[Editor: This article was published in The Bulletin (Sydney, NSW), 25 June 1908.]
A whole continent — and £4,000,000 a year to run it with.
Mr. Wade: That left the Commonwealth with surplus revenue in 10 years’ time of something like £4,000,000 to waste or do what they like with. … You won’t see much of it. They might find this money spent on all kinds of wild schemes, which would not bring one penny to New South Wales or the other States. That £4,000,000 would belong to the Commonwealth to do as they like with; it did not come back to the States. … Under these conditions, the whole of their future rested in the hands of the people of the State. If they were contented to be blind or apathetic in the matter, and contented to listen to fairy tales such as were told them by orators at the time Federation was accomplished, that they could trust the Commonwealth to do the fair thing, then they deserved no sympathy. He went on to warn them that, sooner or later, this thing would have to be faced. He asked them to move now and be active before it was too late. — Sydney daily paper.
Holding forth at Newtown, a few days ago, State Premier Wade, of N.S.W., threw a little light on the dark places of the State grievance about which so much has been heard. Wade’s woe, it seems, is based on the fact that, if the Customs and Excise revenue is divided as proposed by Treasurer Lyne, the Commonwealth will have “something like £4,000,000 to waste or do what they like with.”
The first thing that attracts attention here is the gigantic insolence of this little State Misery, who assumes that money entrusted to the only Parliament which represents, as regards both Houses, the whole people of Australia, must almost necessarily be wasted. Wade’s alarm at the idea of the people of Australia being entrusted with £4,000,000 per annum of their own money, instead of having a rather obscure but very superior legal gentleman like Wade to take care of it for them, is pathetic. It is more than pathetic — it is patronising and almost disgusting.
The kind of Australia that G. Wade wants this land to be can be gauged by his frantic alarm at the idea of the Government of a whole continent having £4,000,000 a year to spend. Australia supplies the only instance in ail the world’s history of an entire continent united under one flag and one Government, and inhabited by people of one race and speaking one language. Before such a land as this, if it doesn’t fool away its chances, there are possibilities that Greece and Rome and Carthage never dreamed of. It represents, not only the biggest proposition on earth to-day, but the biggest possibility there has been since history began. But even the biggest possibility in all history requires money at the back of it as well as patriotism and courage. And a wretched, unpatriotic little Parish Misery calls on his State following to rise and curse, and howl, and do battle, and assert itself, and tear around generally, because the Government of Australia, under the proposed division of the tariff revenue, will have £4,000,000 a year to spend. Apparently he thinks that a junior clerk’s salary is about the right thing to run a continent with.
* * * *
Australia is the most isolated and the most unprotected outpost of the white man. It is up against Asia in the most literal sense. If England is conquered, that will be, at the worst, a conquest by such peoples as the Germans or the Americans — peoples of its own race, its own religion, and its own civilisation. If Australia is conquered, it is almost certain to be a conquest by a race of Asiatic Pagans — by a race which is capable of making G. Wade a hewer of wood and a carrier of water in kerosene tins, and which would have no scruple about sending Wade’s young and handsome feminine relatives to the Yoshiwarra, to be the property of any and every comer who liked to pay for them.
No country can set up: in business as the last lone outpost of civilisation, with the innumerable hordes of barbarism at its gates, without taking risks, and risks mean precautions, and precautions mean money. Now that Britain has withdrawn its fleets from the Pacific, and intimated clearly that it will no longer undertake the sole defence of outlying territories that won’t defend themselves, Australia has come in contact with the hard facts of the situation. It can no longer be the only country on earth which makes no serious provision for its own security. It must hump the burden of sin and civilisation as other countries do. And that means expenditure — a fair amount of expenditure.
Europe spends hundreds of millions a year on preparations for defence — or offence. Asia spends quite a mountain of depreciated silver coinage on the same business. So do the two Americas. Even Africa, disordered and black and incoherent as it is, does a fair amount in that direction. Australia can’t afford to be the one simple trusting lamb among all these wolves.
Yet the prospect of the Australian Government having £4,000,000 a year to spend on defence and on everything else (£4,000,000, which is one-fiftieth of what Britain spends on defence alone) fills Gregory Wade, the Local Drain Calamity, with fury, and he urges his dilapidated following to rise and fight to the bitter end against the idea of the Australian Government having any money at all with which to protect and develop the land.
* * * *
It is not merely defence in the military and naval sense that has to be considered. Australia is a pathetically empty land. The part of it which is most convenient for Asiatic invasion — the Northern Territory — is so empty that, under the common theory of international law, any nation has a right to take possession of it for lack of “ effective occupation.”
