The Evening Star. WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 10, 1924. AUSTRALIAN SHIPPING CRISIS.

Evening Star, Issue 18812, 10 December 1924, Page 6

The Evening Star. WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 10, 1924. AUSTRALIAN SHIPPING CRISIS.

It must now be admitted with reluctance that Australia looks to be in for a critical struggle over her sea transport. The dispute occurs at a peculiarly unfortunate time, possibly by design rather than fortuitously. The season has been exceptionally favorable, and production is so great that the surplus for export is far above tho average. Tho wool clip is of more than usual dimensions, more from tho fact that fihoep have fared so well that their fleeces average 21b apioco heavier than last year than from any great increase in flocks, and prices all round constitute a record. The wheat crop ripening, or ripe for tho stripper, is one of tho most bountiful in Australian annals, and the big surplus for export will come on a market rather in undersupply from other sources, and should therefore command prices remunerative to growers. In dairy produce Australia, which because of drought is occasionally an importer during the summer, is this year an exporter on a very large scale, and here again world markets show at least payable prjess. Early in the season certain difficulties in marketing all this produce were foreseen, but these related to the unusual discrepancy between tho Australian pound and the British pound, making the transfer of the purchase money from.' consuming to producing country increasingly expensive if practicable at all. Hardly had the financial obstacle to marketing clip, crop, and other produce been adjusted as well as seems possible than an industrial obstacle to marketing developed, first aboard ship, and then on the wharves. This latter phase has now overshadowed tho former one. The boycott has been introduced, and Homo liners have called at other Australian ports en route for Britain without lifting any cargo, because they have been declared “ black,” their holds containing cargo that was put there hy

members of tho Shipping Labor Bureau in Sydney. The trouble originated in Sydney, but the effect is greatest in Melbourne, because in Sydney it is still possible to load steamers by labor obtained from the bureau, which is an institution sanctioned by both Federal and State law. But it is a standing challenge to the Labor bosses, and they are determined to have it abolished, law or no law. A cable received from Melbourne to-day states that tho Waterside Workers’ Federation (whose headquarters have not yet been shifted thence to Sydney, as was proposed soon after the dispute began) has decided to defy the Arbitration Court and continue the strike until the Shipping Labor Bureau is abolished.

In Australia the history of the Arbitration Court is liberally besprinkled with defiance of its rulings and power by unions principally of semi-skilled or unskilled workers, maritime and waterfront unions being notable for this attitude. The fomenters of trouble in these callings have no use for arbitration unless resort to that principle gains unconditional compliance with their demands, which have been becoming increasingly preposterous. Contempt of arbitration and of the court is shown by the Federation Executive’s indifference to the threat of deregistration. The federation had already contemplated industrial outlawry in name as well as in fact. Labor’s objective appears to bo to rule tho community without troubling an iota about the legality of that rule. “ One outstanding fact,” says a Melbourne newspaper, “ is that tho dominating force in unionism has no respect for arbitration law, and that arbitration law has not that fores within itself which enables it to command respect. It would bo unjust to criticise tho President of the Court. Ho has done his best, but his best does not endow him with the power to compel men to obey a wards of his court.” Mr Justice Powers, who is to retire from hi# position next year, has, like his predecessors, had the thankless task of supervising the working of an unworkable machine. He has repeatedly been placed in tho humiliating position, not only of seeing his awards flouted with impunity, but of hearing in his court tho threats of Labor leaders to strike unless their demands are made awards of the court.

Complaint is now being made in tho Australian Tress of the apathy of the various Governments concerned. It is being pointed out that the Arbitration Act is unique in that there is no Minister responsible for its enforcement. In that court there is beheld the spectacle of % High Court Judge lecturing, exhorting, and almost pleading with the parties to obey the law, while Ministers and departments stand by unconcerned; whereas in all other courts a judge lays down tho law and maintains his judicial aloofness in the knowledge that it is the duty of someone else to see that the law as ho has laid it down is enforced. This particular infraction of the law may he regarded as directed at certain Governments. In Victoria, for example, Labor had its first tasks of office on sufferance because tho Country Party held aloof for a time from Liberals and Nationals. Then fusion was arranged and Labor was put into its old place in Opposition. The Country Party was the determining factor, and revenge became a necessity to Labor. This attack by tho union loaders is concentrated on oversea shipping. The primary producers, the constituents of tho Country Party members of Parliament, will suffer most severely through the strike, Tho most opportune time to cause the maximum of injury was chosen. Wool, wheat, butter, and fruit are to bo piled up in stores and on the wharves. With this produce restrained from finding a market, it is not only tho man on the land, but the whole of Australia, that will suffer. And it is usually the wage earner who suffers most acutely; but the sufferings of the rank and file behind or below them are not considerations taken greatly into account by Air Thomas Walsh and the polyglot crowd who have grabbed the Labor reins in Australia in general, and Sydney in particular. The strike may or may not fail in its ostensible objective, tho abolition of the bureau, but the mere wanton infliction of injury to industry and on the community ns a whole, is too often regarded by Labor as a quite sufficient objective, and its achievement as a positive victory. In 1923 there wore 274 strikes in the Commonwealth, involving the loss of 1,145,977 days’ work by 76,321 people and the forfeiting of £1,275,606 in wages, and outside of New South Wales there was practically no industrial trouble in Australia at all. This year there has been less industrial ferment until, towards its close, tho dislocation of shipping, emanating from Sydney, bids fair to give 1924 an unenviable notoriety in the annals of tho Commonwealth. It is surely time that both the Federal and the New South Wales Governments took determined steps to break up the gang of revolutionaries, mostly foreign, who aspire to dictate from Macdonnell House, Sydney, to the whole of tho Continent.