AUSTRALIA’S DEPRESSION

Waipa Post, Volume 42, Issue 3304, 2 June 1931, Page 6

AUSTRALIA’S DEPRESSION

HOW LONG WILL IT LAST ?

• There are all sorts of prophets and prophecies. There is the female prophet who unsuspectingly tells a policewoman’s future, yet cannot foretell her own appearance in the Police Court. There is the prophet who sells you in a sealed envelope a tip for a classic race, and is too contemptuous of wealth to make his own fortune by backing his own tips. There is the mystic-prophet who puts his prophecies in such a cryptic way that only his disciples can tell what he means—and then only after the happening of the event. But the most subtle and delightful, and withal most courageous, prophet of all is Mr Freeman, P.M. (comments the Melbourne Argus). He has prophesied the end of the depression, and has given practically the exact date. It is four months off. He did not read it in a tea-cup or pass it on in a sealed envelope. His novel method was to award several vagrants four months’ gaol, exJplaining that he had decided upon that lenient period so that they might be released when work was likely to be available. Not everybody believes the depression will end in a few months. Some think it will go on for years, and others that it will go on for ever. Many pessimists declare that they will not believe that the end of the depression has come until the Federal Ministry balances its Budget. How lucky it is for those vagrants that Mr Freeman, P.M., is not one of these. If he had been a pessimist instead of an optimist those luckless chaps who were sentenced to be imprisoned until the rising of the clouds of depression might have remained in gaol for the rest of their lives.