It really seems that the charges against the old Labour Party that it favoured nationalization is rather tilting at a windmill. In most cases the so-called State enterprises amount to very little. The Governments concerned lose money on them, chiefly because they use them for political purposes.
Queensland is the last shocking example, not that its losses amount to much as compared with the general but indefinite losses which the State has incurred during the past seven years of Labour rule. The Auditor-General has been telling us his story of these enterprises. does not differ much from that of the official head of the State Enterprise Department. There are butchers' shops, cattle stations, produce agency, railway refreshment rooms, fish supply. one public house and a cannery. The debt of the whole lot to the Treasury now stands at very nearly £2,000,000, of which £1,660,000 is debited to the cattle stations. There are some 86 butchers' shops throughout the State, but as the private shops number as many hundreds it is difficult to think that these few matter very much one way or the other. It is admitted that private enterprise has, with the fall in the price of cattle, given the State undertakings a rough time. Stil] they were able to produce a credit balance which was promptly transferred in order to enable one of the other features to make ai better showing. made on the butchers' shops, the hotel and the railway refreshment rooms, and losses upon the cattle stations, the produce agency, the cannery and the fish supply. The losses exceed the profits by £447,000. Of this amount the cattle stations account—_ for £400,000. The butchers' shops were largely supplied with privately grown beef, while the State stations' held on to their own stock, trusting to the future. The Babinda public house had no competitor in its locality, and the railway refreshment rooms were obviously a monopoly, It is not, therefore, unfair to say that where profits were made the State lad practically no competition to encounter. But these incursions -into State trading are of the most trumpery nature. They' neither affirm nor deny any general principle, and the stranger could traverse Queensland from one end to the other and not meet more instances of State Enterprise than he would in a day's journey between France and Italy. But there are other forms of State enterprise which are wrapped away, and catalogued under mines and so forth. There are several coal mines, and whether they pay Their way or not they are developing seams which private enterprise has not touched. To call this sort of thing State Socialism is of course to pay it undue honour, or to reduce the theory of State Socialism to the level of a feeble joke.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.