MAN WHO RAISED MILLIONS.

Otago Witness, Issue 3853, 17 January 1928, Page 75

MAN WHO RAISED MILLIONS.

SPENDS THREE DAYS IN GAOL. ANOMALIES IN MAINTENANCE LAWS. SYDNEY, January 5. Thousands of people in Australia know George Dash by sight—a stout figure, an interesting, attractive-looking man, in early ’forties—and nearly everybody knows him by name. For in the war years George' Dash was much in the public, eye, as the chief organiser of the big Commonwealth loans; and since the war he has also assisted in organising various Commonwealth loans running into millions of money. He was reputed to have received a large salary, plus commission, and was thought to be very well off financially. But he appears to have fallen upo n evil days, for he has just spent three days in Long Bay gaol for failing to comply with a maintenance order for the support of his wife and family. He has written an account of his experiences in gaol for Smith’s Weekly, and incidentally draws attention to a curious anomaly in the maintenance laws.

“ At the age of 41, in the midst of a career which has made my name known throughout Australia,” he writes, “ I have just left the walls of a prison. . . . I thought that confinees such as myself, the sport of maintenance orders and of fortune, who had committed no crime in the ordinary sense, would endure the mercies of a debtors’ prison, a sort of second-rate boarding house. I thought I would be allowed to wear my own clothes, have meals sent into me, amuse myself, enjoy even the prehistoric comforts of the Marshalsea of Dickens’s day. How cruelly wrong these fancies were I discovered on my first day in Long Bay gaol. The first night I certainly slept in my own clothes after a search that would have flattered Arsene Lupin. But next morning gaol began in earnest. A pan of unsugared, unmilked ’corn meal and half a loaf of bread were pushed at me. Then someone gruffly ordered me to march with a squad of other newly-con-victed ‘ criminals ’ to the clothes- store, where we were all arrayed in coarse grey uniforms, numbered all over, blucher boots, and cabbage tree hats. If only my immaculate friends could have seen me as I stood then, the complete gaol bird! • • • Gaol, although scrupulously clean, is as devoid of comfort as a billiard ball is of feathers. Every device that human ingenuity can invent to remove comfort is utilised. Loss of liberty is. bad enough, but a man never has the slightest conception of what gaol means until he is actually a prisoner. The only pleasant recollection I have of the place is the wonderful brotherhood of the prisoners.”

From this it would appear there is something wrong with th e statement that the Labour Party had made gaol a very pleasant place to be in, with plenty of interesting lectures, concerts, and so on. But to get back to the story:—‘‘l chummed up with a poor ‘ confinee ’ who has spent three years in gaol, with his maintenance order mounting up all the time. To-day. the arrears amount to over £400,„ and his gaol pay is about Is a day! ” What chance, he asks, has a man of paying off his arrears? “ Surely there is something wrong with a law which allows a wife, by a scratch of a pen, to plunge her husband into unending misery like this. Surely there is something wrong with a system which orders a husband to maintain his wife at a certain fixed rate, and then debars him from ear | n ’pg more than Is a day to pay it

What Mr Dash—who was fortunate enough to find a “ millionaire,” whose name, given as J . W , can be readily guessed, sympathetic enough to come to his rescue—loses sight of is the plight of the wife and family of young children. How does he propose to deal with the problem of the poor wives who ai© not being maintained ? Whichever way one looks at it, the question is not an easy one to solve.