Unhappy Conditions In New Guinea

Anonymous Writer Outlines Impressive Practical Policy For ‘Cinderella Territories’

Letter to the Editor

FOR the most part, the New Guinea Europeans are a likeable crowd— I’ve worked, fought, drunk and played with them for nearly fifteen years—but they are not in the tropics for their health, they are little better informed on fundamental New Guinea problems than the average man in Aus tralia, and their ideas on the country’s future start and finish with the neces sity for a cheap, plentiful and docile supply of native labour.

Incidentally, I’ve long since learned that mere length of residence in the Territory is no criterion of knowledge— it hasn’t even taught many of the old timers to speak decent Pidgin.

At present, your views on New Guinea would seem to be as follows: (a) Strategic considerations necessitate Papua-New Guinea being developed as an Australian bastion against future Asiatic aggression. (This cannot be dis puted). (b) This development can best be achieved by energetic young Australians operating as free private enterprise as sisted by native labour. (c) The world is crying out for edible fats and produce, which P-NG can pro duce in appreciable quantities if given the chance.

(d) Government’s function is to main tain law and order and promote social services, but above all to facilitate development by free enterprise, the revenues from which can make the coun try even more flourishing than was TNG (allegedly) prior to the war. (e) The interests of the primitive stone-age native population can best be served by hitching their waggons to the star of private enterprise. In this way they will acquire our civilisation and its concomitant skills, and at some decently remote date will automatically rise to

social and economic levels sufficiently high to warrant their being granted some measure of political responsibility. (f) The above programme has been completely disrupted—firstly, by the war, and then by the advent of the Socialist- Labour regime at Canberra, whose ill chosen Territorial Minister, Ward, has made New Guinea the victim of his per sonal Left Wing prejudices and a test ing-ground for the ideas of woolly anthropological and Socialist theorists who are his advisers. (g) Accordingly, native interests have been made supreme, private enterprise has been strangled by bureaucratic red tape, starved of supplies, and ham-strung by foolish native labour legislation. The development of the country has been brought to a stand-still and a state of affairs produced which can only be cured by a change in Government.

If that is a fair summary of your views, PIM, then you are either grossly dishonest, or just as woolly as the arm chair theorists you deride.

NOW let us get down to some cold, uncomfortable facts. The retention and development of NG is vital to Australia. If we don’t do it, then, sooner or later, the Asiatics will. Thus far we have hardly scratched the surface.

NG is the only country in the world which apparently can be developed with out constructing roads and railways.

Apart from the New Ireland East Coast road (a German job) and the Wau-Labu nightmare (which opens up little agri cultural land) there is not a develop mental road in the country.

Any idea that NG can be developed by air transport is arrant nonsense. No industry, save gold, can stand air-freight charges, and the country’s future lies not m gold but in agriculture. Admittedly, much of the terrain precludes road building, but there are still tens of thou sands of acres of fertile land lying idle which could readily be made accessible.

This lack of transport not only makes the per capita cost of administration one of the heaviest of any colony in the world: it also prevents the establishment, in areas adjacent to labour supplies, of the variegated capital enterprises essen tial to economic stability; and finally— for all the rubbish talked about a New Order—it effectively bars the bulk of the native population from ever playing the substantial role they mustyif the islands are to remain ours and theirs.

NG is an agricultural country, but is not making the slightest effort even to support itself in foodstuffs. Two of the most serious problems facing employers are the shortage of supplies and the ter rific cost.of imported foods. The ship ping-space position would be consider ably eased, and the planters’ overhead considerably reduced, if that food were grown within the Territory, as it should be.

Meantime, instead of tackling these problems of transport and food produc tion, Government policy (sic) seems to be concentrated on over-loading the country with staff which can’t even be housed, let alone gainfully employed.

NO one taut a pipe-dreaming Socialist would dispute that introduced capi tal in the form of commercial enterprise is an essential to NG’s devel opment; but it is equally false to believe that this development can be achieved by the colonial plantation system alone.

Such theories have been already well tried and found wanting in other colonies —the West Indies and the Netherlands Indies are cases in point.

In NG, the theory breaks down right at the jump when considered in terms of man-power—white and black—alone.

We haven’t the white man-power willing and able to develop tropical Australia, let alone NG. In the TNG of 1940, after nearly sixty years of settlement, there were only 272,000 acres (less than y 2 per cent, of the total area) under planta tion cultivation—most of it planted up in German times in a few constricted areas.

Control of the majority of these holdings has long since passed into the hands of the Big Firms, and no one can maintain that a plantation system run by hired managers, with absentee shareholders as the real landlords, ever provided a sound basis for genuine agricultural settlement anywhere.

And even if we had large numbers of your Australians anxious to become yeoman settlers, and a Government will ing to assist them (we have neither), the development of plantation agricul ture under present methods still depends on an adequate supply of native labour.

Sufficient labour is not available; but the underlying reasons for its scarcity in volve much more than the blunderings of Government policy under the Wardist regime, THE native .labour supply in TNG was inadequate for that Territory’s needs in 1940, when 40,000 in dentured labourers were employed. Most of the accessible tribal areas had then been tapped, many had been closed to prevent the complete disappearance of man power from the villages, and future de velopment depended largely on recruiting labour from the limited new areas which

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were left. Those areas did not include the highlands, whose population (at least a third of the total) have no acquired immunity to malaria and hence cannot be brought to the coast.

