FIJIAN INDIGNATION

Waikato Times, Volume 92, Issue 14259, 9 January 1920, Page 2

FIJIAN INDIGNATION

PROFITEERING IN FLOUR. f AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND j ASSAILED. We in Fiji feet very much the imnelghbourly acts of Australia- and New Zealand in the matter of differences in prices (writes the Suva correspondent of the Sydney Daily Telegraph). We resent the fact that we as a kindred portion of the Empire are placed on a lower level titan the German of Rab.iul by Australia and the German of Sam m by i\evv /.ealand. We hear a great deal of the brotherly affection felt for Fiji by Australia and New Zealand, how we are all fellow kinsmen, members of the one Empire, devotees of the one Motherland, living under one Hag. The whole atmosphere is flooded with platitudes and tears of affection. But while the voice is that of Jacob the hands are those of Esau. It will come as a shock to our people to know that all those who eat local bread are helping to pay off the Australian war debt at the rale of id a loaf, and the war debt of New Zealand at the rate of id a loaf. Yet such is a fact. The fact may be called oy some other name, but it hurts just the same. The price to-day of flour from Australia is £lB 15s, f.0.b., Sydney. That is what it costs the Fiji baker, plus freight and landing charges. The Australian baker can get all the flour he wants at £l3 10s. That Is, £5 5s less than the Fiji baker can start baking at, or Id per loaf >n the Customs’ return of flour imported for the year. The New Zealand baker gets his flour at £ls 10s, while the Fiji man has to pay £lB 7s 6d f.0.b., Auckland. As there is a difference in freight between New Zealand and Australia of 12s Gd a ton, the Fiji baker can land flour here from New Zealand at 20s less than he can from Australia. Australian wheat is very largely used m making the New Zealand flour. The Commonwealth Government is selling wheat for flour for local consumption at £5 5s less -than wheat for exported flour. The millers, we are informed, are not the profit makers. It is actually the Government which is profiteering. While the Government is posing before the electors as the enemy of profiteering, it is a sinner of a bad type itself. We can understand Australia -selling w-heat to foreign countries at a higher rate than locally, but we candidly cannot understand her attitude in talking platitudes, denouncing profiteering, proclaiming her comradeship for other parts of the Empire, her desire for a Customs’ union with Fiji, while all the time she is penalising the colony in the most mercenary way possible—in a way which hits every man, woman, and child in Fiji. The same applies in every way to New Zealand, which has camouflaged her profiteering under the smug and evil term of "bonus.” The Fiji baking industry is suffering heavily from this profiteering. Bread has risen, not by reason of ordinary yeast, but because of the yeast of veiled hostility. So dear is bread that ithe natives who are at ordinary times largely bread caters cannot afford it, and have fallen back cn native foods. So, less flour is required for Fiji, and the revenue is suffering. I am glad - to see that the Sydney Chamber of Commerce has taken the matter in hand. Such a big injustice is causing a very sore feeling in Fiji, where over a third of the whites are Australians.