AUSTRALIA: Tame Tasmanian

(See front cover)

Racing toward the U. S. this week on the Italian liner Rex was honest, naïve, likable, tousle-haired Joseph Aloysius Lyons, Premier of the Commonwealth of Australia, soon to swap grins in the White House with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and indulge in genial economic horse trading.

Few years ago spendthrift Daughter Australia was Mother Britain’s second best customer, and the U. S.’s best customer for motor cars and trucks. Today the exuberant young Commonwealth, much sobered down and striving mightily to pay her debts, is Britain’s third best customer and the U. S.’s second best for motor vehicles. Australians are also avid consumers of U. S. typewriters. They expect Premier Lyons to rub these facts into Washington’s New Dealers and convince President Roosevelt that he should lower the U. S. tariff to favor Australia’s wool, wine and wood.

Meanwhile, Joe Lyons & wife loomed last week as two of the most notable characters to emerge from what uppity Great Britons call ”Down Under.” Seven short years ago the Hon. Mr. Lyons was merely Premier of Tasmania, an island which is down under Australia and referred to by Australians as “The Speck.” From this insignificant island Joe Lyons bounded with Horatio Alger rapidity to the Premiership (January 1932) of busted Australia whose national credit he proceeded to restore. Australian-born, the Premier and Mrs. Lyons had never been outside Australia in their lives until this spring when they sailed for the Royal Jubilee to ride at London in a State carriage behind King George.

Australia’s MacDonald. If Englishmen were not so ignorant of Australia, they might point out that James Ramsay MacDonald’s desertion of the Labor Party which had made him Prime Minister and his formation of a National Government was exactly paralleled in Australia by Premier Lyons. Neither the Scot nor the Tasmanian was ever a true toiler in the Marxian sense. Both got their start as schoolteachers. And of Ramsay MacDonald it might have been said, as one of Joe Lyons’ admiring biographers has frankly said of him, that “when it came to politics he stood for the Labor cause because there was nothing else he could stand for.”

So long as the proletariat chooses such leaders, just so long can the proletariat expect to be ditched. Yet Mr. Lyons’ situation today is the opposite of Mr. MacDonald’s. While the Scot broods in ignominy as Lord President of the Council, forgotten and ignored, the Tasmanian has come forth into the world spotlight in the past few weeks not only as a hero to Australians but also, much to the British public’s surprise, a figure of consequence in the Mother Country. This is because British Dominions Secretary James Henry (“Jim”) Thomas has long made an angry mess of the relations between His Majesty’s Government and the touchy regime of Irish Free State President Eamon de Valera. Irishmen at their wildest are no hotter to handle than Australians, and Premier Lyons proved last month on visits which he paid to Dublin and Belfast that his Australian reputation as a cooler of hotheads is solidly founded. Irish himself by ancestry and a devout Roman Catholic, his first thought in Ireland was to kiss the Blarney Stone, results being excellent. Last week the wires between Dublin and London no longer sizzled with veiled insults but hummed harmoniously as such vexed issues as the Irish land annuities and the abolishment of the King’s Governorship General at Dublin were dealt with on a basis not of alarms and threats but of orderly negotiation. Never before had an Empire Premier from beyond the seas topped the Mother Country’s well-valeted statesmen with such breezy ease. Proposed today is a solution in which “President” de Valera’s country would be known as a “Republic” while actually remaining in the British Commonwealth of Nations with much the same status as Canada.

In London itself the Australian Premier was up against an impossible situation. The Mother Country, while agreeable in principle to the idea of favoring Dominion products in her tariff schedules, is not willing to practice to do so greatly at the expense of the Argentine and a host of other countries with which Great Britain has interlocking trade and currency agreements. So far as could be learned, Joe Lyons got nowhere in attempting to trade with His Majesty’s Government and not much further when he addressed 500 crusty British buyers described as “Australia’s Customers” in London.

