A.—4

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lOth Day.] All-Bed Eoute. [16 June, 1911. Sir JOSEPH WARD— cont. For 16 years Australia was a party to a contract across the Pacific and on through Canada and across the Atlantic to England, and if the disabilities that are suggested by Mr. Fisher now in connection with the All-Red route as regards cargo are to be put forward as a reason why we should not agree to it, then those same arguments existed during the whole of the 16 years when the Australian Government subsidised that service and carried it on without any such objections being raised. There is a very important aspect of this matter which requires to be remembered as between the Governments of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and that is the development of trade between these three Dominions. Independently of the conveying of mails and passengers across Canada and across the Atlantic to England, the development of the trade between the three Dominions themselves has always been an important factor in connection with the proposal to have a service established across the Pacific, while at the same time giving a through route across Canada and on to England. That has been the case all through, and if I were asked to support this on the ground of its being the carrying of freight cargo to England, I should oppose it with very great determination, because as a cargo service to England it would be absolutely useless and impracticable. But that idea was never intended as far as lam aware in connection with the carrying on of a service of this kind. And so with the mail routes which have been referred to by the Suez Canal. The steamers that carry the mails and passengers through the Suez Canal from Australia and which carry mails and passengers from New Zealand through the Suez Canal to the Old Country are not the carriers of the bulk of the freightage between Australia and England or between New Zealand and England, because we have all got our independent direct steam cargo services, for which steamers have been specially built, refrigerating steamers carry the bulk of our cargo trade quite independently of those subsidised steamers, which to a very large extent are mail and passenger steamers only, it is true they have some accommodation for perishable products. If we mix up a proposal of this kind with anything in the shape of a freightage service we get into a position that there is not the slightest use, in my opinion, of discussing the advisability of attempting to have fast steamships for mail and passenger purposes so as to draw the Old Country and the oversea countries closer together. If the view of any of the representatives is that we are to discuss it from the trade-carrying point of view, then we ought not to give our subsidies for carrying to traders at all, because there are hundreds of cheap and good tramp cargo steamers which will carry the cargo trade without subsidies, and as far as New Zealand is concerned we would not give anything for such services. I feel it necessary to say this, with reference to the development of cargo trade referred to by Mr. Fisher, that, with all due deference to him, Ido not think it comes in. If it was a matter of the conveyance of freightage we were endeavouring to arrange the steamers for Mr. FISHER : I said emigrants. Sir JOSEPH WARD : Yes, that is carried on now by your mail steamers. Mr. FISHER : We could not ask the emigrants to disembark at one part of the continent and re-embark again. I have travelled there, and I speak of what I know. We cannot send women and children across the continent, and even if we are five days shorter we could not do it. Sir JOSEPH WARD : The emigrants would go with the steamers trading through the Suez Canal to Australia in the ordinary way, and not across the Canadian continent. Mr. FISHER.—Or by South Africa. Sir JOSEPH WARD : Yes, they could go that way ; but, generally speaking, they would not.