CHARACTERISTIC FEATURES OF
sparse population and great distances, transport, dependent
largely upon overseas trade, has become one of the most im-
portant, if not the most important industry in the community ’.1
The statement is probably even more profoundly true of the
Australian community, where railway transport is a government
monopoly and where expansion of the system has always been
carried out with a view to further concentration in the capital
ports. Again, as Dr. B. W. Shanahan has demonstrated, there
is in progress in all countries of recent development a definite
migration of manufactures from the countryside to the seaboard,
and a concentration of industry in the great seaports that is
determined, on the one hand, by the ‘layout’ of the railways and,
on the other. by economies in the industries themselves arising
from economies in handling due to the provision of better port
facilities.
This movement towards monopoly control is continuous and
pervasive in every department of our economic life. The
Federal control of Australian loans and currency, and the close
association between the relatively few banks—which are be-
coming fewer by amalgamation every year—constitutes a
condition of monopoly control that is on all fours with the
‘trustified’ organization towards which every large industry
from mining to wheat-growing is moving in the Commonwealth.
Most of the raw materials of manufacture, and every important
consumers’ product from sugar to coal, are already produced
and distributed under monopoly or semi-monopoly conditions.
All these factors, aided in an unusual degree by the government
regulation of industry, have operated to establish a unified
trading system, and to promote a unique condition of economic
interdependence between the different states of the Common-
wealth. The result has been to establish a situation for Australia
as for Canada, ‘ where there is little likelihood that an important
industrial or financial phenomenon arising in one part of the
country will be neutralized by counteracting phenomena in
another part’. Always excepting, be it understood, the more
or less local variations in weather resulting in good or bad
seasons.
Add to these circumstances the national sentiment and the
traditional commercial ties which unite Australia and Great
1 Canada’s Balance of International Indebtedness, p. 11. 2 Economica. 1923.
1