Agitators Threaten

Australia’S Export

Trade

It is amazing the extent to which we allow small and noisy minorities in Australia to make trouble for us.

An unassailable fact is that full employment in Australia depends, to a great extent, upon our export trade. Yet at this time, when every effort should be made by the Government, by the manufacturers and by the workers to see that nothing is allowed to interfere with legitimate export trade, a few Communists, using their power as executive officers in certain trade unions, have held up for months the shipment of valuable cargoes of Australian produce and manufactured goods.

Australia had an opportunity of supplying at least 20 million pounds worth of goods to the Netherlands Indies, but much of this trade has been lost. Orders have been cancelled owing to shipping and other delays caused by indus trial troubles.

For many years European and Indonesian Communists have been working in the Nether lands Indies to overthrow the Dutch Adminis tration and substitute a Communist dictatorship.

The present troubles there are to a great extent due to the subversive activities of these “Red Fascists’’ in the past.

Nationalist extremists in the Indies are a small but very noisy and very active minority.

They are lead by a Communist who collaborated with the Japanese during the enemy occupation of the Islands and who was appointed by the Japanese as president of the Indonesian Republic just prior to the Japanese surrender.

This is the man Australian Communists are supporting.

Before the Japanese invasion the Indonesian people were content and progressive under the moderate democratic Government of the Dutch whose wise and liberal colonial policy had made a show place of the Indies.

The Dutch Administration encouraged and fostered native enterprise in both industrial and agricultural spheres. Of 33 million acres of land under cultivation in Java, 30 V 2 million were tilled and harvested by the Indonesians themselves, the remaining 2V Z million acres only being in the possession of Dutch farmers, whilst in the other islands there were hardly any Dutch estates and none at all in Bali and Lombok.

Valuable assistance and advice was given by the Government Agricultural Administration to the native farmers, and they were assisted by the State in the marketing and export of their products. In 1936, seed farms were estab lished in numerous agricultural centres, and spectacular advances were made in the pro pogation of higher yielding varieties of rice.

Similarly, native textile and weaving projects were encouraged and assisted by the Govern ment. Medical services had been greatly im proved during the decade before the war, and education, at both schools and Universities, was accessible to the Indonesian, as well as the Dutch.

Then came the war and the occupation of the Islands by the Japanese, and the Liberal Government of the Dutch was swept out of existence, to be replaced by the martial law of the invaders. It was during this period that the Indonesian quisling, the present leader of the extremists, came into his own by throwing in his lot with the Japanese and assisting them against the Allies.

In return for this aid the Japanese furthered and supported the extreme nationalist movement of which this man is leader, realising, as the course of the war shattered their hopes of success, that in this way they might still retain a dominant influence in this rich market.

For reasons of both trade and security, it is important to Australia that neither Japanese nor Communist influences dominate the East Indies. One way in which all Australians can help in the democratic rehabilitation of the Indies is to see that shipments of goods urgently required by the Dutch are promptly loaded and despatched.

Contributed by the Consolidated Export

and Import Group of Australia.