The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET AUCKLAND THURSDAY, JANUARY 23, 1930 A SHARP LESSON FOR AUSTRALIA

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 878, 23 January 1930, Page 8

The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET AUCKLAND THURSDAY, JANUARY 23, 1930 A SHARP LESSON FOR AUSTRALIA

THE most luxuriant growth in Australia is that of the public debt. It increases at the rate of about £34,000,000 a year. Today, the aggregate indebtedness of the Commonwealth and States is close on £900,000,000. The annual foreign interest bill is £30,000,000. And this year loans totalling £120,000,000 fall due for redemption. These figures and facts emphasise the seriousness of the decision of London financiers to reject projects for the raising of loans for Australia until the coal-mining dispute in New South Wales has been settled. The embargo may seem exceptionally drastic in its range of disciplinary effect, but it could he applied only to the Commonwealth as a whole, and not to a notorious State which for years has been a hotbed of industrial strife. Since last July the Federal Government has exercised, though possibly has not enjoyed, control of national borrowing through a Loan Council which is now an integral part of the complicated machinery of Australian public finance. This arrangement was established as an essential necessity for the avoidance of competitive borrowing by seven different governments, all fevered with desire for more money and also for the pious purpose of keeping within reasonable hounds the loan expenditure of the six States whose borrowing record in the past decade has been nothing less than an orgy of political profligacy. For example, New South Wales loan expenditure last year totalled close on £17,000,000, the biggest sum in the State’s history, and larger than the aggregate of the half-dozen States in the normal year before the world war. This year the Strike State proposes to spend £10,000,000 of borrowed money, if it can be raised, on all the purposes that please the Australian democracy. ' Whatever merit the new scheme of Federal control of public debt may possess in Australia, it now reveals an embarrassing defect for impecunious governments in that the industrial folly of one State has provoked the imposition of a loan embargo on them all. Such hardship as may be experienced by those States, if any, which do not yet require to be disciplined financially, should help toward bringing to an end an intolerable industrial chaos on the northern coalfields of New South Wales. For almost a year past that State has been in the grip of industrial disorder. A great industry has been paralysed, allied trades have been crippled, and the commercial interests of the country have suffered to a serious extent. » Everything possible, reasonable and plausible has been tried both by the State Government and the Federal Administration to bring the ruinous dispute to a satisfactory end, hut neither side to it has shown even a desire to yield. They have rejected the offer of generous terms from conciliatory politicians who were willing to settle , the wrangle largely at the expense of their overburdened taxpayers. Even without such terms the miners, if working instead of living on the bounty of industrial unionism, could earn the highest coal-mining wages in the world. The position has become so serious that something more effective than political intervention or persuasion must be tried by someone with impressive influence. It has been left to potential investors and financial agents in London to introduce a new method of settling mischievous industrial disputes. If the embargo be maintained Australian workers as well as their overpaid and muddling politicians should be taught a salutary lesson. Without the continuous aid of loans from abroad Australia cannot easily make any progress at all. Her seven Governments have exploited the sources of internal revenue to the bedrock of resourcefulness. Land, inheritance and income taxation in every State has to supply two coffers (State and Federal), and at all times the financial locker is empty. The need of some forceful external check on Australian industrial folly is not only necessary but is long overdue. The present dispute in New South Wales is not an isolated trouble calling for punitive treatment. It is hut another disorder added to a lamentable list of strikes and industrial revolt. Four years ago, for instance, there were 227 mining disputes throughout the Commonwealth; of that total 202 occurred in New South Wales. The time has come to make a decisive end to notorious nonsense. No loans for loafers promises to become the best cure that has yet been tried.