THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS FRIDAY, DECEMBER 23, 1927. THE AUSTRALIAN STATES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19827, 23 December 1927, Page 10

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS FRIDAY, DECEMBER 23, 1927. THE AUSTRALIAN STATES.

One after another the weaker Australian States, where the population relative to area is smallest, have found under federation that life has grown increasingly difficult. Western Australia has felt and expressed financial grievances so deeply that secession from the Commonwealth has been openly advocated. Those who would secede to cure their grievances are prevented from airing the device as anything more than a theoretical remedy because they cannot find any practical way of carrying out their threat, and because they cannot show how their conditions would be any better if they did. There may be good cause to wonder, as one student did after examining the facts, why Western Australia ever joined the Commonwealth ; yet, the step having been taken, to retrace it is not a practical possibility. Tasmania, too, has grievances of a substantial kind, complicated because of the stretch of water dividing the island State from the others. Tasmania has not suggested secession, but has called for Federal aid in her financial straits; called so loudly and with such cause that special help has been given. Now another voice has joined the chorus of discontent, saying bluntly that federation, so far as South Australia is concerned, has been a failure. A contrast is drawn between the prosperity of the eastern States, where manufactures have been established, and the struggles of the west, where primary industry predominates. This situation, says South Australia, will create "a spirit of resentment which might even endanger the federation."

Federation of the Australian colonies,, though achieved only after long years of negotiation, with many failures preceding the eventual success, was a logical, in one sense an inevitable, step. At least some method of unification was. Without it the term "Australian" had no real meaning, the progress possible to united effort could not begin, the several communities with so many interests in common might easily have drifted far apart when every dictate of common sense and sentiment demanded that they should come together. Allowing the difficulties and discontents that have followed their union, there is still much to be credited to federation. It received its most significant vindication in the magnificent war effort which united all Australia in an en deavour that won the admiration of the world. It is impossible to conceive that the States, as independent entities, could have done what Australia then did. Yet, in the more prosaic but none the less vital tasks of peace, there are problems which do not yield readily to solution. They are in essence financial and legal. Under the constitution by which the rights and powers of State and Federal authority are defined, cases for adjudication are constantly recurring. Since the whole field of taxation is divided between these two agencies the spheres which each shall occupy and the method of dividing the yield have created many problems. Finance has been the dominating difficulty of both Western Australia and Tasmania. Each has had to be granted special relief by the Federal authority to allow State taxatior to be reduced from a level which threatened ruin to industry. If, as is now indicated. South Australia is to be an applicant for similar assistance, the Federal Treasurer will find his task g v ow increasingly delicate' and onerous.

While South Australia emphasises primarily its own disabilities, there is a deep significance in the point already quoted, in which contrast is drawn between east and west. This bears on one of the most con tentious sections of Federal policy, the high protective tariff. It has been attacked as penalising the country for the benefit of the cities. If that charge is correct it also favours some of the States in much greater degree than the rest. The secondary industries are almost all located in New South Wales and Victoria. There the people whose occupations are sheltered by the tariff live, there they create a market for the products of primary industry, and give to the country some compensation for the high duties paid on many necessaries of life. The westei'n States, because of isolation and long haulage, Tasmania because of sea freights, do not gain any great ad-

vantage from this home market. Yet they feel the effects of the tariff to the full. The Federal Tariff Board itself has admitted the point as touching Western Australia, but its remarks are applicable also to South Australia and Tasmania. Reporting in 1924 it said: "Whatever additional cost the policy of protection may add to tiie price of goods and material imported by the Australian consumer, the citizens of the eastern States gain as a compensating advantage the presence of a large production and manufacture. Such is not the case in Western Australia, which is so placed that at present it has to bear whatever burden may arise under the protectionist tariff without reaping any accompanying advantages." Realisation of this seems to be creating in Australia a situation akin to that existing in Canada between the industrial east and the prairie west. It arises under federation, though not inherent in federation. Yet it creates between States a line of demarcation in prosperity sharply enough drawn to make South Australia declare federation a failure.