Annual Scolding

Australia Receives Her Annual Scolding

THE usual amount of nonsense was aired at the meeting of the UN Trusteeship Council in New York in June. Australian adminis tration of New Guinea and Nauru was again criticised—by those veteran critics, India and Russia.

It is, of course, no accident that spokesmen for countries where the people are oppressed and/or poverty stricken and illiterate, are loudest in criti c i s m of more enlightened administrations.

At this session of the Council, it was implied that the extraction of phosphate from Nauru had turned a “flowering garden into a wilder ness”—the Nauruans, of course, hav ing their land whittled away before their eyes while the British got all the profits. India did not like the Australian administration in New Guinea, either.

Australian officials made the appropriate explanations.

However, at the next meeting of the Council the same perennial criticisms by the same perennial critics will no doubt be on the agenda again.