The manpower available has always been used wastefully. There has been no attempt, either by Government or

o d T lop meohani appliances with the object of replacmg large staffs of unskilled labourers by luuefme" ° f Sk “ ]ed Seml ' C nf Pr tronf^ S i tr S rU ? est . pr 9 ductlon rirvfn?) d im lm P r °ve it™* ° n • 5 mple +- 6 ™ Q P lon J eil]l S condia i pr °duction needs w l « 7Cl apH met ii^nfo^ numb iL rs - °f labour^ 00 ’ unsK:llled and inefficient , ng planters fe now discovering that ,'° nger so . cheap or so n ° th S g to Meantime, the Governments unbalanced new labour legislation is ensuring that no indentured plantation labourer shall h t ave an y opportunity of acquiring any s 4. i u . . , ? he c^ rent ] ahouv shortage is here to Th eie is ample official evidence t ?l at 1 the natlve population was declining c SIU mP 6 h S i^ a - r P ly the war, and is still declining. Chief causes of this are introduced diseases— Particularly influenza and other respiratory complaints—and the slow breakdown oi tribal life under the impacts of Government pacification, mission evangelising, and labour recruiting. This decline will continue until the living standards of village natives are raised, which cannot be done by denuding the villages of manpower. 4.x, 4l^ URTHERMOR E, the natives are " primitive subsistence gardeners who have never been dependent on wageearning to live and, generally speaking, have ne v? r been keen on exchanging the comparative freedom of village life for the steady work and discipline of the plantation.

Except for the war, forced labour has

been “out” since German times, and would not be a solution even if it were acceptable to international opinion.

Prior to the war some economic pressure was applied in the form of native taxa tion. Since the war, there has been less incentive than ever to work for wages, and the efficiency of labour has sunk from even its modest pre-war level.

Natives are holding large sums of cash and, under the present crazy system of war-damage payments, have still to receive large sums. For reasons best known to itself the Government is mak ing no effort to use this money for native advancement. Most of it is finding its way into the tills of thievish trade-store keepers who, in return, hand out junk at scandalous prices.

Added to all this, native opinion is becoming increasingly critical of the Government and of Europeans generally.

For good or ill, they saw a lot during the war, they placed their own inter pretation on it and, irrespective of what party is in power in Canberra, native mentality can never be reverted to what some of us like to think it was in 1940.

Large groups are beginning to demand education and economic advancement.

Communist agitators are already exer cising some influence on the Papuan coast.

READING the utterances in your journal one is led to think that the Wardist regime is pursuing an active policy in NG aimed at getting rid of the whites and uplifting the native.

Well, having just emerged from the thick of it, I maintain that there is no policy operating. The Administrator is a dignified professor, with no previous experience of the problems of colonial administration, who thinks all ills can be cured by speaking to the natives nicely. His Moresby advisers include too many doddering old-timers' without a

constructive idea between them; and his Canberra bosses, headed by J. R. Hal llgan, the tycoon of the effete External Territories Department, are simply a bunch of Commonwealth Public Service clerks quite ignorant of the special prob lems involved. Ward himself, having applied his Left Wing prejudices to the Native Labour Ordinance, is now no longer interested.

For all the talk of native welfare, there are few visible signs of it, and the natives are becoming more politically-minded, more impatient and more suspicious every year.

WHAT has to be done, then? Briefly, the Territory has to be developed, and, if events in South-East Asia are any guide, it has to be developed fast.

It is just as foolish to believe that this development can be effected by an ex pansion of the present plantation system as it is to maintain that the natives were enslaved and brutally. exploited before the war.

Continuing pre-war methods, the only way development could be stepped up would be by importing Javanese or Asiatic labour —and we don’t have to look further than Fiji to see the results of that course.

How, then, can the problem be tackled?

Here are some suggestions:— • Encouragement of capital enterprise —with Government subsidising if necessary—to grow food, including meat and rice, for local consump tion. • Subsidised research into the develop ment of mechanical appliances for copra production. • Movement of populations (at present on the road to extinction) living in bad country which has no agricultural future, to selected sites adjacent to the present planted-up areas, where, conditions being suitably safeguarded, they could make a good living wage earning. • Government and planters to co operate in setting up technical train ing centres in plantation areas where labourers could be taught the rudi ments of some technical skills. • A ten-years programme of road and/ or railway construction to make selected fertile and reasonably-popu lated inland areas accessible from the coast—it will cost millions but there is no alternative.

• Government encouragement of capital enterprise to start agricultural projects (rice, cattle, pigs, coffee, cocoa, tea, rubber, peanuts, etc.) in such selected areas where native manpower is available on the spot. • Such projects to be mechanised as far as possible, and also to aim at getting the natives to produce economic crops on their own land on a share basis under managerial supervision. (According to one of the ASOPA bright boys, this system has been successfully developed in the Sudan). • Native taxation to be re-introduced and its revenue expended on native social services. • An all-out attempt to raise the standard of life in the villages with the emphasis on agricultural development, hygiene and technical training. (This can’t all be done by kindness alone.) This is a long-range, costly and ambitious programme beset with countless obstacles. There is no easy way. Reasonable success would mean the emergence within a generation of a flourishing NG and a rapidly increasing native popula-

tion which is our one hope of staving off Asia. I regret that the need for official de-pfum? necessitates my usin S a nom - X nrn ’ ’

0 Sydney, Sept. 15.

Kiap.