INDUSTRIAL ANARCHY

Evening Star, Issue 25618, 19 October 1945, Page 5

INDUSTRIAL ANARCHY

GOVERNMENT'S INACTIVITY CONDEMNED MINERS’ PAPER ADDS VOICE TO CRITICISM (N.Z.P.A. Special Aust. Correspondent.; SYDNEY, October 18. The Prime (Minister, Mr J. B. Chifley, has comq in for severe criticism ,over the way' the Bunnerong dispute has been allowed to drift, but it is strange to find the miners’ paper adding its voice to this criticism when it is remembered that Sydney and other cities have suffered gas and electricity rationing because of the miners’ strikes. .

The official organ of the Miners’ Federation, ‘Common Cause,’ says: “ While Mr Chifley is touring around, the country and .refusing to see any reason for" his Government to intervene, shops in Sydney were using hurricane lamps, and the State’s basi: industries were either completely closed down or limping.’’ After urging high wages and better conditions for the workers, the paper adds:. “ If the Government continues to sit down with folded arms, then it will play into the hands of reactionaries, the position will drift from bad to worse, an economic crisis will come upon us, and the Government’s prestige will drop, with the workers looking desperately for an alternative.”

Addressing a Liberal Party convention, the Leader of the Federal Opposition, Mr R. G. Menzies, said that industrial lawlessness and anarchy were having an impact to-day on the whole industrial fabric of Australia. No Government could complain of industrial anarchy if it was prepared to see its laws treated with contempt. Mr Menzies said he shuddered at such a want of comprehension when he heard the Prime Minister sav that the industrial dispute in New South Wales was a State matter. To describe as a purely local matter an industrial disturbance

so devastatingly a matter of concern to the whole of Australia was grotesque, he said. In the .Legislative Assembly last night the Leader of the Opposition, Mr (R. W. D. Weaver, introduced a motion calling for immediate Government action to maintain industrial law and order. He strongly criticised the Federal Government’s "inactivity, saying it had earned the name of the “ Do Nothing Government.” Mr'Weaver said, the present disturbed state was due to a continued disregard for law by many unions, which knew that the'Labour Government in power would do nothing. “Nothing can be done unless it is granted by an organisation of law-breakers. By its continued apathy and disregard of its duty, the Government has ceased to rule,” he declared. Ministers applied to a union before doing this or that, and the unions decided what the public would do. Soon the public would have to apply to the Labour Council for the right to work. In reply, the'State Premier, (Mr W. J. McKell, said that Australia was not the only country with industrial unrest, and this present difficulty _wa» not a matter of Government inaction.