THE SAMOA BILL.

Evening Star, Issue 19616, 23 July 1927, Page 6

THE SAMOA BILL.

The Samoa Bill, which provides for local banishment of Samoans and deportation of Europeans in Samoa charged with preventing or hindering the work of the Administration, passed its second reading in the House of Representatives this morning after an allnight sitting. Doubts and dislike felt in regard to the measure were not fully shown by the division, on which the voting was 43 to 13. Reform members, except one or two on whom party ties have been apt to sit most loosely, were content to accept the Government’s assurance of its necessity without making speeches which would only Jmvo delayed itg passage, AM It®

powers of opposition were used by the Labor Party. The Nationalists did not choose to resist a measure which the Government, having most in formation, declared was necessary, but they left the Government to take the responsibility for it. In all the circumstances that was a fair course to adopt. Tho responsibility, plainly, is not a light one. Tho argument for the Government, in effect, was that there was no merit whatever in the case of the Citizens’ Committee and disaffected Samoans, which was wholly tho result of selfish intrigues and agitation working on child-like minds, and the trouble must be stopped by tho strongest measures. The suggestion was that it would never have happened but for the discontent of some Europeans with the Prohibition law, and with action of tho Administrator which threatens to interfere with their profits on copra. Tho Administrator’s report states that tho request of tho natives that they should receive a higher price for their copra from merchants is entirely natural, because, while the natives have to pay post-war prices for their goods, that product is still paid for practically at pro-war rates. Natives of Fiji, Tonga, and other South Sea Islands get more for it than the Samoans, In Samoa also the same price is paid irrespective of quality, and that gives no inducement to'the natives to improve their product.

Causes which the Government indicates probably have had much to do with the present unrest; they may bo its chief incentives; but the case set forth is no more, at this stage, than the Government's case. The report of a commission, which it anticipates, would he a much better basis for action in "the future. Mr Rollcston, as At-torney-General, does not seem to us to have been happy in his defence of deportation as a policy, “Mr Holland,” he said, “had admitted that the position in Samoa was serious. Therefore it was evident that something must be done to put it right.” But if local banishment has been applied to chiefs for the Inst four years, and disaffection is more serious now than it was before that time, the intensilicntiou of that method would appear to offer quite the least chance of a remedy. It is denied that 90 per cent, of the Samoan people arc behind tho Citizens’ Committee. Let the proportion bo placed at only 20 per cent., and a wide field is presented for banishments. Punishments that can be inflicted, as ibc AttorneyGeneral described, without tho need of clear and explicit proof that the man who may ho punished is really guilty make no appeal to British ideas of justice. Mr Nosworthy referred to advisors who tell the people not to kill the rhinoceros beetle, which is an Island pest, not to clean up tlio villages, and not to pay taxes. Such offences should bo met by the severest penalties; hut it has not been publicly stated that chiefs who have been so far banished have been guilty of them, and it should not be impossible for them to he dealt with by the ordinary processes of law. “A too dictatorial and militaristic form of administration ” and “too much efficiency” have been postulated, from an impartial source, as contributories to the unrest in Samoa. A commission is urgently required to tell us whether those have been among its causes or not.