Chapter 3 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974

Is There a Minerals and Energy Crisis?



John Ray

IT SEEMS EMINENTLY commonsense to say that if we are steadily using up our minerals and fossil fuels we must eventually run out, and the sooner we start preparing against that eventuality the better. The fact that we are steadily discovering more deposits of minerals may help postpone but not cancel the day we run out.

An extremely relevant consideration to us, however, is just when that day is due. As far as energy is concerned, the projection must be to millions of years in the future. Match that against the mere six thousand years of our recorded history. True, our fossil fuels will not last that long. Oil may run out within the lifetime of most people now living. Coal may last no more than a thousand years. But nuclear energy and solar power are practically limitless. Already Britain gets twenty per cent of its power from nuclear energy and if it can get that, there is no reason (other than suffering a slightly higher cost) why it cannot get the total. This cannot be an immediate or very short-time transformation. It takes years to build nuclear power stations and a sudden cut-off of Arab oil or some other such man-made limitation will cause temporary disruption, but there are no serious long-term problems.

'But even uranium will run out eventually!' True. But we really have no idea when. Uranium has only recently become an economically useful mineral so exploration has hardly begun. Even so, the already-known reserves will at least last us through the next century. This is particularly so when we realize that there are already in commission in Russia and at Dounreay in Scotland 'fast breeder' nuclear reactors which enable all of the uranium mined to be used, instead of just a small part of it.

Even uranium, however, is merely a transitional fuel. The fuel of the future is sea water -- or the hydrogen which is one of its components. Hydrogen will be used in the future as both a chemical and as a nuclear fuel. As a nuclear fuel it (or its isotope, deuterium) will be used in a fusion reaction, with helium as an end-product. Just as the H-bomb produces far more energy than does an A-bomb, a fusion reaction with hydrogen produces far more energy than a fission reaction with uranium. And the beauty of it is that so little hydrogen is required to do this. Therefore the amount of seawater we have should last us practically forever.

There are great engineering problems in setting up a controlled fusion reaction. So much energy (heat) is produced that the process cannot be contained in a solid container. It must be contained in energy (magnetic) fields. Engineering in energy is naturally a much less developed art than engineering in metals. Even so, the task has already been accomplished. Net energy production by thermonuclear (fusion) means has been carried out, although only for extremely short periods. Seeing that nobody had even heard of nuclear power only thirty years ago, this is very rapid progress indeed. The technical problems will certainly have been overcome long before we need to rely on this source of power some centuries hence.

'But thermonuclear power is certainly not going to be very portable. What is going to fuel the cars and trucks of the future?' The answer to this also involves hydrogen from seawater, only in this case as a recyclable chemical fuel rather than as a consumable nuclear fuel. Once you have a source of power -- be it coal, oil, nuclear or thermonuclear -- you have various options open to you for storing it or converting it to portable form. The electric battery you have in your car is perhaps the most familiar example of this. Another option is to use your power source to break down water into its chemical components, oxygen and hydrogen. The hydrogen can then be stored and used as a chemical fuel in much the same way as we now use petrol. Unlike petrol, however, hydrogen is completely non-polluting and completely recyclable. For this reason, it may come to be used even before petrol runs out. The reason it is non-polluting and recyclable is that when it is burnt it simply recombines with atmospheric oxygen to become water again. As long as you have a source of power, it is the everlasting fuel. Every gutter becomes part of a re-cycling system. Our bodies are as well adapted to dealing with water suspended in the atmosphere as they are not adapted to dealing with the sulphur dioxide that petrol at present puts there. The only reason that hydrogen is not at present used is cost and the fact that it requires a pressure vessel to store it rather than the simple sheet steel tank that presently suffices for petrol. Insofar as it is a worse polluter, then, we must welcome the fact that petroleum is running out.

