SERVING MANY MASTERS

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 28, 3 February 1938, Page 8

SERVING MANY MASTERS

Because of the variety of interests to be served, it can hardly be said that tariff-making is a scientific operation. Every Government in the Empire is faced with the problem of how to serve its own domestic sectional interests, how to' avoid hurting sectional interests in other parts of the Empire, and how to pacify foreign interests; clearly there is no scientific formula by which this result can be obtained. Perhaps the nearest approach to a scientific solution would be to give the tariffmaking problem to a calculating machine; but this will certainly not lie done at the forthcoming Ottawa revision conference in London, whose task is likely to be ns thorny as that of the original conference in 1932. By comparison, 1932 was simple. The depression then' had nearly every country on the run. Every Government was determined not to buy, yet anxious to sell; so, at Ottawa in 1932, with the world at war against imports, it could be •epresenled as necessary that the Empire also should take shelter behind not only Customs preferences but the new expedient of quantitative restrictions. In 1932 the plea was self-defence. In these "recovery" foys a truce is demanded in the war on imports. World-trade is now talked of as a pillar of world-peace. Isolation, it is now said, is no longer defence, but offence. Something must be done to appease America and the' other foreign countries. And yet Empire interests and Dominion unitinterests must be preserved. Can it be done? In yesterday's paper the Australian Associated Press contributes a cheerful note, in which the wish may be father to the thought. The A.A.P. writer feels himself warranted to say: It is^npw virtually settled that Imperial preferences on what the Dominions regard as their most vital commodities will remain unaltered, whate'ver form the proposed AngloAmerican trade treaty takes. "Preferences," it is to be assumed, does not cover quantitative restrictions, in which the British farmer and the Empire exporter to the British market iwere both concerned in 1932. M. Van Zeeland in his report almost takes it. for granted that peaceseeking nations will wish to get rid of quotas, and he implies that this should be the* minimum British Empire, contribution to world-peace. What else can be done is a matter of conjecture, because, in practice, Governments themselves seldom know what they are going to do. They watch the strains and stresses developing around them at home and abroad, brace their shoulders to pressures and counter-pressures, and, after a series of oracular statements, finally go^in the direction in which they are pushed. The "Sydney Morning Herald" asks: , If the Empire cannot break down the Ottawa barriers, what; hope is there of inducing other nations to move towards freer trade and international co-operation? At the same time, "the Commonwealth Government must surely soon consider1 the need for making sure of support from Australian political and commercial opinion for 'the policy it has accepted."