared that a reduction in wages is justifiable as well as inevitable. Why keep the disastrous st op page going.’