Chening Post THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 1931. TYRANNY OR DEMOCRACY

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 42, 19 February 1931, Page 10

Chening Post THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 1931. TYRANNY OR DEMOCRACY

Mr. L. L. Hill, the Labour Premier of South Australia, who in the face of much opposition from his own party has striven hard to carry out the resolutions of the Melbourne Conference, is reported today to have returned from Canberra to Adelaide with a "gleam of hope," but there would have been more comfort in the intimation if his grounds had not been stated. He believed that ■when tho Premiers met at Melbourne next week the plans which would be evolved from, the deliberations there would depend entirely on the result of the conference between the Prime Minister and Mr. E. G. Theodore and the Commonwealth. Bank Board, when the three-year plan would be discussed. Why the dependence of the Premiers' Conference on the result of another of Mr. Theodore's interminable conferences with his enemies, the bankers, provided any ground for hope is not explained. Instead of revealing any "gleam of hope" the glaring "non sequitur" serves rather to illustrate the desperate straits to which even a sober mind is reduced in the endeavour to escape from a pessimistic conclusion. Undisguised pessimism is otherwise the prevailing note of our recent news from Australia, and it is naturally strongest in New South Wales. Through the lamentable weakness of Mr. Scullin the Commonwealth continues its drift towards the rocks at a pace which, if the much stronger will of Mr. Theodore has its way, will soon be accelerated. But under the control of a far more powerful and reckless demagogue than either of them New South Wales may be said to be steaming straight for the rocks. Without help from the Commonwealth the State would indeed have struck them last week, but the course was not altered, and a disaster appears to be imminent which is more likely to involve the Commonwealth than to be retrieved by its aid. The gravity of Australian unrest, especially in New South Wales, is illustrated from opposite quarters in our latest reports. Addressing the Congress of the Australian Council of Trade Unions in Sydney, Mr. Duggan, the President, was reported yesterday to have said that "they had met in the hush that foretold a great tragedy." Any doubt whether this tragedy was the continued subjection of the worker or the means by which he would be driven to assert his freedom was removed by the revolutionary speech with which he was supported by the Secretary. Today the rural discontent in New South Wales finds striking expression in the speech in which Dr. Earle Page, Leader of the Australian Country Party and formerly Federal Treasurer, declared that fanners could no longer submit to the insidious domination of the extreme Labour element in Sydney, and launched a campaign for the secession of an area about as large as New Zealand at the north end of the State. Compared with these two ominous items the extraordinary action taken by Mr. Lang, the allpowerful Premier of New South Wales, in applying the closure to the Opposition's censure motion- may appear to be of minor importance. Yet the issue raised by the motion — the repudiation policy of Mr. Lang himself—is as important as any that could have come before the State Parliament and had not previously been debated. To deny the Opposition the right of discussing such an issue is to strike at the root of Parliamentary government and to substitute tyranny for democracy —another proof-of how extremes meet in the Labour parties of Australia. The official addresses to the Congress of the Australian Council of Trade Unions and the motion favouring a general strike which is now before the meeting, point in the same direction as the tyrannical action of the Labour majority "in the New South Wales Parliament. Theoretically the most democratic of the .Australian parties, Labour, as reprej sented by Mr. Lang, has gagged Parliament as though he were a Cromwell with military force behind him, and, as represented by officials of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, it is tired of the law and the legal machinery which it helped to make, and determined to assert a power which will accomplish its purposes by illegal methods. A quarter of a million Australians were on the verge of starvation, said Mr. Duggan, and many more in danger of being crushed by tho weight and power of tho machinery they themselves had created. The Press, Pulpit, and Courts denied men a decent standard of living, and forced them, to endure many tortures. They looked to Labour to re-gain for them lost, employ-' ment and standard of living. The reference to "the machinery they themselves had created" and to the

Courts which "denied men a decent standard of living" might conceivably mean that Labour, which had previously fought for the retention of the Commonwealth Arbitration Court, should now repeal the Act by which it was established. But the speech of the Secretary of the Council showed that a shorter cut, which will nullify the awards of the Court without abolishing it, is proposed. The political machine, said Mr. Cross, was inadequato to copo with tho situation. The only means to secure a satisfactory result would bo a declaration by tho Federal Government of a national emergency, enabling the Arbitration Court decisions to be overridden so that tho workers would obtain whatever industrial conditions they desired. The resolution which has since been submitted to the Congress pro-, poses a shorter cut still. A general strike, might enable the workers, without the aid of the Government, to defy the law and its guardians and to neduce the awards of the Arbitration Court to scraps of paper. As a general strike does not often succeed, and under the present conditions of Australia could hardly succeed without violence and bloodshed, Mr. Cross's milder proposal may be deemed worthy of a trial. Its effect would be, he says, that the workers could obtain whatever industrial conditions they desired. Not what they deserved, be it noted, or what was fair, but what they desired. While the state of emergency continued, the workers would be able to dictate their own terms, but at the end of it they might have to give the new schedule the support of the law which they are now despising, or be prepared to fight for it. The Labour Congress may therefore accept Mr. Garden's view and prefer to have the fight at once. Should the resolution in favour of a general strike to begin on Wednesday next be carried, one trembles to think of the effect it might have on the ferocity of the fine mixed fighting with which the campaign in Sydney East opened yesterday.