CHEAP STEEL

Evening Post, Volume CXXXV, Issue 102, 1 May 1943, Page 4

CHEAP STEEL

AUSTRALIA'S FUTURE

HIVE OF INDUSTRY AFTER

WAR

(0.Q.) SYDNEY, April 21. The Broken Hill Proprietary Company, Ltd., is a favourite target for politicians eager for publicity, but their darts make as much impression on the iron hull of Australia's industrial colossus as pea-rifle bullets on the armourplating produced in its foundries. Taunts and threats over years have failed to rouse the powers behind the company to enter into a verbal war with its antagonists. Therefore, it was a surprise when the chairman, Mr. H. G. Darling, broke silence and offered a modest defence of the company in an article in the "B.H.P. Review." It is true that the article was addressed to Australians at the front who might be anxious about their position in postwar reconstruction, but it also obliquely answered the company's critics. Mr. Darling declared that it was nonsense to suppose that the peace would be more perilous than the war. The fact that Australia could produce steel more cheaply, than Britain or the United States meant certainty of work after the war. "Australia's new civilisation, founded on cheap and good steel, is going to make her a hive of industry when the war is over," Mr. Darling stated. "Good, cheap steel means cheap aeroplanes, cheap railways, cheap machinery. Practically speaking, nothing is produced without the use of steel—in it, or in its construction. If the Australian soldier comes back with the determination to work as well as he is fighting, he will find that he can make and sell everything in competition with the best countries in the world. THE INARTICULATE MASSES. "If Governments after the war will limit activities to stimulating old and encouraging new industries, Australians will show the initiative necessary to develop our rich resources." Mr. Darling stated that a small percentage of population will cry loudly for Government planning and nationalisation. But the inarticulate masses will not cry for it. "Their experience of Government railroads, mines, brickyards, and fishing fleets has convinced them that the Government should be like the referee in a prize-ring who penalises fouls but who does not get into the fight himself." Mr. Darling might also have added that without 8.H.P., Australia would have had practically no modern industrial war effort. He might have pointed out that the company's managing director, Mr. Essington Lewis, is supreme director of Australia's war production, and that when the Labour Government gained office in 1941 he was retained in his position in spite of the screams of extremists for his removal.