WEST AUSTRALIA AND SECESSION.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 64, 16 March 1936, Page 11

WEST AUSTRALIA AND SECESSION.

Mr. J. A. Munro has correctly stated the position in West Australia, but his synopsis is necessarily incomplete. I have followed, with much interest the secession movement, and a vast amount of misunderstanding re same exists in this country. Recently I read a letter signed "Secessionist" in a Perth newspaper, from which I take the following: "Of course, we are not secessionists just for secession's sake. Our natural destiny is to be within the Commonwealth. But the newspapers have taken great pains to cloud the issue. We are the youngest of all the States. (What I mean by the youngest is not since the first settlement, but that our crystallisation did not take place until the 'nineties. We were until that period simply a territory.) Wo have had all the mistakes of the other States to warn us. We have made the only gesture possible to let the rest of the world realise why we are secessionists. We object to being taxed to death in order to swell the revenue of States in which the people have been so harshly treated. We cannot get the Commonwealth Government to reduce the tariff charges, but we can let tlie world see that we refuse to be taxed simply because the people of other States arc. hypnotised by the platitude that they must not allow importations if they would keep prosperity and assist unemployment. We are not manufacturers, and we do not intend to be if we can help it. We have a vast area un'der our control, and all that the Federal tariff has done has been to make the life of our outback settlers harder and the Cost of living higher. If the rest of the people of the Commonwealth will co-operate with us (and it would tempt thenr» immensely) in making our . nation free trade, secession would never have risen its head. . . This correspondent is a city working man, he says. No more startling testimony has ever been adduced to show the iniquity of tariffs. Here we have a section of a British commonwealth so bitter that they are prepared to take a momentous step and break away, so keenly do tlicy feel the injustice of the insane disease known as protection. -Comment would be superfluous. HERBERT MULVIHILL.