42 WYNDHAM STREET, AUCKLAND TUESDAY, MARCH 11, 1930 A GREAT SPORT

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 918, 11 March 1930, Page 8

42 WYNDHAM STREET, AUCKLAND TUESDAY, MARCH 11, 1930 A GREAT SPORT

A HUNDRED collieries and associated industries in New South Wales are either paralysed or crippled because thousands of miners have put up a cricket score in the great Australian sport of striking against industrial conditions which relatively are of the first class and the best in the world. The obdurate men have been on strike for 370 days, and look like going on in subsidised idleness for as long again. They still are far behind Australia’s record strike, and since their countrymen love a the Broken Hill miners’ endurance test for over two years may be beaten by the colliers on the- Northern coalfields of New South Wales.

The latest report from Sydney states that peace on the coalfields is as far off as ever. Another conference between the disputants collapsed after an hour’s discussion or wrangle. Neither side would capitulate or even concede anything worth while. The miners stood fii-mly on pre-strike ground, and the owners would go no farther than to the point of accepting the November compromise rates which, of course, throw the cost of settling the dispute largely upon the taxpayer—always the basis of a political compromise. So the contending parties-are as they were without any prospect of an early truce. There is political talk now about withdrawing from the idle coalminers the State bounty known as unemployment relief. The threat may not be brought' into practice, but it is quite certain that so long as this dole is available, it will help to maintain the strike. Pharaoh’s heart hardened because Pharaoh himself was always well fed. It has been the payment of unemployment relief, together with the receipt of ready generosity from industrial unions both in Australia and New Zealand, that has enabled the miners of New South Wales to ruin their own industry and depress other industries for a year without causing acute distress among the strikers themselves, although, in many cases, wives and children have felt the pinch of unnecessary poverty. As in the experience of the Broken Hill strikers, the Maitland and other Northern district miners have not starved while they have idled. Hotels and cinemas have not closed; food has been reasonably plentiful and never worse than tolerably scarce; and (to quote an Australian writer) “it is no great hardship to.lack a bed in a lotus-land where the air is generally soft and warm and the buffalo grass lies thick beneath the gums and palms.” What is the cause of all the trouble ? It is the old question of wages plus what has been described bluntly in the Commonwealth as “the ever-widening reverence for the creed that the Australian is the salt of the earth, and that he need not prove his superiority in competition with the rest of the world. He has built for himself a temple dedicated to that awful deity, ‘Australian Conditions,’ and there must he no risk of the profanation of that temple by outsiders.” Quite so, but the temple is crumbling. Australia is in a bad way. It is suffering the exercise abroad of one of its industrial pastimes at home: Australian credit has been declared “black.” And Sir Granville Ryrie, High Commissioner for the Commonwealth in London, has told an unemployed Australian there that an Australian has as much chance as a Russian has of getting work in the Empire’s capital. British “employers have the fixed idea that all Australians are strikers and fomenters of trouble, or, at least, unwilling workers.” That is a wrong idea, of course, but Australian workers have only themselves to blame for its growing strength abroad. Investors have become chary of Australian industry and polities. As for the idle miners, they have lost any right they had at one time to sympathy and support. Under the compromise rates of pay competent hewers can earn and have earned at the Rothbury mine wages ranging from thirty shillings to over £3 a day. It has to be conceded that such wages are the exception, not the rule, but even at the lowest rates the miners’ earnings still would he the highest in the mining world. The worst trouble is the glaring fact that the coalmines in Australia have been overmanned for years to the extent of five thousand workers. Unless the surplus be employed in other occupations the coal industry cannot pay them all record wages. “The salt of the earth” may have to be taught a grim lesson.

RECIPROCITY WITH CANADA

QUESTIONS of considerable importance to the New Zealand timber industry were raised yesterday during a round-table conference attended by representatives of local timber interests and the Canadian delegation which is endeavouring to solicit larger timber orders for Canadian exporters. Of the several contributions to the discussion, the most interesting from a Dominion point of view was that of Mr. E. J. Phelan, secretary of the Timber Workers’ Union, who pointed out that this country’s annual imports of timber are equal to the work of 3,500 New Zealanders. Thus, although the Canadians may be welcomed in the cordial spirit in which they have come, and with sympathy for the object of their visit, it would be a good deal better at this stage to discuss ways by which New Zealand can reduce her timber imports, rather than extend her patronage of overseas articles. The Canadians do not actually suggest that New Zealand should find it desirable to import more timber than she does now. On the contrary, they admit as experts that there is no particular fault to be found with New Zealand timbers, several of which have marked points of superiority over the imported article brought from the Pacific Coast. Instead of asking that New Zealand ? s imports be extended to give Canada a greater share of the business, the visitors suggest that it would be fair to divert to Canada a lot of the trade now sent to the United States. In view of the strong contrast between the reception of New Zealand commodities in Canada and the United States, this is an eminently fair suggestion. America has found in New Zealand a ready market for her products, but her ideas of reciprocity are peculiar, and New Zealand wool and butter are subject to almost prohibitive tariffs. Sentiment and everything else thus urge preference to Canada, but the trouble is that sentiment does not rule in business, as some of the Auckland firms who in past years have made tremendously heavy importations of American timber might acknowledge. In the past the difference between Canadian and American millers has been that the American “chased” the business. Their State-subsidised ships helped them to deliver the timber cheaply, and they have not hesitated to cut prices to maintain their advantage. Thus it is not clear that the discriminating tariff for which the Canadians ask would he very helpful to their cause. The conclusion from the discussion is, however, that where we must import timber it should wherever possible be Canadian; but that, in view of the New Zealand industry’s struggle for survival, better far to patronise the New Zealand article, and dispense with the overseas product.