STATE EXPERIMENTS IN AUSTRALIA & NEW ZEALAND BY WILLIAM PEMBER REEVES I" AUTHOR OF "THE LONG WHITE CLOUD IN TWO VOLUMES VOL. II WITH TWO MAPS E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY 681 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 1925 Ergo ipsas quamvis angusti terminus aevi Excipiat, neque enim plus septima ducitur aeataa, At genus . manet 3 LIBRARY 738784 TY OF 1 Reprinted in Saxony by the "Obral" process from a copy of the original edition printed by R. & R. Ciark. Limited, Edinburgh — CONTENTS CHAPTER I The Labour Question— PAOK Labour Laws: Their Origin . 1 Factory Laws ... .36 The Minimum Wage Law in Victoria and South Australia . 47 Industrial Arbitration (a) The Case for Compulsion . .69 - (b) The Act of 1894 ..... 85 - (c) Arbitration at Work . .107 (d) Mr. Wise's Act . .153 (e) Why Arbitration may succeed . .162 (/) Arbitration aud the Wage Board System compared 173 Shops and Shopping Laws . .181 Minor Labour Laws ..... 200 . , The Unemployed and State Employment . .216 CHAPTER II Old Age Pensions— — Old Age Pensions in New Zealand 242 -- Mr. Seddon's Act .... 250 A Pensions Law in Operation 258 Criticism ..... 265 Pensions Laws of New South Wales and Victoria 281 v STATE EXPERIMENTS CHAPTEK III PAGE Liquor Laws ....... 301 CHAPTEE IV The Exclusion of Aliens and Undesirables . 325 Index ...... 365 CHAPTER I the labour question ] Labour Laws : Their Origin In Europe, disaffected beings who protest against the unequal division of profits between capital and labour, and wno are unorthodox enough to believe that many of the conditions of industry are too monstrous and unnatural to be allowed to go on making human life a mere " procrastination of death," are usually warned off as seekers of the impossible. The very age and enormity of the wrongs they would attack are appealed to as proofs that these are inevitable parts of the frame of all great civilised societies. In the old world, in short, it is common for opponents of social reform either to rate 1 Authorities. —Most information is found in the annual reports of the inspectors of factories —A'ictoria, New Zealand, New South Wales, Queensland, and South Australia. The Victorian reports began to be published in the eighties ; those of New Zealand not until 1891, and of the other colonies not until 1897. Of the Victorian Parliamentary papers the most valuable are the reports and evidence of the Factories Act Inquiry Board, 1893. There are the publications of the Victorian Anti-Sweating League, and many articles in the Age and Argus newspapers in 1893 and other years. See also " Anti- Sweating and Factory Legislation in Victoria," by the Rev. John Hoatson, Westminster Review, October 1900. In the latter part of 1896 the Sydney Daily Telegraph published a series of fourteen articles, entitled "The Disastrous Effects of Protection in Victoria." They were written by a Melbourne free trader to discredit protectionism, but incidentally summarise the case against sweating. Note also "The Sweating System in Dunedin " (pamph.), Dunedin, 1889. For the nourishing condition of male adult labour in Victoria in the decade 1881-1891, see "The Eight-Hours Day in Victoria," a chapter in The Eight Hours Day by John Kae. l VOL. II B ! STATE EXPERIMENTS the poor as a shiftless and thriftless lot, whose troubles are of their own making, or to pose as fatalists ; when the wretchedness of poverty is spoken of, they shrug their shoulders, and fall back on the oriental Kismet In the colonies, for the most part, they have taken up a nearly opposite attitude. Instead of pleading the magnitude and antiquity of industrial evils as a reason for shrinking from trying to remove them, they deny their existence. Because in Australia and New Zealand the level of comfort amongst workers has been higher than in Europe, and even than in England, the laissez- faire party have been in the habit of scouting the notion that want and injustice are to be found. So it has come about that the comparatively high degree of com- fort amongst colonial workers has been the chief obstacle in the way of reform. A dozen years ago, when the demand for labour laws first grew strong, colonial work- people were almost always well fed ; most of them were well clothed, decently housed, and did not work for excessively long hours. A large number were paid wages which were nearly, if not quite, as high as their trade could afford. Only a small minority of men workers had to put up with wages which would at once strike an enlightened Englishman or American as low\ Unhappily this last could not be said of women or child workers. Still even their lot was—with some melancholy