In Scotland, where Australia and her affairs are better known than in England, the warmest and best informed tribute to Premier Lyons on his visit to the Mother Country was paid at dour, granite Edinburgh. “It is difficult to imagine,” said the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, Sir William Johnston Thomson, “any world politician today, excluding dictators, who has achieved more in so short a time.”

Meanwhile plump but not fat Mrs. Lyons, who does not look as if she had borne the eleven children her husband calls “our cricket team,” moved not without mild social success about London and in the provinces attended to such duties as christening a liner destined for Australia with a bottle of Australian wine called Minchinbury. Wherever the Lyons went in the Mother Country they were served Australian fruit salad, a delicacy easy to obtain in cans. Writing for a newspaper syndicate Down Under, Mrs. Lyons reported : “I think it is a pity that the lovely English countryside should be spoiled by the many new houses built exactly the same, like peas in a pod. Why not build individual homes and thus relieve the monotony?”

It was explained that Great Britain’s cheap mass housing program is today the Mother Country’s chief pride and contribution to something vague called “social service.” Thereafter Mrs. Lyons was dogmatic only about things of which she is absolutely positive. “I wonder how anyone can bring up a family without religion,” she notably remarked. “If faith is not the basis of family life, there is no ultimate authority to which to appeal.”

Toward Honesty. The ultimate authority to which the Australian Government has always appealed is the Bank of England and its satellite banks and bankers. A generation ago Australia began to give herself a spendiferous New Deal, with minimum wages, maximum hours, social insurance, the dole and other goodies. Broadly speaking these were financed by Australian borrowing in and through London. The gallant War record of proverbially dare-devil youths from Down Under (“Anzacs”) assisted in building up psychological reasons for lending to Australia far sounder than those which induced the spree of British lending to Germany in the fabulous 1920’s.

With Depression Australians faced the choice of whether or not to welsh on their creditors, as Germany was welshing. For years the spirit of welshing seemed about to triumph Down Under, and its prime apostle was and is fiery John Thomas Lang, then Premier of the Great Australian State of New South Wales (TIME, April 6, 1931, et seq.). In one of the rare instances where a Governor appointed by King George has ever successfully intervened, Premier Lang was forced out of office on an adroit technicality by game, ruthless Sir Philip Game, then Governor of New South Wales, recently appointed London’s Commissioner of Police at Scotland Yard. To have thus cut out Repudiationist Lang like a canker from Australian public life would of course have done small good had not Australia’s Federal Government been in process of regeneration. The dramatic moment when Joseph Aloysius Lyons gave a firm and decisive Conservative twist to Australia’s helm came one morning at 10 o’clock four years ago, after the Australian Parliament had been angrily debating all night.

The Commonwealth debt stood at $1,500,000,000 (current exchange), the growing industry budgetary deficit stood at $40,000,000, and the Mother Country would no longer lend. To Joe Lyons the stopgap measures proposed by his Labor Party colleagues smacked of recklessness and radicalism. In a simple speech of amazing lucidity, power and effect—considering that he and everyone else were red-eyed with sleeplessness—Mr. Lyons did a schoolteacher’s sum and quit the Labor Party then & there. Thus he broke with friends of a lifetime because they would not see the mandatory logic and arithmetic of subordinating Newdealism to paying the Commonwealth’s debts and taking Australia out of Germany’s class. In less than a year Australia’s bourgeoisie, backing Joe Lyons’ new United Australia Party, had won a general election and put Premier Lyons in approximately the place Ramsay MacDonald was in after King George bucked him up to form Britain’s National Government.

20% & 3%. As his program Premier Lyons brandished “20%.” Australians took a 20% wage cut while Australian prices, rents and interest on loans held in Australia were all reduced approximately 20%. The marvel is that to a great extent they were hammered down by the Government with every legal method, then slugged lower by methods akin to the ruthlessness of perfect ladies forcing their friends to take tickets to a charity bazaar. In converting Australia’s internal loans to issues paying a lower interest rate Government high pressure of every conceivable sort got all but 3% of the bondholders to accept the cut. It was then ballyhooed that it would be “unfair to Australia” and the other 97% of bondholders if the 3% should get their just due. Like President Roosevelt, when he was out to get gold, Mr. Lyons caused legislation to be passed that the 3% of recalcitrant bondholders are “assumed to have applied” for bonds they explicitly had not applied for but were thus forced to accept at the lower interest rate.