'But what about nuclear waste-products? Surely they are the worst polluters of all!' This is so. But even that is a transitional problem and their production and disposal is at least far, far more carefully supervised than is the production and disposal of other waste-products. It is a transitional problem because radio-active by-products are an inevitable outcome of nuclear fission only. Thermonuclear fusion in theory need produce no radioactive by-products. Contamination due to accident could occur but the single end product of the hydrogen-based fusion reaction itself (helium) is atomically stable. Thus when thermonuclear power comes in, the age of no-pollution will truly have dawned. Hydrogen is the ecologist's dream fuel. If the Arab oil embargoes hasten our conversion to hydrogen, this could well be enough to qualify the Arabs for canonisation into the ecologists' pantheon.

Another potentially limitless source of power is the sun itself. It has been calculated that five times as much solar energy falls on the roof of the average American house as is used in the form of electrical energy within that house. Except for considerations of cost, we could probably switch to this source of pollution-free power right now. Australia's empty deserts could become a great economic resource -- collecting solar energy every day of the year, converting it to electric power and using that power to produce hydrogen from seawater.

So the 'energy' part of the `minerals and energy crisis' is shown to be in fact no great problem at all. Energy may become substantially more expensive in the near future, but in the long term even this will scarcely be detectable in its influence on the steady upward rise of our living standards. We may have many short-term crises of man's deliberate creation (such as the Arab oil embargo), but all the energy we could ever want is there for us to use if that is what we really want to do. Any limitations are imposed by man, not by nature. Only the unforeseen is dangerous and that by its very nature we cannot plan for. All we can do is make sure that we have many alternate sources for the power we use and this is something that is going on apace. In the future, it is unlikely that the world will ever again let itself become as dependent on one source of fuel as it once did on Arab oil. When thermonuclear power comes in, sources of power will be as common as seawater. Any country with water will be self-sufficient in fuel.

To sum up, then, even without oil, our existing resources of coal and uranium are sufficient to provide us with energy for centuries to come, and long before that time runs out solar and thermonuclear power will have become commercially practicable. As an added bonus, reserves of coal and uranium tend to be located in politically stable countries, such as the U.S.A., Australia, Great Britain and Europe.

The situation with minerals is not remarkably different. Again we have a scenario of possible substitutions stretching into the indefinite future. Additionally, as the costs of particular minerals rise, so it will become more attractive to re-cycle them. One very versatile metal that has come into increasing use in the present century is aluminium. It presently finds a wide variety of uses including structural applications. In alloys such as 'duralumin' its one major disadvantage -- softness -- can also be overcome. In previous centuries it was used very little. Only when a method of extracting it cheaply from bauxite was invented did it become a resource. Now a method of extracting it from that most ubiquitous of materials-clay, has been perfected and a trial plant is already in operation. As it is the most plentiful metal in the earth's crust, this advance is an important one. One of the reasons aluminium is not more used is that it requires a great deal of electricity in its production. With the future advent of thermonuclear power, however, this should be no problem and the price of aluminium should drop greatly relative to other metals. When this happens, the effect will be to reserve our less abundant metals for applications where their peculiar properties are indispensable and aluminium will become the work-horse metal that iron is today. Since the day when we will run out of clay seems extraordinarily far off, there would appear to be no long term worries about the supply of aluminium. The metal of the future is underneath our feet.

No doubt, however, some clays will be better for producing aluminium than others. This is the point: the physical materials of the earth are available practically without limit: sand, clay, rock etc. Given the availability of power, the only decision we have to make is which ones to use. The technological possibilities are so wide that what we use is what is cheapest. We could still use other things if we have to. Take sand, for instance. Sand (silica) is the raw material for glass and with the invention of glass wool and fibreglass, the ways in which glass could be put to use are far greater than is at present economically attractive. Fifty years ago, for instance, who would have thought that suburban Australian fishermen would be putting to sea on weekends in boats made of glass? And yet it is nowadays something so common as to pass almost unnoticed. For all practical purposes, the availability of the materials of this planet for structural and other purposes can be treated as infinite. The only question ever is which ones we use.

