With Bureaucracy

Why The Taper Tins?

Chas. Sullivan Loses Battle With Bureaucracy

A SINGLE-HANDED war against

the bureaucrats of the Aus tralian Department of Com merce and Agriculture has been carried on for some time by Mr.

Charles Sullivan, of Sydney, head of a well-known company exporting foodstuffs, etc., to the Islands.

For some reason, which no ex perienced merchant can understand, the Department will not allow Aus tralian packers to pack corned beef for export in round cans—it must go into square, tapered cans.

Islands consumers will not buy the tapered cans if they can get round cans; and as the meat-packers of New Zealand are under no such handicap, a large proportion of the Australian canned corned-beef trade has been lost to NZ.

“Not only has Australia lost this trade with the Islands,” says Mr.

Sullivan, “but our own firm, and others, are actually importing NZ corned beef in round cans into Sydney, for transhipment to the Solomon Islands.”

However, when the meat is mixed with cereals, etc., the Australian; Department permits its export in round tins, under various names; and these lines have a big sale in Papua-New Guinea, where they are issued to labour as meat rations.

Why do the bureaucrats allow these lines to go in round tins, while “straight” corned beef is forced into taper tins?

Mr. Sullivan tried in vain to get the Minister to examine this thing, personally. But all he achieved was a typical letter from a Depart mental official saying “the Minister is unable to agree to the relaxation of requirements desired as it is evident that it would result in the lowering of the standard and reputa tion of Australian canned cornedl beef.” He ignores the success NZ and other Countries has had with the round cans.

The outstanding weakness of the Australian Government to-day is said to be the way in which Min isters have surrendered the business of administration to a powerful andl dictatorial bureaucracy.

Tf Mr. and Mrs. Pat Costello lefti Suva early in May for Europe. They; will visit, in London, their daughter and her husband, Wing-Commander J, Bray, who is on the staff of the; High Commissioner for New Zea land.

If Mr. V. C. Gabriel, of Burns Philpc (NG) Ltd., Samarai, Papua, reachedt Sydney in mid-April on threes months’ sick leave.