Opinion of Leading Journalist

Hebrides No Asset

To Australia

OSMAR WHITE, of the Melbourne Herald, and one of the few Austra lian journalists who knows anything about the Pacific, feels that Australia will be “buying a pup for appearance’s sake” if she takes over British responsi bility in the New Hebrides, as it is rumoured that she will.

He calls the Condominium Govern ment the most expensive, cumbersome, contradictory, ridiculous, comic opera type of government ever devised by poli ticians, but comments that it works— not efficiently or smoothly, but just sufficiently to see that the area is con trolled, essential social services are carried on, and that crime is suppressed. This has been possible, he says, because the Administrators of both French and British nationality, have contented them selves with a bare minimum of control in civil affairs.

“In a world plagued by over-government, the New Hebrides scintillates as an ex ample of how uncomplicated life can be if only the administration is content to under-govern. Refrain from committing murder, mayhem, and the grosser kinds of larceny, in the New Hebrides, and you will manage to get away with practically anything else.”

Vila, the capital, he describes as one of the most squalid and unlovely settlements in the Pacific —the business quarter is a row of tumbledown shacks along the filthy waterfront. He with reason aments the present copra boom which is causing the neglect of cocoa and coffee plantations which were becoming econ omically important to the Group before ;he war.