Poverty Bay Herald

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume XIII, Issue 4489, 30 January 1886, Page 2

Poverty Bay Herald

PUBLISHED KVERY HV US I Sti

GISBOBNI, SATURDAY, JANUARY 80, 18S6.

THfi AUSTRALIAN COLONIES. The affairs of those colonies are of more direct interest to New Zealanders than are those of any other outlying portion of the Empire, partly because they are our next neighbors, and partly because there is more similarity in our circumstances ; and we have more or less close relationship with some of them. The recent drought in this Colony has given New Zealanders a greater capacity to sympathise with Australians in the terrible droughts with which the continent is so often afflicted. We made a great fuss here because there is slightly less than the usual rainfall dura few weeks, but non-travelled New Zealanders have little conception of what a drought means in Australia — months without a drop of rain, intense heat, a continually glaring sun, no shelter, and areas as big as New Zealand without the vestige of a shrub, and no rivers to speak of. We are incomparably better favored by Nature than Australia as to climate and moisture, and those even whoae experience ofthe continent is confined to the overland journey from Melbourne to Sydney know what a most painful sight at the end of a dry season is the hundreds of miles of parched and withered country without a particle of greenery and the river beds dry as an oven floor. A very short experience of the contrast afforded by Australia gives one an immensely increased love for New Zealand, and causes one to reflect what a splendid country it must be that it is able to withstand the utmost efforts of reckless politicians and financiers to ruin it. A drought that would ruin this Colony more completely than fifteen years of Vogeli3m is fairly well borne, say by New South Wales, which takes not a great deal of notico of the loss by drought of as many sheep as are in this Colony. Beginning with Queensland, we find that colony has put an end to the island labor traffic that was so little different to slavery, and has thus re-established herself in the eyes of the world. The awful atrocities committed in that traffic will stain Queensland's history for ever but she has made a grand effort and ended the shame, despite the utmost efforts of Northern sugar planters, who of cours 6 predicted the utter ruin of the country. It will practically end the sugar export of the oolony unless Coolie or other non-Enro« pean labor can be obtained, but thero ia

