Melboutiie and Adelaide have been the two cities where' the trouble on the New South Wales coalfields have made themselves most felt. Neither city has any local coal supply for the manufacture of gas, and it has resulted in the gas companies buying cheap coal elsewhere, supplying inferior gas,-and as an added insult to the public, increasing the price of the inferior article. The Melbourne Company raised the cost of gas by 2s. 6d. per 1,000 ce. ft., making the total cost 8s. 6d., while the Adelaide Company was content with an increase of 1/-.. Naturally the consumers in neither city were satisfied, and in Melbourne the Company has already climbed down to the extent of 1/- and a violent controversy, which may wreck the State Ministry, is going on as to whether or not the Company should be expropriated on the grounds of mismanagement and non-fulfilment of the terms of its charter. The closing down of the score or so of pits at Maitland in New South Wales lasted about three months. A Exactly what caused the trouble was that the miners allowed themselves to be led by a few Communists, and practised sabotage in order to render the mines unprofitable. They did in regard to the pits very much what the seamen did in regard to coastal steamers, and the employers countered similarly in each case. Having exhausted their patience, the shipowners, each time trouble arose, tied up their ships; and more lately the colliery-owners, when the men stopped work without good reason, did not re-open their pits, but brought the underground ponies to the surface and allowed the collieries to remain idle. In the result several thousand miners had nothing to do, and factories had to shorten hands because the fuel supplies were insufficient and intermittent. The real leaders of the miners were paralysed with fear of the Communists, and for. a time contented themselves with calling upon miners all over Australia to pay upkeep for the tmen who had thrown themselves idle, and declaring that never would they mako peace if the employers were allowed to victimize any of the members of the unions. The employers, on the other hand, declared that unless they could employ whom they liked. and they named 80 hot-heads whom they would not re-engage, the mines could remain closed down. The leaders of the men demanded that the State and Federal] Governments should intervene, and either compel the owners to resopen the mines, or practically conficate them. But Labour is not in office either in New South Wales or in the Federal sphere, and the best that could be obtained was an offer by the acting Pre-
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.