High Exchange

Beneficial to Planters

Chance For Australia To

Regain Islands Trade

Written for the Pacific Islands Monthly by Mr. G. H. Robinson, Managing Director of Messrs. McLeod, Bolton and Co. Ltd.

ALTHOUGH to the majority of importers in Australia the re cent big increase in the rate tof ex change on London, or decrease in the value of Australian money abroad, to the extent of £30/10/per cent., is something in the na ture of a calamity, yet to planters in those island groups served by Australian Government subsidised steamers, it should be a matter for considerable rejoicing.

It will give to plantation owners and exporters, who are in a position to seize and make good the opportunity, a means of reaping an unexpected har vest, which will go towards counter balancing the loss they have incurred by the steady decline in the world prices of their products.

It will also provide a unique chance for Australian manufacturers to regain their lost trade with those territories, for, whereas island merchants and traders would have to pay £130 in Lon don or on the Continent for £100 worth of goods, they will be able to buy the same goods in Australia for about £106. It might be thought that the cost of imported goods in Australia would be correspondingly the new rate of exchange, but this is not the case. Due to the depression and the accumulation of stocks whole sale prices are low at the present time.

Australia’S Lost Trade.

Many of us have watched, with in creasing dismay, the steady decline during the past ten or fifteen years in trade relations between Australia and the Islands. There were reasons for this, as there are reasons for all such adverse movements of trade, and it would take more than a few words to summarise them.

The Navigation Act, with its conse quent restriction of shipping and high cost of such services, the blind restric tions and high cost of handling copra on the wharves and the definite exclu sion by tariffs of other island products represent but the wellspring of an ignorant legislature and its satellites of uninterested officials. However we have to be thankful that out of the present slough of despondency, caused by Australia’s mismanagement, an op portunity has arisen.

The ill-wind of Australia’s misgo ernment and over-borrowing abroad will blow somebody some good. The drainage of Australia’s commercial channels of expenditure will have a re flex in an advantage to island produc ers and to Island trade with Australia.

As those shipping through Aus tralia will have their money available fer expenditure sooner, and that money will buy more here than abroad, conditions certainly seem to favour a return to pre-war times, when, as is well-known, Sydney was the entrepot for trade with the Islands.