Chapter 4 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974


The Doomsters Rise Again



By PETER SAMUEL

'Australia with its minerals is like the bride with the very large dowry. She can wait to be wooed.'

With this little simile Rex Connor, Minister for Minerals and Energy, sums up his policy philosophies. He has never used his analogy in any public medium, only in private conversation. Perhaps his reticence is due to the rather archaic social context of the analogy. Possibly he is biding his time so that departmental work on a major energy policy statement can be finalised, submitted to the cabinet and endorsed as the guidelines within which Australia's minerals will be developed under Labor.

But the allusion to an Australia possessing very rich resources in a world where they will become inexorably scarcer and more intensely needed, is the key to the minister's approach to policy development.

Connor has said he believes there is a developing 'energy crisis' in the world and in the U.S.A., western Europe and Japan in particular. Australia's general strategy should be to quietly take stock of its energy resources and only export them in such quantities and at such a time as his department's planning suggests will maximise the benefits for the nation.

The minister envisages a new regime of government planned and controlled development of Australian energy reserves, based on a judicious exploitation of the 'world energy crisis' and the addition of 'resources diplomacy' to the traditional tools of foreign policy.

The idea of a long-range plan for Australian energy resources is not new and not particularly a Labor Party idea. Commonwealth government officials under the previous regime started work some time ago on the plan which Connor intends to unveil later in the year.

Lloyd Bott, head of the Department of National Development which ran minerals policies in the Liberal era, said in an address last year: 'We will need to decide just what our future fuel needs are likely to be ... my department is in the process of undertaking a major study of energy demands to the end of the century, and I expect that this study should be completed by the middle of the year (1973 presumably). Australia's total energy resources must be balanced against our forecast needs . . .'

That project has been taken over by the new team-Connor, his new tough-minded departmental head of Gorton-era fame, Sir Lenox Hewitt, and the small band of all-purpose under-officers he trails around with him in his jumps from department to department. Asking a government official to estimate mineral reserves is rather like asking a police chief to estimate undetected crime. He has a vested interest in under-estimation, and since no one can possibly know the answers anyway he can throw his figures around confident that no one will be able to prove him wrong. At least, in the case of the minerals crystal ball gazer, his errors will not be provable until he is personally long forgotten.

In 1938, the chief geological adviser to the Commonwealth government, Dr Woolnough, declared Australia's reserves so poor that it would 'in little more than a generation become an importer of iron ore.' By the mid-1960s Australia should have run out of iron ore, and so it was considered imperative in 1938 that there should be a prudent husbanding of the nation's scarce resources. The Lyons government intervened and placed an embargo on iron ore exports, which lasted until the balance-of-payments crisis in 1960 forced its abandonment. It was the Liberals who placed a ban on the export of natural gas and oil and who severely restricted export permits for uranium.

Government restriction on minerals and energy has a long and bi-partisan tradition in Australia, and Connor is merely treading in familiar political footsteps. But he seems to intend to go further along the same track. It is probably good politics. It looks like conserving our resources against covetous, money-making foreigners. But is it good sense? Is there really an 'energy crisis' which requires such action?

Most of the people in America who are talking about an energy crisis there are talking about the next ten to fifteen years. Beyond 1985 or 1990, most people agree there will be new sources of technology available to provide for energy needs-fast-breeding nuclear reactors that need almost no fuel, solar energy, geothermal and tidal power, possibly fusion reactors and fuel cells.

True, some particularly pessimistic scientists calling themselves the Club of Rome played around with potential growth rates of demand and a potential tailing away of technological advance and produced predictions of disaster in a widely publicised book called The Limits to Growth. This work, described by the distinguished British economist Wilfred Beckerman as 'such a brazen, impudent piece of nonsense that nobody could possibly take it seriously', was taken seriously by the World Bank which has produced a painfully long but very thorough demolition of this classic in doom-mongering. Indeed, apologists for the Club of Rome have been reduced since to saying: 'At least they promoted lively discussion.'