This sort of thing vastly pleased the Bank of England. Its suave directors noised about London that Australian credit was now so much better as to make a new issue of Australian bonds “attractive.” Soon in the Mother Country conversions were put through which are saving Australia $5,000,000 yearly today. Instead of a budgetary deficit Premier Lyons, who is also Commonwealth Treasurer, expects to show in his latest budget, which he will present next month, a surplus of some $4,000,000.

In Australia today the bankers can be said to have won. They feel they have won. Certainly they are not objects of mass scorn or ridicule. But Australia’s climate is too salubrious, things grow too easily, mighty resources are too splendidly undeveloped, and the masses have too long enjoyed previous Government bounty for the New Deal which is old Down Under to have taken a fatal beating. From a critical Marxist viewpoint Australia is pinker than the U. S. today and Premier Lyons is but little whiter in his politics than President Roosevelt. Both leaders limp heavily, the Australian because of an automobile accident, but both mask physical heaviness with the spirit which makes Premier Lyons’ favorite greeting a slap between the shoulder blades and a cry to Mrs. Lyons to “make ’em feel at home!” While the President finds solace in postage stamps the Premier in leisure moments rereads Sir Walter Scott.

Horse Trade? That Joe Lyons and Frank Roosevelt will trade each other’s pants off, thus leaving each still with one pair of pants, seemed the likely issue of their conjunction this week in Washington. Last week they had already started being “good neighbors.” On the Rex the Australian Premier regretted and proposed to correct the oversight which makes Australia the only Dominion of the Big Four not represented in Washington by its own diplomatic mission. For his part President Roosevelt took note of the oversight which has made Australia hitherto a spot of exile for members of the U. S. foreign service. In Washington it was briskly announced that swank J. Pierrepont Moffat of the U. S. State Department will go out to Australia as Consul General at Sydney and consider himself promoted. In top hat and tails, Mr. Moffat was assigned to the State Department welcome brigade sent to Manhattan to meet Premier and Mrs. Lyons.

Raw? Salads! After being received in Rome by Il Duce, Premier Lyons, who in Paris had made no effort to meet Premier Laval or any other French statesman, cried, “I want to pay homage to Mussolini. . . . He has done immense good.” At the Vatican devout Joseph Aloysius and Enid Lyons, who in Scotland had been jeered by a handful of irrepressibles as “Papists!” knelt before the Supreme Pontiff. His Holiness imparted the Apostolic Benediction and observed, “We still preserve a most pleasant recollection of the great triumph of the Church represented in the Eucharistic Congress at Sydney, Australia” (TIME, Sept. 17, 1928).

To a query on the Rex “But isn’t Australia terribly raw?” plump, vivacious Mrs. Lyons answered, “Yes, the salads!”, her favorite repartee whenever Australia’s rawness comes up. Another favorite remark of hers: “You must have happiness in married life. The mother should be like a beloved Queen.” Burly, curly Joe Lyons when he saw Queen Mary several weeks ago for the first time in his life exclaimed involuntarily: “Magnificent! Magnificent!”

With the next Australian elections in mind the Lyons have sold the big Buick in which he used to campaign and bought in London a little Humber, less able to take the pounding of Australian roads, but British and thus the right thing to bring home from the Silver Jubilee. In loyalty to King & Country the entire Lyons family always resolutely eat English plum pudding on Christmas, no unheroic act in Australia. “We have eaten Christmas pudding,” Mrs. Lyons has proudly admitted, “with the thermometer at 102° in the shade. Your winter, of course, is our summer.”