War Time Planning In Australia

Southland Times, Issue 24106, 20 April 1940, Page 15

War Time Planning In Australia

PLANNING FOR WAR AND PEACE. By B. S. B. Stevens. Angus and Robertson, Sydney. Price 3/6.

The former Premier of New South Wales deals lucidly with Australia’s war problems in this stimulating book. After analysing the Commonwealth’s present war effort—and finding it inadequate—he presents a case for credit expansion. But he insists that financial remedies must not be applied haphazardly. “. . . A safe measure of credit expansion,” he writes in a key passage, “can be brought about only by an accurate pre-knowledge of what physical

resources are progressively to be transferred to the Government’s use—in other words through the operation of a national plan.” The interaction, and sometimes the conflict, of State and Commonwealth interests has created special problems for Australia, and to this extent Mr Stevens’s theories have a restricted scope. But the book is important as one of the first really constructive criticisms of war policy, and Mr Stevens’s wide experience in public affairs gives weight to his opinions. His chapter on post-war reconstruction could be studied with interest and profit in New Zealand as well as in Australia.