PROSPERITY IN SYDNEY

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 77, Issue 134, 8 June 1934, Page 4

PROSPERITY IN SYDNEY

q-'HE different views which are expressed by visitors to Sydney concerning conditions there, are but a natural result of their individual experience and viewpoint. Sydney is a city with more than a million inhabitants. The visitor to a metropolis can be engaged most of his time with a certain set of residents who, despite the depression, still enjoy considerable incomes. These incomes are probably more drawn from fixed interest investments and provide the recipients with an assured position. The fall in interest rates may be set off by very slight adjustments in personal expenditure, coupled with the reduction in the cost of living. The casual visitor to Sydney is by no means able to avoid the deceptive element which is introduced by the spending of visitors to the city. There are always many visitors, be the financial weather good or bad. Those who cater for the tourist traffic are definite in their assurances that there is a marked falling off in tourist spending. Again, while Castlereagh Street may not provide evidence of acute depression, save the continual presence of able-bodied mendicants making hideous noises with alleged musical instruments, the canvas town which has been erected in the sandhills at Botany Bay, where the unemployed have a permanent village of shanties, made of driftwood, sacking, old iron, and the flotsam and jetsam of the beach, provides eloquent evidence of the magnitude of the depression and its effects upon Australia. The only worthwhile test of prosperity of a community is to be found, not in the condition of the streets nor of the people that one sees therein, but in the figures which tell of the economy of the country.