AUSTRALIAN CHARACTERISTICS

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 30, 4 August 1923, Page 11

AUSTRALIAN CHARACTERISTICS

It is interesting sometimes to see ourselves as others see us. Candour in some. people has been described as being comparable to lollies in which the acid preponderates over the sweetness. But there was not sweetness at all in the lolly of criticism that the Right Hon. Major Charles Peter Allen, P.C.. a member of the House of Commons, offer us. It is all acid. In the first place we are, so t he said, so positive as a nation that we ■ are right, that criticism bores us. Northcliffe found us self-complacment. But the Right Hon. Major Charles Peter Allen, P.C., goes further than that. We are cock-sure. We also won the war. Or we think we did. The British Navy did play some little part in the war, but how many Australians realised it? The Right Hon. Major Charles Peter Allen, P.C., would like to know. Hs also has the evidence of his own eyes to tell him that we have not made our people sober. Then, we are living in a vicious circle. We cannot compete, owing to high wages, with foreign sugar in our home market, so we clap an embargo on foreign sugar. The . same ■with South African maize and foreign dried fruit. We are also instructed as to the distinction between nominal" and "real" wages, and are told, on the question of population, that we have had a system of deliberate birth control since 1886. Now, you know the sort of .country this is, and just the sort of people we are. Like an old pair or trousers, we are full of flaws and holes and imperfections. For the Ri^ht Hon. Major Charles Peter ..ilen PC hns spoken. He left last week for New Zealand, probably to awaken it also to a tew plain, cold-boiled facts about it-