How Australia Is Penalising New Guinea
p. 28 · Read in the full issue
Spoiled Natives And Harassed Planters Letter to the Editor
fpALKING of black marketeers and their X nefarious tactics: they seem to be gentlemen compared with our own Commonwealth Government of Austra lia!
For instance, quite a number of public servants, plantation owners, etc., returned to Papua and New Guinea recently, to pick up the threads of their life’s work where they left them in 1941. Instead of their mother government taking a paternal interest in them, she treats them
like foreigners.
For example, she puts a prohibitive ex port duty on the flour and sugar which she exports from Australia to her citizens in the Territories, to wit: 75 per cent., on top of which the said citizens have to pay 10 per cent, ad valorem customs im port duty before they can get delivery up here.
Again, these perfectly good Australian colonists do not receive the benefit of the stabilised price of tea, as they did when
in Australia. Tea cost them 2/31 per lb. down there; but it now costs them 4/9 per lb. here!
The price of Australian rice, in bags, purchased from the Army, used to be £2B per ton. Now it is £42 per ton, and we are told it will be £5O per ton after the next shipment from Australia, which is due here in a day or two. Who is getting the extra cash—l’ll wager it is not the Aussie producer!
YOU will, perhaps, recollect that when Mr, Chifley was in London recently, he vehemently announced that when he returned to Australia he was going to look into the edible oil and fat position, to see how much more the Australian public could send the Mother Country.
Mr. Ward, in his zeal to see that “Fuzzy Wuzzy” was not going to be exploited by these greedy Aussie planters, evidently pulled the wool over Mr. Chifley’s eyes— as far as Papua and New Guinea were concerned, at any rate—because he promptly caused all the contracts of ser vice entered into by “Fuzzy Wuzzy” with ANGAU during the past couple of years, to be cancelled—notwithstanding that ANGAU recruited this labour for the Australian planters at £4 per head. These fees evidently entered the coffers of Ward’s External Territories’ Department per medium of that Department’s pros perous baby—the Production Control Board.
It doesn’t seem to matter to Mr. Ward or to his autocratic Canberra bureau crats, that if they did the decent thing by Britain, and got all of the copra rot ting in Papua and New Guinea out, it would mean an extra ounce of vegetable fat per person, per day, in the United Kingdom. But, oh dear no! Britain can go hang while Fuzzy Wuzzy is told to go home, and be damned to the copra and rubber plantations.
But that is not all. The closing down of the coconut plantations in Papua and New Guinea means the closing down of the crushing mills, refineries, soap and margarine factories in Sydney and the throwing out of work of thousands of Australian workers and taxpayers.
MR. EDITOR, pay a visit to Levers’ and other copra crushers, margarine and soap manufacturers in Sydney, and see for vourself how much copra they have on hand and how little vegetable fat and soap is available for the Austra lian consumer, let alone for shipment overseas. Why?
We have just been told that the export of soap from Australia to these Territories has been prohibited, because of the short age down there! Just verify these facts for yourself and see what an awful mess Canberra bureaucrats are getting Aus tralia and these Territories into.
I as an Australian Serviceman and-an onlooker for the past 27 months in New Guinea, am thoroughly disgusted with what I have seen since the advent of Civil Administration. The natives were con tented and happy under ANGAU and the military regime. But they are not so now.
They are in a constant state of turmoil, wondering whether the present Govern ment wants them to work or not.
I have no axe to grind but, being a plain Aussie who has fought Nazism in the recent war, I hate to see good Colonies ruined by meddling bureaucrats and would-be dictators from afar I intended seeking employment in New Guinea upon my release from service But conditions have altered so much up here during recent months that I have changed my mind about staying on as a civilian.
I am, etc.,
Madang, NG. 10/7/’46.