Moreover, the Territory isn’t even part of Australia, in a political sense, until the Commonwealth takes it over. It is merely a British Crown Colony, administered by South Australia, and liable to be transferred under certain conditions, the most important of which is the completion of the trans-continental railway. If the Territory isn’t taken over it may yet be resumed by the British Government, and made an outlying province of India or the Malay States, and turned into a huge nigger settlement, which will end the dream of White Australia for ever and a day.
To take over the Territory, and pay its debts, and connect it by railway with the rest of Australia, and settle it with a sturdy white population, and garrison it against the invasion of our brown brother Shem, are matters that involve the expenditure of cash. No ideal is worth anything unless backed up by cash. It is impossible to be the only white race that owns a whole continent without spending a certain amount of money, just as it was impossible to be Babylon for 2d. per annum, or Rome for 2½d. The making and consolidation and defence of a new nation which is the nominal possessor of a territory as great as that of European Russia, Germany, Austria, France, Spain, Italy, Turkey, Britain, and Scandinavia combined, can’t be done for the price of a packet of “fags.”
But these things don’t appeal to the purely six-and-eightpenny mind of Gregory Wade. He can’t see why the Government which has to look after 3,000,000 square miles of country should want any money except what he chooses to allow it. Certainly Wade manages to spend something over £5,000,000 a year on mere administration, in a State that only represents about one-tenth of the Commonwealth; but when it is suggested that the Government of all Australia might possibly have £4,000,000 a year with which to meet its responsibilities, Wade calls on the rest of the asylum to rise up in the cause of liberty and break things.
* * * *
The Commonwealth, as has been mentioned before, is a fairly large undertaking. It isn’t so large as the whole Russian empire, but it is just about as large as that portion of the British empire that is administered from London, and it is nearly as big as Brazil, and it is larger than everything else. Even the United States don’t equal it in size, and China is left very many miles behind.
The Federal Government of Australia (and there are 3,000,000 square miles of Australia) has to do all the things on which Britain (there are 121,000 square miles of Britain) spends a steady average of nearly £100,000,000 per annum. That £100,000,000 represents Britain’s bill for military and naval defence, for posts and telegraphs and sundries, and for that portion of the civil service which corresponds to the Federal civil service in Australia. Yet, Britain hasn’t nearly 8,000 miles of coast to supply with lighthouses; it hasn’t in front of it the amazing proposition of finding out how to defend 3,000,000 square miles of country with little more than 4,000,000 people to supply the defence; it hasn’t 2200 miles of transcontinental railway to build, and perhaps 2000 miles of branch lines; and it isn’t confronted with the tremendous fact that a successful invasion means the end of its religion and its civilisation. And yet, as already mentioned, Britain under its comparatively easy circumstances, gets through £100,000,000 a year on the same kind of services that the Commonwealth is responsible for. And when it is suggested that Australia should have, for its general spending, about one twenty-fifth of the money that Britain spends, a tenth-rate little State politician, who is a lawyer in his spare time and defends the embezzler who has blewed his employer’s money on a slow horse, calls on the people of Australia to rise and demolish Australia, and to curse Australia, and to fight against Australia to the bitter end.
* * * *
If there was, in the Australian Constitution, a shred of evidence in support of Wade’s attitude, the position of that miserable individual might be to some extent excused. But there is none at all. When the Constitution was first drafted it set forth that three-quarters of the tariff revenue should be permanently allotted to the States or set aside for payment of the principal and interest of the State debts. George Reid, Premier of N.S.W., demanded that this proviso should be altered or abolished, and it was made to read that for ten years the State Governments should receive three-fourths of the Customs and Excise revenue, and after that the Australian Government could do as it pleased with the lot. Very reluctantly, and only because they were told that on no other terms would N.S.W. — Gregory Wade’s State — come into the union, did the other State Premiers agree.
Now the time when the Commonwealth, according to the terms of the agreement which Reid, of N.S.W., forced on it, can keep all the Customs and Excise revenue, is at hand. And the Commonwealth Government, instead of availing itself of the authority thus thrust upon it, offers to pay the State Governments £6,000,000 a year, rising gradually to £8,750,000 a year. It isn’t bound to pay any of that money, but it offers it none the less, and its reward is the coarse and illogical denunciation of Wade and people of his calibre. For Wade has figured out that the proposed arrangement will give the Commonwealth £4,000,000 a year of loose change, and he doesn’t see why it should want any loose change. It has only to look after the military and naval defence of a continent about the size of Europe, to build a few thousand miles of transcontinental railroad, to light pearly 8000 miles of coast, to provide old-age and invalid pensions for a population of a little over 4,000,000, to run mail services over 3,000,000 square miles of country, and to take over and administer and settle and develop a Lost Province nearly five times the size of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland.
