assistance rather than of reliance upon individual energy and effort;
while Governments, always exposed to interested political pressure,
are prone to give that assistance rather than to see industries
disappear, their capital lost and the workers engaged in them
forced to seek other employment. Thus protection tends to grow
and to cover an ever wider field, its own growth being productive
of the very conditions which lead to its further growth. Something
 of this kind has, we think, taken place in Australia. We
believe that the policy of protection has, in some respects, been
unscientifically carried out; that it has been extended to cover some
interests at least which do not deserve it ; that the total burden of
the Tariff has probably reached the economic limits, and that
an increase in this burden might threaten the standard of living.
54. The case for protection is strongest in regard to those industries
 which can claim that, having the home market. secured
so them and mainly using home produced commodities as their
raw material, they can and do supply the community with their
goods at a price equal to or not malerially greater than that
at which similar goods could be imported from overseas without
a duty, but that the protection is necessary because, but for it,
powerful combinations of oversea producers could, by undercutting
 their prices, drive them out of business, and having done
so could for the future charge as much as the Australian consumer
sould be forced to pay. This is a case which commands all possible
respect, but the corollary of it is that the measure of the extent
bo which it can be made out is the measure of the extent to which
protection is, on pure economic grounds, justifiable. We are thus
provided with a working canon of efficiency and may say that
those industries are efficient which can supply or which are likely
within a reasonable measure of time to be able to supply their
goods at a price not greatly exceeding the cost of similar goods
imported free of duty, and not in any case exceeding that cost hy
more than the community is prepared, with its eyes open, on
other than pure economic grounds, to pay for the maintenance of
the industries in Australia. Efficiency in this sense should, we
think, be generally the condition of protection. Other things being
equal, those industries are most likely to be efficient which, producing
 goods comparatively simple in character and in wide demand,
tan obtain the benefits of mass production for the Australian
market ; but mass production is not everything, and it may well
be that a small industry producing a commodity for which there
is only a limited demand may be able, by the vigorous application
of brains and energy to its task, to supply Australian requirements
at a reasonable price and thus prove itself a worthy object for
Protection.
55. A further condition of protection should be that every
recipient of it should be liable at any time to be called upon to
furnish the Government with the fullest information as to the
costs of his products, the prices at which they are sold, and the

Efficiency as
vcondition
f protecion.


[Information
regarding
wrotected in-Justries
 to be
supplied to-Government