AUSTRALIA: Buying Jobs

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If the U. S. should decide to borrow $240,000.000 and spend this sum to make jobs for the jobless, Washington would be doing proportionately the very thing that Melbourne did last week. Significantly it was not an Australian radical who proposed to borrow $2 per capita of Australia's population to make jobs. Instead the plan was unfolded at Melbourne to a Commonwealth Conference of State Premiers by Australia's new Roman Catholic and comparatively conservative Federal Premier, Joseph Aloysius Lyons, father of nine, famed "Man from Tasmania."

Ever since the War, Australia had borrowed at a staggering rate until two years ago, when even London lenders began to grow leery of the Commonwealth. Last week, however, Premier Lyons seemed confident that another $11,310,000 can be made available by what he called a "cooperative plan of State loans and Commonwealth contributions."