Vexed Question of Corporal

Control of Native Employees in New Guinea Vexed Question of Corporal Punishment

REPORTS have reached Australia that there is some discontent in New Guinea concerning the policy inaugur ated by the new Administrator in connec tion with the punishment of natives for minor offences. It is said that the pre sent Administration has re-established the “Wisdom” policy; and that, as a result, native labour generally is becom ing increasingly difficult to control, especially on the Morobe goldfields, where there are from 5000 to 7000 indentured labourers.

The crux of the problem is the right of the individual employer, or alternatively the minor official, to inflict corporal pun ishment. The New Guinea law, as it is now, forbids personal chastisement. If a native commits an offence he must be brought before officials of the Administra tion; and, if punishment is to be inflicted, it may be inflicted only at the order of a properly constituted court.

The present Administration says that that is the law and it must be obeyed.

The Griffiths Administration (1932-34) which was generally regarded as a com mon-sense Administration, did allow re sponsible employers and officials a certain amount of latitude in administering cor poral punishment; and the system worked admirably. Up to 1932, there was a growing and serious agitation in New Guinea regarding the system of dealing with native offenders and the amount of native crime of a petty character. Be tween 1932 and 1935 that discontent died out.

Conditions which were not envisaged by the law-makers, and not provided for in the laws relating to the control of na tive labour, have to do with the character of the native labourers themselves.

Generally speaking, the natives are not moved by criminal inclinations. But, definitely, as they get over their first awe of the white man and his equipment, they are inclined to be cheeky, and to rebel against simple discipline; and if their cheekiness is not checked it becomes in solence of a dangerous kind, and may lead to criminal offences.

These primitive natives have no under standing of the intricacies of law and of law courts. They can quite easily be taught that there are certain things they may not do; and, if they once understand that when they are cheeky, or lazy, or deceitful, or commit petty theft, or fail to show necessary respect to white men and

women, they will promptly receive a smart cut across the buttocks with a cane, they will behave themselves.

But when a system is imposed under which the New Guinea employer is forced to take a lazy, or impudent, or disobedient servant to a law court for punishment; and when that circumlocutory method ends, at the worst, in the native receiving a term in the calaboose, the system of maintaining discipline among native labourers tends to break down. Its break down becomes inevitable when the term in the calaboose means merely confinement, with perhaps a little hard labour thrown Under the Griffiths system, pack drill was introduced in the native prisons.

Calaboose, which meant to the native no thing much under the Wisdom regime, became a serious matter when it included pack drill, carried out under the ferocious eye of a native policeman. Under the Griffiths regime, a white employer was not threatened with divers pains and penalties if he boxed the ear of an impu dent house-boy; and if the white em ployer found that he could not control his native employee and took him to a court for punishment, he knew that that na tive would really be punished, and not left to play about more or less happily in a prison yard.

It is reported that pack drill has been practically abolished in New Guinea prisons and that police wallahs are out on the war-path after every minor official and white employer who so much as smacks a native servant. This has not made for satisfactory labour conditions — at the goldfields end of New Guinea, at any rate.

But we predict something worse than the discontent of white employers. Up until the end of 1932, with growing fre quency, there were reports of approaches being made to white women by natives, and, in a distressing number of cases, assaults actually took place. For the last two or three years there have been no reports of such unpleasant incidents. But if discipline is being weakened in the manner indicated it is as certain as the sunrise that there will be a renewal of the unpleasant incidents to which we have referred.

Mr. E. V. O'Brien, owner of Miliat Plantation at Madang, returned to New Guinea from Sydney at the end of January.

Major Clive B. Joske, of Suva, Fiji, has been appointed by the King of Norway to be a Chevalier, First Class, of the Royal Order of St. Olaf, in recognition of his services as Norwegian Consul. Two other decorations recently conferred on Mr.

Joske were Officer of the Order of the British Empire (Military) and Officer of the Legion of Honour, France.