The Hawera Star. FRIDAY, MARCH 9, 1928. THE DARWIN BOYCOTT.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVII, 9 March 1928, Page 4

The Hawera Star.

FRIDAY, MARCH 9, 1928. THE DARWIN BOYCOTT.

Delivered every evening by 6 o'clock in Hawera. Manaia. Normanby, Olcaiawa. Elthnm, Ma.ngatoki. Kaponga, Alton, Ilurleyville Patea, Waverley. Mokoia. Whakamara, Ohangai, Meremere. Fraser Road, and Ararata.

AVc have frequently said..that one of the chains tied about the feet of official Labour in this Dominion and in Australia is its complete lack of any sense of proportion, but to this charge against the rank and file, if not against the leaders, might be added another they suffer intensely from a lack of any sense of the ridiculous. As for the leaders, they may be as quick as the next man to perceive humorous situations of their own creating, but it is not their business to remark upon them. Even some of the most serious hold-ups in industry would have their comical side if their results were not so disastrous to those who would otherwise enjoy the absurd dignity and ill-logical reasoning from which they rise. But, according to recent Australian papers, an outbreak ,of ' ‘Labouritis” occurred in the Northern Territory which displayed typical Labour methods at their worst with no harmful results to anybody—except maybe to the proprietors of hotels whoso returns diminished for a time. The Northern Territory, it is well known, and Darwin particularly, is not typical of Australia as a whole, nor arc its inhabitants all genuine Australians. The Territory harbours a polyglot population, including Greeks, Russians and Japanese, and other foreigners from Southern Europe and Asia are conspicuous. Darwin is recognised as a particularly hot spot on the map of Australia for more reasons than one. But the workers there are alive to the fact that these are days of progress, that Labour has a dignity of its own,' and means of obtaining recognition of its status which are also .peculiarly its own. Therefore Darwin is no stranger to the go-slow, the boycott and others of Labour’s favourite weapons. It is true that the workers do not get opportunities similar to the Sydney watersiders to draw upon themselves the spotlight of publicity; there are no intercolonial liners to held up while one of the stokers goes ashore to see a man about a dog; State governors seldom if ever hold luncheon parties on board ship there, thus depriving the cooks and stewards of an opportunity to give Darwin a free advertisement. But when Darwin does get its opportunity it certainly seizes it. The latest to come the way of the local Trotskies and Lenins was provided by a dispute between the workers and the hotel proprietors regarding the conduct of hotels generally and the price charged for beer particularly. Whether an earnest effort was really made to settle th» difference of opinion existing between the men who had to finance the operations of the hotel business on the one hand and the worker 0 who wanted cheap beer, on the other, we do not know, but we do know that Labour set its organisation to work and instituted a boycott. Everything was done upon the .most approved lines. An edict went forth that certain hotels were to be considered “black.” Now, there are certain serious differences between declaring “black” a steamer and an hotel. In the case of the former the worker may lose his wages; his family may know the pinch of want and merchants and traders removed by hundreds of miles from the scene of the dispute anay suffer serious loss. But when all hotels are placed out of bounds in such a place as Darwiu things are bound to happen. The boycotters became restive under the tropic sun and soon there were murimirings in favour of more conciliatory methods of bringing the hotelkeepers to see the light of reason. A mass meeting was called and it was there made evident that all the workers, with the exception of a band of twenty, had weakened in their resolve. However, the lessons of the Russian revolution had not been in vain, for the small group of die-hards took it upon themselves to decide that the unpopular course of continuing the boycott was in the best interests of the rank and file, though .the latter might fail to sec it in quite that light. A man who proposed that ’ the meeting should employ a secret ballot was ejected from the meeting; then .the police were ejected, and the “people’s representatives, ’ ’ the self-constituted Soviet Council, ruled unmolested. But the triumph of force was short-lived and reason conquered, for it was discovered during the proceedings that the union secretary had had a drink at a “black” hotel. That sounded the death-knell of Labour’s boycott of the Darwin hotels. We need not dwell on the concluding scenes, for they are easily imagined. But this comedy of tropic heat and Labour principles, with its tragedy centred in the idol whose feet of clay lias had its counterpart in other and graver industrial troubles.