‘Negligent Trustee’

Leading Australian Daily Describes Wardist Regime in N. Guinea

THE following damning indictment of the Wardist administration in New Guinea was published as a leading article in “The Herald”, Melbourne, on May 14, under the heading “Negligent Trustee”.

No comment is needed—except that vte may poirit out that this summary of the situation supports all the criticism we have made of Territories’ conditions during the past three years.

IJIVEN before the war ended, the Aus- Jtj tralian Government had the means —and, as it then seemed, the desire —to launch a sound programme of social and economic reconstruction in New Guinea. An Australian New Guinea Ad ministrative Unit and a Production Con trol Board existed. Great resources of surplus war material, together with war made dock facilities, could have been turned to civil usfe as the camp'aign front rolled north. But the picture in 1949, after more than three and a half years of peace, is one of waste, decay and frustration.

The Herald’s observer, Mr. Osmar White, sums up in one of his recently published articles that “probably no ter ritory in the world to-day is a more cautionary example of what happens when an inefficient and ignorant met ropolitan government assumes the re sponsibility of colonial administration”.

That is the verdict of one now revisiting an area which he knew well before and during the war.

New Guinea’s importance to Australia needs no stressing, A great part of our war effort was dedicated to its libera tion, and it will be a strategic corner stone in our future defence. Responsibili ties have grown and problems have be come complex since 1945, but we can not claim inexperience as an excuse for failing to meet them.

Our pre-war administrations in both Papua and the Mandated Territory of New Guinea may have had the faults of a leisurely era. Broadly, however, they were based on a policy at Canberra which allowed offcials, white civilians and natives in New Guinea to see where they were going.

Unreal

BY contrast, the present Federal Gov ernment has instituted little beyond a “new deal” in indentured labor regulations, the first effect of which was to create chaos on the newly re-opened plantations. This has recently been fol lowed by an ordinance requiring native councils to send reports of their village meetings to Canberra. Such bureau cratic absurdity may swell the files of the External Territories Department— if village headmen along the Ramu and the Sepik can find shorthand typists.

But it will convince neither the natives nor any competent member of the United Nations Trusteeship Committee that Australia has a practical plan for New Guinea.

Window-dressing qrdinances are not what New Guinea needs. The urgent job is to provide saw-milling equipment for practical reconstruction, to repair the wharves that have been allowed to rot, to get shipping for the thousands of bags of valuable copra that is de teriorating on plantations. Above all, the need is to slash away the red tape

at Canberra which is frustrating the efforts of administrative staffs in the field.

Frustrated

WE have the nucleus of a fine colonial service in New Guinea.

It has been able to do some good post-war work, in spite of heartbreaking

difficulties. A useful start has been made in opening technical training centres for natives. But the rate of resignations from the service is high. The conditions under which the Government expects them to live and work in the tropics, and the atmosphere of negotiation which emanates from Canberra are discourag ing the young Australians who should be the pioneers.

Great play has been made by the Gov ernment on its intention of abolishing labour exploitation and giving first pri

ority to native welfare. No progressive Australian would challenge that aim.

But only the most unpractical theorist would assume that the objective could be reached by a primitive community of two million natives without a long pre paratory period in which trained and trusted white administrators are given every assistance, and in which white en terprise is allowed to give the country a sound economic foundation.

The Rt. Rev. Leo Scharmach, Roman Catholic Bishop of New Britain, returned to Rabaul, from a visit to Australia on May 13 by Qantas Airways. He was ac companied by Father Kopas. Both have now returned to Vunapope Mission.