[?]tive Labour Costs

The Senator

OT [?]e Fa cts About [?]tive Labour Costs

Parliamentary warblings of i e inimitable Australian lator O’Byrne on the sub- Papua and New Guinea are off the beam that they are 1 by most Territorians. But, me reason, they have got the skin of that tough old rian, sawmill-owner Tom He has let go in a series lignant broadcasts to the Pacific Post and Pacific Monthly. :ne, of course, is quite con that the wretched New native is being cruelly ex by the ruthless white man. nd his like writhe whenever jit the Islands and learn that labourers do not receive the dinary rates of wages paid ralia. Nothing will convince lat (a) Australian wages are :h in relation to world ds, that they have got the ian economy tied in a more permanent knot; and (b) ry few Islands labourers are one-quarter the value of m workers, anyway.

Flower makes the foregoing clearly enough—but neither iifferent bureaucrat, nor the d politician, nor the ignorant ian voter is going to take htest notice. It has been go like this for 25 years, to our ige. lower supplies some interest- Drmation, however. There is ry of what the natives did new International KB6 6uck, for example. It cost native driver said he wanted is of oil for it, I gave it to rhat night he came to my and stated that the truck )ken down along the road.

Dve out to inspect the truck, and the engine a complete He admitted that he had 3 oil to another native. d to replace the engine-block >er 6 months, I got it on the ain. A few days later another driver was driving the truck y bush mill into town. He heard a noise at the back, ned over and looked out the door. Thus, he let the -wheel go, and ran off the lead-on into a tree. The as a complete write-off. In or £7OO, and I got £4OO and ick.” letter to South Pacific Post, Flower makes a comparison

between the running of a saw mill in a white-labour country and in Papua. He wrote: “In Australia, a Twin Canadian sawmill with No. 1 bench and a docking saw can be operated from the forest to the sawn product with eight Europeans. These men would average £7O a month each, a total of £560 and should produce 4,000 super feet of sawn timber each day or 500 super feet for each man em ployed in the organisation.

“In Papua, to operate the same mill, five Europeans are required at £B5 to £9O a month, plus plane fares from Australia, quarters, vehicle, etc,, which would bring it up to £lOO per man, or £5OO a month In addition, at least 30 natives are re-

So i J’ e^ l n nd their wages ran e e from xz to £lO a month plus ration issues, plane fare, medical exepenses, etc. a reasonable average price would be £lO a month per native, or £3OO which, on top of the £5OO for the Europeans, makes the monthly cost of running the mill £BOO.

“That is not all. Any employer °f labour knows that in this country all that can reasonably be expected from a European is 75 per cent, of what he would do in Australia.

Which means that instead of 4,000 super feet per day being produced, this now drops to 3,000. If there are 20 working days in a month a mill in Australia produces 80,000 super feet at a cost of £560 for labour. In this country it costs £BOO for labour

to produce 60,000 super ft of ti] These are the facts tha O’Byrnes consistently ignore, making their summaries South.