every hope that the great exertions of the planters in this direction will be successful. To their defeat in the labor traffic is du c agitationly the planters to get Northern Queensland made a separate colony, a movement the success of which is very doubtful, and which is against the federating tendencies of the age. Queensland is quite big enough to bo two large colonies, but if the sugar planters get separation tho rest of tho Empire would not stand renewed atrocities in the labor traffic, so that the sugar people should not attain their main end. An increasing professional politican class and a rapidly growing debt must make the more thoughtful Queenslanders as anxious for the future as some New Zealand colonists are. The Colony was lately threatened with an outbreak of cholera brought from fho Batavians, but prompt preventive action saved Australia from a visitation of the terrible scourge, whose ravages, however, in the newer and cleaner colonial towns would be much less than in filthy Spanish and Italian cities. New South Wales has tried to solvo a political difficulty by a dissolution and a general election, and has failed, parties being now so oven that nothing but the weakest Government can be formed, and there seems to bj no alternative to another early dissolution, as the conditions do not favor a coalition. That very old political stager, Sir Henry Parkes, has come to the surface again recently, but has not been able to get back to power, and Sir John Robertson, whose land policy was the law of the colony for so many years, wants to upset the recently passed great Land Act, which he will probably be too weak to do. Of course each side claims that its particular land policy is the most liberal and beneficial, and we at this distance are unable to say which is right and which wrong. We do know, though, that it is wrong to have a deficit of a million on the year's revenue, and the new Government, if they can keep on their legs, will have a big job to set; that matter straight. The Colony is enormously wealthy and its revenue is immense, but its borrowing lately has been very large, and it Bhows signs of out-Vogeling Yogel in raising loans. The country is seemingly wonderfully prosperous now, but a country borrowing somo five or six millions yearly could hardly look anything but prosperous, especially when a great land revenue is made a part of the ordinary income of Government, One cannot but remember the proverb that "all's well that ends well" when thinking of the circumstances of New South Wales, and the end is a long way off yet. The huge deficit is attributed to the droughts, but a very loose system of financing, due to abnormal and largely fictitious prosperity, is more likely to be the real reason. A satisfactory feature of the late general election waa the certainty it afforded of a continuation of the free-trade policy. Social life in Sydney is being mado to approximate more to that in the old world by a very wealthy nobleman who has been appointed Governor, and whoso seleotion is believed by many to be the beginning of 8 new policy, intended to have great social consequences, as to appointing Governors, at any rate to the two principal Australasian Colonies. Needy men have been mostly ohosen for Governors hitherto, and if Lord Carrington's appointment is what it ia stated to be it opens up a very large question | that affords much room for thought. The tendency would be to make the distinction between olasses, between rich and poor, more marked in theße colonies and more like old world conditions ; but with manhood suffrage and the broader life of new countries there is no danger whatever of our ever seeing out here the more distasteful features of those sharp class distinctions which most of us remember in England. It will be as impossible, for instance, to get colonial youths to wear floured hair as to get colonial girls to become such domestic servants as are seen in Europe. Lord Carrington will make social life gay at Sydney, and some of the "wealthy lower orders" there may imitate him, but he will never work a social revolution. In Victoria there is just occurring a break up of the Coalition Ministry that, in 1883, succeeded, after the interregum of the O'Loghlen Government, the violent party differences which had existed so many years. Then that great Liberal, Mr Graham Berry, who had promised " broken heads and flaming houses " as gentle hints to the Constitutional party who would not let him work out his mad schemes, again exemplified the lion and lamb notion and subsided into a mere subordinate of Mr Service's. He has run very placidly with Mr Service nearly for threo years, and now goes to London as the first Protectionist Agent-General from Victoria. His latter career is another wonderful proof of the sobering and moderating influences of age and experience ; the firebrand is now the decorus upholder of law and order ; the infuriate radical has calmed into a steady-going believer in the existing order of things. His experience will long point a moral and adorn a tale for young and ardent politicians who, by a sudden burst of fleeting popularity, are made to think they are going to set the world on fire. The Coalition Ministry is to be reorganised as there is no great question to divide parties, but there are signs that the Victorians are get. ting tired of the quiet monotony of Coalition, and will presently long and hanker for the fervid delights of party fighting. It is hard to see what great)question there will be to divide parties, unless it may possibly be an effort to put an end to Protection. Melbourne is wonderfully prosperous, as shown by the fact that strikes are plentiful — a pretty sure sign. But the advance of the country is not at all in keeping with the growth of the huge capital. Victoria, too, is borrowing at a tremendous rate. South Australia is more depressed than either of the colonies, and a deficit of three quarters of a million has led to a tariff that is very protectionist. The future of that colony is not very hopeful, and the present state of Adelaide is shown by the hundreds leaving weekly for Melbourne. If any colony goes broke South Australia has the best chance — considerably better than even New Zealand Protection will not enable it to make both ends meet, and its wool, wheat, and copper scarcely pay to export. It is little wonder that the state of things is des-

cribed as desperate, and that some colo nists are beginning to despond. Western A uatralia (a country as large as all Europe without Russia), with its 30,000 people, is beginning to aspire to have a Parliament and a big national debt, not knowing when it is well off. Its troubles will come quito soon enough — it will get its politicians and loans in due time, and when ouce got thoy will never be got rid of : so the colonists had better make the most of their remaining happy time. The country is being taken up in blocks somo of which are half as big as this island. Little Tasmania quietly jogs along, and is perhaps the most genuinely prosperous and happy of these colonies. One cannot but see with some regret that all the Colonies are now tending towards paying their politicians, and there seems to be a continual struggle which shall borrow fastest. Victoria and New South Wales are each about to attain their million of population, and Freetrade in the one Colony haa brought population of late years far faster than Protection has brought it to the other. The meeting of the Federal Council is a very great event in Australasian history, though three of the chief Colonies are standing out. The subject is too great to be dealt with now, but it may be remarked that the Council meeting has drawn from tho Tasmanian Premier a prediction of the independence of these Colonies which is as inevitable as fate, whatever sentimental elderly people may believe, but yet which is so distant that few of us now alive will survive to see it.