Restless Norfolk Island

New Laws and Regulations Arouse Pleas and Protests

IF events of the past month are any criterion, life in Norfolk Island is not quiet and placid, as the rest of the world supposes.

Judge Coyle was sent to N.I. in July to hear a case wherein C. C. R. Nobbs sued the Administrator, Captain C. R. Pinney, for £3000, alleged damages, on the ground that, in 1934, he was wrongly and unjustly removed from the office of president of the executive council. After a hearing extending over several days, judgment was given for the plaintiff for £2, and costs 39/6. Which was tantamount to saying that Mr. Nobbs had a genuine grievance, but it was in the £2 instead of the £3000 class.

During the month, the Commonwealth authorities have been bombarded with pleas and petitions.

The particular grievances to which at tention has been directed are: 1. That the new laws provided by the Norfolk Island Act, 1935, under which a new form of advisory council is authorised, deprives the residents of what little voice they previously had in the government of the island. 2. That the Federal Minister for Territories (Sir George Pearce) was only 24 hours on the island, when he went there

to inquire into residents’ grievances in March, and that he ignored the residents' representations and adopted, almost in toto, the recommendations of the officials. 3. That the men of the Norfolk Island Boating Company, which had serviced oversea vessels since the Pitcairners landed there in 1856, have been ruthlessly displaced from their livelihood by a new boating company, formed in 1934 under the close patronage of the Administrator —the latter company now working the steamers under licenses “granted to certain individuals.” (It appears that the Minister and the Administrator have both recommended the old boating company to amalgamate with the new one; but this the former refuses to do.) 4. That the introduction of new ordinances governing the publication a newspapers make it impossible now for the local newspaper to criticise the Administration.

Copies of the latter ordinances have been forwarded to us. The new laws appear generally to be exactly the same as the laws operating in New South Wales, where every publisher and printer of a periodical must give sureties against using his paper for purposes of blasphemy or sedition. But there has been added a provision that the publisher must give sureties satisfactory to the registrar for payment of “such damages and costs as may at any time thereafter be recovered against him in any action for printing or publishing any defamation libel in the newspaper.”

The effect of this is to place, in the hands of the Islands bureaucracy, the power to prevent the publication of an newspaper worthy of the name. No man in his senses, would give such a surety to a newspaper, which everlastingly is a target for irresponsible writ-issuers; and even if he did, the registrar has the power to refuse the surety and demand another one. Writing to us, the editor of the “Norfolk Island Times” says; “It would appear that this Ordinance is a deliberate attempt to stifle the expression of public opinion on the Island.

With such an interpretation of the ten ‘defamatory matter’ it becomes impossible to comment on any public or political matter in the way of criticism. In short we must publish nothing but what the Government and the local Administrator wish the people to know.”

The Macarthur Onslow incident of la

year showed that there is a quarrelsome and difficult section in the Norfolk Island population of 1000 or so, and that it is very ready to criticise the Administration and resist governmental authority. The

circumstances of that incident probably did more than anything else to create in Canberra a belief that the only way to keep peace on the Island would be to give the people a minimum of self government.

On top of that, there is the economic situation. For a number of reasons, for which no one is to blame, it is at present impossible to provide these people with an adequate market for their produce.

Many otherwise contented and quiet residents, finding themselves seriously embarrassed, therefore have joined the ranks of the agitators, and are ready to blame the Administrator for all their mis fortunes. This will die down when economic conditions improve.

Captain Pinney may have thought, three years ago, that he was receiving one of the “plums” of Pacific administra tion. Actually, he has been given a hornets’ nest.

But, with a full knowledge of the Nor folk Islanders’ peculiar temperament and unusual circumstances, and realising the special difficulties of administering an isolated community where petty intrigue and back-door chatter are recognised public amusements, one has the feeling that in N.I., to-day, the faults are not all on one side. The bureaucracy seems to be losing some of its benevolence, and becoming bad-tempered. That business of wiping out the 80-years’ old company of boatmen has a harsh look; and the extra ordinary act in relation to the publication of newspapers certainly has upon it all the marks of a peevish bureaucracy on the warpath. And when bureaucracy gets away with the bit between its teeth it is good-bye to the liberties of the people, of which newspapers, with all their faults, are the main safeguard.

One hesitates to comment on the N.I. situation, without knowing more of the

local situation and of the case for the defence. We know that difficult elements exist in the N.I. community, and we know that Captain Pinney is not the type of man to be turned easily into an oppressive or bull-headed tyrant. But he has been subjected to an unconscionable amount of economic worry and petty ir ritation and, under the stress of it, he may have forgotten the good manners he learned in Papua.

If the N.I. people really are oppressed, Canberra soon will hear of it, for there are many newspapers and persons in Australia always ready to have a crack at bureaucracy. The present regime in N.I. is likely to endure for another year so N.I. had better make the best of it: The N.I. people, before they really can get a hearing, have to live down the unfortunate reputation they gained for themselves as trouble-makers in the Macarthur-Onslow affair, last year.