PROSPEROUS AUSTRALIA

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 242, 9 July 1938, Page 10

PROSPEROUS AUSTRALIA

• . *' A gentle reminder that New Zealand is not the only country in the world that has emerged successfully from the depression period, is conveyed by the Commonwealth financial returns for the year just ended. During the past week in Parliament, as has been the case for months past, members of our own Socialist Government have been proclaiming the wonderful achievements of their own administration. The prosperity of New Zealand, we are told over and over again, is all due to the accession to office of a party pledged to a Socialist policy and programme. Never in this country have there been such boastful claims advanced by a political party; never such a mutual admiration society as the present Ministers and their following. Yet a few hundred miles away across the Tasman Sea we have the Commonwealth of Australia, with a non-Socialist Government, showing not only an equal degree of prosperity, but in many respects progressing on sounder lines and enlarging, instead of restricting, the range of opportunity for the advancement of its people. A cable message a day or two ago intimated that not only had there been a record total of revenue received by the Commonwealth Government for the past year, but there was a surplus of 13, 498,000 on the year s accounts —the seventh surplus in succession. This flourishing state of the country’s finances lias been attained after making substantial remissions of taxation. It has been attained, not by Socialistic experimenting and interference with private business, but by the encouragement of private enterprise and by stimulating individual effort.

Not only has taxation been reduced in Australia until it is now pounds a head lower than in New Zealand, but in a variety of directions the people of Australia are better placed than the people of this country. Costs all round, for example, average out there at a lower figure than in this Dominion. Employment is more secure and more economically productive owing to the absorption of workers in private industry, instead of thousands being diverted, as they are here, into Government employment, while thousands more here are kept in specially created Government or public body jobs and paid with money taken from the pockets of their fellow workers. The dairy-farmers, too, in Australia, have been receiving a higher price for their butterfat under their own control scheme than the dairy-farmers in New Zealand have received with their butter and cheese commandeered by our Socialist Government.