INDUSTRY IN AUSTRALIA

Wairarapa Times-Age, 30 July 1941, Page 3

INDUSTRY IN AUSTRALIA

REMARKABLE EXPANSION OF

MANUFACTURING.

A NOTEWORTHY PUBLICATION.

The remarkable expansion of Australian manufacturing industry during the last quarter of a century is elaborately described and pictured in “The Australian Manufacturer Annual," which on this occasion is also the silver jubilee number of that wellknown weekly journal “The Australasian Manufacturer." The annual is a large and handsome publication of nearly 330 pages, profusely illustrated and splendidly produced in every way. Much of the wealth of information it presents no doubt will come as a revelation even to those who arc aware in a general way of the tremendous strides Australia has made in manufacturing industry in recent years, not least notably, in the production of armaments and munitions since the present war began. It is in its details that the nature of Australia's great industrial achievement becomes clearly apparent, and in this publication the details are presented most effectively. The broad statistical facts of the achievement are also highly impressive, however,. As they are given in an introduction by the president of the Associated Chambers of Manufacturers of Australia (Mr Alured Kelly) these are, briefly, that: “There are nearly three-quart-ers of a million industrial workers in Australia whose pay in wages, totals approximately £150,000,000 annually. This is for manufacturing activity alone. These figures represent an increase of 41 per cent as compared with the pre-depression peak of twelve years ago."

War industries, in which Australia is making a great and growing contribution to her own defence and that of the Empire, bulk large in the current picture of manufacturing in the Commonwealth. It is emphasised by a number of authoritative contributors to “The Australasian Manufacturer Annual.’’ however, that the factories now producing aircraft, aircraft engines, guns of various kinds, and many other items of armaments and munitions, are no mushroom growth to be scrapped whom the war is over. The Acting-Premier of Victoria, Mr A. E. Lind, says on this subject: “History has a habit of repeating itself, and it is safe to say that many of these enterprises, modified to meet peace time needs, will, as was the case after the last war, become permanently a part of the industrial life of the community.”

On the same theme, the president of the New South Wales Chamber of Manufactures (Mr J. G. Jones) speaks still more emphatically. Deriding suggestions that “undesirable” and “exotic” industries are being established in Australia, he quotes Mr Arthur Greenwood, British War Cabinet Minister without portfolio, as stating that Britain realises that the Dominions cannot be asked to curtail manufacturing industries which they have initiated and built up in war time and recognises the right of the Dominions to expand these industries. “There must be,” Mr Jones maintains, “a frank appreciation of the necessity of deliberately spreading population and industries throughout the Dominions, on a carefully worked out plan, so that instead of having an immense population and vital resources concentrated on the periphery of the convulsive continent of Europe, they will be located throughout the Empire, and may wellnigh make it impregnable. And in the doing of this, the point of industrial development reached by the Dominions when war is done, must, for those Dominions, be the starting point of further expansion.”

No more' than a hint can be given here of the immense mass of arresting information embodied in “The Australasian Manufacturer Annual,” of the light it casts on the expansion in the various States of the Commonwealth of scores of industrial processes, as well as upon research that is opening the way to further enterprise and on other related questions and activities. The publication as a whole is excellent and does justice to a momentous epoch in the history of Australia and the Empire.