Manpower

Press, Volume LXXX, Issue 24194, 29 February 1944, Page 4

Manpower

The Federal Minister of Commerce, Mr W. J. Scully, who recently said that the dairy industry Had “ never “been more prosperous,” was answered, according to a report from Sydney yesterday, by the Secretary of the Australian Milk Producers’ Association. Between 230 and 280 New South Wales farmers have given up dairying in the last 12 months, more than 100 in Victoria, and so on. This sort of evidence has been accumulating for a long time. A few weeks ago the owner of perhaps the finest and one of the largest herds in New South Wales announced that he had decided to sell out and warned the Government that the industry was now being carried on the shoulders of elderly and aging men, who were failing under the strain. But if such testimony is doubted because it is incomplete and because it is not disinterested, no such doubt attaches to that of the Acting Commonwealth Statistician, who issued comparative figures this month covering the farm labour resources of the country. They record a measure of depletion too heavy to be consistent with Mr Scully’s prosperity. The total of male employees in rural industry fell from about 200,000 before the war, to 120,000 in March, 1943. Farm owners, lessees, and unpaid relatives working on farms decreased from 300,000 to 240,000. Against this over-all decline of 140,000, there is to be set an increase, from 20,000 to more than 60,000, in the number of women working in rural industry either as owners’ relatives or as paid employees. The net fall is therefore about 100,000 from a prewar gross total little greater than 500,000; and the impact of the fall is of course heavier than the percentage indicates, because the loss has been preponderantly a loss of young and fit workers. These figures illuminate the Australian man-

power problem as no similar figures illuminate the problem in New Zealand. During the General Election campaign the Minister of National Service compared 1942 and 1943 farm employment totals, without estimating either. Later he announced that the release of about 2400 men for farm work, among 12,250 men released from the armed forces in New Zealand between April and September, left very few farm ‘ workers still serving: the “great majority”, had been released before April ’’l. Neither then nor later, however, were figures quoted to show how' many hands were available to work the farms in 1939 and how many are available at this stage. It will not be sufficient if information of this kind is laid before Parliament in secret session. There are issues of policy which the Government can successfully deal with only if the public is adequately informed and therefore understands decisions and accepts their demands. The manpower issue is the most urgent of these issues.