AUSTRALIA: Nowhere’s Secession

Now & then the big, boisterous States of the Australian Commonwealth think for themselves. Two years ago New South Wales tried to repudiate the interest on its State debt (TIME, April 6, 1931 et seq.). The Crown-appointed Governor finally forced the Premier, tall, square-jawed John Thomas Lang, out of office (TIME, May 23). Last week the Commonwealth’s biggest and rawest state, Western Australia, voted to secede from the Commonwealth.

The State of Western Australia is a vast semidesert as big as Western Europe. Separating it from the rest of Australia are 800 miles of uninhabited country. Among the jack rabbits, kangaroos and kookaburra birds that laugh hysterically and swallow snakes, live half a million farmers who till the fertile belt so successfully that they produce more than one fourth of Australia’s wheat. Western Australians have long looked sideways at the Commonwealth’s densely populated states, at the Eastern manufacturers who profit from the Commonwealth’s high tariff, at the public works paid for by Australia’s huge borrowings since the War. To humor their grudge, the State Legislature last December scheduled a state-wide referendum on two choices: 1) a Commonwealth convention to revise the Constitution; 2) secession from the Commonwealth. The rest of Australia remained calm at Western Australia’s threat to jump off the edge of nowhere. Wartime Premier William Morris Hughes called secession “a crude and futile expedient.” The Attorney General told the farmers that the Commonwealth Constitution provided no means by which a state could legally secede. The Commonwealth Premier Joseph Aloysius Lyons went to reason with them and they hooted him out of the State. Their own Premier Sir James Mitchell came out for secession. Their customs revenues continued to go to the Commonwealth, by their contention, to develop the other states.

Last week the embattled farmers paradoxically voted Premier Mitchell out of office in the Government elections, plumped strongly for secession. The Labor Party, which is against secession, but is also against Premier Mitchell’s policy of wage reduction, won a majority of ten seats. Observers doubted whether anything more would be done about secession, called the vote a “protest, not a decision.”