exceptions—above the European level. The climate of the colonies, too, is on the side of the workers. New Zealand's is ideal, so is Tasmania's, and the poor dread the summer heats of Australia far less than the cold of Northern Europe and America, where the long winters, with their short hours of daylight, mean that through half the year the workers toil from dark to dark. Even the poorest do not live in slums, are not LABOUR LAWS: THEIR ORIGIN driven to ask for shelter in workhouses through sheer lack of house-room, are not pawns in the hands of financiers who manipulate railways, and do not have their city's water supply stinted in hot weather. There is, indeed, a loneliness in the pastoral country of the interior compared with which the sleepiest English village is a humming hive ; but there is nothing in colonial cities as bad, or nearly as bad, as the slums of New York and London, or as thousands of city spots which are not slums, but which are soulless, ugly, and dispiriting. There is nothing to match the poorer streets in the English manufacturing towns of the Midlands and North, where the work-people, roused ere daylight in winter by the clang of the factory bell, troop to their unchanging round of narrow labour, trudging over the greasy cobblestones of streets lined with houses of grimy stone or sickly brick. Colonial work-people, too, are saved certain social contrasts and much social contempt. They do not even have to witness much of the flaunting luxury of the vulgar rich. Yet, because life is pleasanter for those who labour with their hands, it does not follow that all is always well. Much is often very far from well, and in the next few pages I propose to show this. If the workers' condition is better now than a decade ago, it is largely because abuses have been dealt with and evil tendencies checked. These abuses and ten- dencies are all the more noteworthy because the personal character of colonial employers as a class is very good. Most of them are kindly, well-meaning men and women, the very reverse of a race of sweaters and tyrants. If, then, in certain trades and in times of depression old- world evils hastened to reproduce themselves in young communities, it was because such things are inevitably begotten of capitalism and competition. The fact that STATE EXPERIMENTS employers on the one side and workpeople on the other are of a good stamp has not prevented the inevitable. Their general level of intelligence and honesty has, however, made possible the application of regulative remedies which would not have been possible amongst a lying, tricky, law-defying race. At no time and in no place probably was the work- ing man supposed to be more completely master of the situation than in Victoria durinsr the decade between 1881 and 1891. The colony was prosperous, with a prosperity of which the workers were believed to be having a full share. Whatever its economic cost may have been, the protectionist system deliberately adopted had helped to build up manufactures and find employ- ment. Not unreasonably, the Victorians thought to find in protection the means of attaching permanently to the colony the tens of thousands attracted thither by the great gold discoveries of the fifties. The inrush had been extraordinary. In 1846, after ten years of pastoral settlement, the province only held 33,000 colonists. Eleven years afterwards their number had grown to 410,000, and by 1881 the latter figures had more than doubled. By that time, however, the alluvial mines were being worked out. In the ten years after 1881 the number of the miners decreased by more than 50 per cent. In the same decade the increase of agricul- tural work-people was but 15 per cent, and of pastoral but 16 per cent. Yet the population grew by 33 per cent, and the richer section of it by much more than that. This was not due to any rapid growth of external trade. Imports, indeed, were worth some five millions more in 1891 than they had been ten years before; but the exports had not advanced at all, and were not half the value of the imports. What had grown were manu- LABOUR LAWS: THEIR ORIGIN factures, in which, probably, sixty thousand hands were busy. Borrowing, public and private, had been lavish, the latter especially. What is called in colonial journalese "a spirited policy of public works" had been pushed on ; but the energy 3hown in that way was nothing to the wild land speculation <vh;ck veat on towards the end of the period and which has since borne, such bitter fruit. While they k's ted, however,, the years of plenty went dancing by to the lightest of financial music. The season of the Melbourne boom was a merry time.