The purely State Insect can’t see why 2d. or so shouldn’t be sufficient for a few small things like these. Therefore there is going to be war — at least so it is announced — between the local caterpillar and the continent. And in this matter Gregory Wade stands forth as the public enemy, as (politically) the shame and disgrace of Australia, as the representative of small dead things, and as the opponent of defence, of progress, of national ideals, and of everything that tends towards the establishment of a strong and united Australian people.
* * * *
The State Frights ideal can be expressed in a few words. It consists of a beggared Australian Parliament meeting in a hovel, a ragged and hopelessly ill-paid Federal public service, no Australian army or navy, no transcontinental railways — in short, it consists of a sort of mendicant Commonwealth which is nothing, and has nothing, and can do nothing.
This Commonwealth is to collect about £12,000,000 a year in tariff revenue. It is to hand the money over to the State Premiers men like Bent and Wade. These individuals are to pose as great financiers because, by reason of the money they get from the ragged Commonwealth, they are able to show a regular paper surplus. They are to issue orders and instructions to their poor relation, the Commonwealth; and ask it why it hasn’t sense enough to be rich and prosperous, as they are; and they are to give it good advice generally. The idea is a great one for the pomp and dignity of people like Bent and Wade; but Australia, which has its own interests to consider, doesn’t quite take their view of the case. The mistake they make is in thinking that they are Australia, and they are nothing of the kind. They are only the persons that certain parts of Australia hire to look after roads and drains and small sundries. The mistake they make is that which the Roman dog-tax collector made when he thought he was Caesar.
Source:
The Bulletin (Sydney, NSW), 25 June 1908, p. 6 (columns 1-3)
Editor’s notes:
annum = (Latin) year
Bent = Sir Thomas Bent (1838-1909), property developer and politician, Premier of Victoria (1904-1909)
blewed = (slang) blown, wasted money (such as money lost on a racehorse which did not win, or lost on a bet, or wasted on a spree); had something stolen from oneself; the realisation that oneself has been stolen from, been the victim of a robbery
Caesar = the title of the Roman emperors; whilst the title was applied to all Roman emperors, it is sometimes used to specifically refer to the first holder of the title, Julius Caesar
d. = a reference to a penny, or pennies (pence); the “d” was an abbreviation of “denarii”, e.g. as used in “L.S.D.” or “£sd” (pounds, shillings, and pence), which refers to coins used by the Romans, as per the Latin words “librae” (or “libra”), “solidi” (singular “solidus”), and “denarii” (singular “denarius”)
fag = cigarette
a hewer of wood and a carrier of water = a reference to low-status or lowly-paid occupations; the phrase is mentioned in the Bible several times, in Deuteronomy 29:11 (“from the hewer of thy wood unto the drawer of thy water”) and Joshua 9:21, 9.23, and 9.27 (“hewers of wood and drawers of water”), although the wording of the phrase varies, depending on which Bible translation is used
Lost Province = a reference to the Northern Territory
Lyne = Sir William Lyne (1844-1913), Premier of New South Wales (1899-1901), federal Minister for Home Affairs (1901-1903), Minister for Trade and Customs (1903-1904 and 1905-1907), Treasurer of Australia (1907-1908)
mendicant = beggar; characteristic of or relating to begging (may also refer to a religious person, such as a monk, who historically did not own personal property, or who lived on alms)
pagan = someone who follows a non-Christian religion; an adherent of a polytheistic religion; a heathen
pathetic = something which evokes feelings of sadness or sorrow (can also refer to something which is considered inadequate, inferior, or beneath contempt)
per annum = (Latin) per year; in each year, for each year (in financial terms, an amount that is earned, paid, received, sold, spent, or used each year)
resume = take back, reacquire, reclaim; reoccupy (can also mean: begin again, continue, or go on with, after an interruption or pause)
Shem = in the Old Testament of the Bible, Shem was a son of Noah (see Genesis 5:32, 10:21); according to tradition, Shem is regarded as the ancestor of the Semites, and therefore, in a context of war, a reference to “Shem” may refer to the Arabic nations [although, in this article, it appears to have been given a wider meaning, referring to Asian countries or races]
State Frights = a humorous and disparaging reference to “State Rights”
Wade = Sir Charles Gregory Wade (1863-1922), lawyer and politician, Premier of New South Wales (1907-1910)
Yoshiwarra = Yoshiwara, a well-known red light district (providing prostitution and sex-oriented services) in Japan, which was established in the early 17th century
[Editor: The original text has been separated into paragraphs.]
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