NOTES OF THE DAY

Dominion, Volume 18, Issue 95, 17 January 1924, Page 6

NOTES OF THE DAY

Mr. Coates appears to have caused a flutter amongst the motorists bv his suggestion of a petrol tax to supplement the /funds for t highways scheme. It may be that the Minister’s idea is an improvement on the tire tax and that the motorists are needlessly alarmed, but in any case the suggestion for the time being at least lacks the weight of Cabinet sanction. The financial aspect of the highways improvement scheme has .an unfortunate knack of obtruding itself at inopportune momenta. It is an aspect of course which cannot be ignored, but the tendency up to the present has been to give it an undue prominence to the exclusion of the more attractive features of the highways scheme What is now wanted is to get on with the scheme and-snow results. It will be time enough to talk abow; schemes for raising more money for highways improvement when tho existing funds have been turned to good account.

Unrest amongst the British coal-miners was at first mentioned almost incidentally in connection with the threat of a railway strike a threat that happily has been for the moment at least lt now appears, however, that there are grave prospects of troiible m the mining industry. The Yorkshire and Northumberland miners voted “overwhelmingly” in favour of terminating the national agreement, and the result of a ballot throughout the country, to be announced to-day, is. expected to be similar. Another upheav a in the mining industry would be a very much more serious disaster foi Britain than the railway strike which is still a possibility. The three months’ coal strike of 1921 reacted with heavily adverse effect on nearly all British industries. Directly and indirectly, it cost the country something like three hundred millions sterling and even this hardly measured its full effect in setting back the clock of trade and industrial recovery. After such an experience, necessarily involving severe hardships for the miners and their families, it might have been expected that peace would reign in the British mining industry J or a long time to come. The outlook at the moment, however, is hardly promising.

Within the last year or two, Britain has on a number of occasions ffpred to facilitate by unprecedented financial sacrifices a general settlemer' of inte nXal war debts and reparations. While she is paying Sf her own war debt to America, she is not yet receiving even interest on the war loans she made to France and other Alhed countries It is indeed a poor reward that Britain should now be charged by a French ex-Minister of Finance amongst others, with responsibility for the fall of the franc exchange. The charge is on its face absurd. Instead of doing anything to depress the franc, Britain has done more than any other country to keep it at a high level of exchange value. The principal cause of the present decline no doubt is that France, in anticipation of reparation payments from Germany, has raised reconstruction loans totalling upwards of 700 millions sterling In these circumstances a loss of confidence by French investors in the prospect of obtaining adequate reparation payments from Germany is quite enough to account for a much more serious decline of the franc than has yet been recorded. Ridiculous as they are, the charges made against Britain may do a good deal of harm by creating a false impression in the minds of the unthinking and the ill-informed.

In attacking the white Australia policy, Lord Leverhulme appears to have made out a very poor case. It is, of course, true that the exclusion of coloured labour must to some extent delay the occupation and development of the tropical north of Australia, but that it will lead to such conditions as Lord Leverhulme pictures—conditions in which it will be necessary “to tax the people to the extent of millions to nurse white men working under unsuitable conditions —is far enough (from being established. Succeeding generations of Australians no doubt will adapt themselves physically to their northern climate, and the increasing use of machinery also has its bearing on such problems of tropical settlement as the Commonwealth presents. Lord Leverhulme was particularly unfortunate in his references to the American negroes. A late development in America is a gieat and increasing migration of the negroes out of the tropical and sub-tropical south into tho northern States—that is to say into regions which are in every way—climatically and otherwise—suited to white occupation. In the total experiences of the United States with a negro population which now numbers over twenty millions the people of the Commonwealth may find ample reasons for upholding the white Australia policy.