Most serious forecasters think that population growth and demand for material resources will decline after 1985 and that radically new technologies will be available to serve energy needs. In any event the problems of the world fifteen years and more ahead are so highly speculative that little purpose seems to be served by predictions.

It follows from this alone that any Australian policy based on the assumption of the world energy shortages lasting into the 1990s and beyond is likely to be ill based. Uranium is not likely to remain in strong demand because of breeder reactors and even oil and gas (not to speak of crude old coal) are likely to be regarded as obsolete and inefficient energy sources.

Over the long span of economic development real energy costs have gone down as technology has advanced rapidly to improve world energy productivity, although there have been periodic episodes when a trend to scarcity appeared for a short while, during which people of very pessimistic nature have each time predicted an eventual 'run out' of reserves.

There have been two surprising counter-attacks against the conservationist policy of the minerals planners in the Federal Government. One came from the Treasury and the other from the Bureau of Mineral Resources.

The Treasury, in a publication 'Economic growth, is it worth having?' has published a major criticism of the idea of an imminent energy crisis and made a powerful attack on export restraint. Connor's idea that Australia might hold back certain minerals for sale in the future is argued against in these terms by the Treasury: 'Possible future gains are being weighed against certain current losses: those in whose interests it is suggested that a certain mineral should be conserved might not turn out to want it at all, or might want it only at a fraction of its current real price. The idea of measuring the scarcity of minerals by extrapolating demand from currently proven reserves is described as "a fallacy of the crudest kind".'

Supporting the Treasury is Mr L. C. Noakes, assistant director of the Bureau of Mineral Resources. The bureau, although an agency which operates within the Connor empire, has a degree of independence.

Noakes in the latest issue of the departmental journal, Australian Mineral Industry Quarterly Review, says: 'It will never be possible to predict confidently either availability of or demand for minerals for years ahead because ore yet to be found cannot be estimated with any confidence, and demand although more amenable to estimation is likely to be controlled by complex factors such as per capita income, population, relative price, substitution and technology . . .' He, too, describes predictions that certain minerals, will 'run out' as 'oversimplistic'.

In relation to coal, Noakes reviews the world and the Australian situation and concludes: 'There is little sense in conserving Australian coal.' Proven reserves are equivalent to 260 years' supply at current production rates, and there would be very many times that if there was any need to go out and prove more. In any case the world coal situation is one of sheer plethora. Already identified reserves of coal amount to about ten trillion tons or many centuries' supplies.

Australia's best strategy for coal is to sell as much as we can as quickly as we can before the Japanese get around to exploiting the vast coal reserves closer at hand in China and Russian Siberia. In the longer term, looking to the 1980s, the market for all kinds of coal seems likely to be steadily undercut by improved methods of electricity generation and steelmaking technology.

Similarly, there isn't any case for keeping our uranium in the ground, because conservationist policies merely encourage other countries to find their own supplies and accelerate progress toward fast breeder reactors and other technology which devalues our reserves.

The petroleum situation is somewhat different. Again there is no question of the world suddenly 'running out' as the dramatists and catastrophists would have us believe. Vast reserves of oil are being proved offshore on continental shelves. Petroleum-poor Britain has suddenly become rich, thanks to oil found under the North Sea, and there is no reason why this discovery should not be repeated in many other places if the necessary drilling is encouraged. Existing wells can be exploited more intensely. But costs are going up and the geological experts agree that demand is pressing more heavily on oil supplies than on supplies of other fossil fuels."

Proven reserves of oil under Australian control are only about 300 million tons or something over ten years' supply at current rates of use. But the prospects for finding more oil are generally agreed among the experts to be good. An oil and' gas specialist of the Bureau of Mineral Resources, Mr M. Konecki, in a paper presented to an Institute of Fuel conference in Canberra last year presented figures suggesting that there could be something like sixteen billion tons of oil on Australia's continental shelf, or 500 years' supply at the current rate of use.

The problem is to find the stuff. The trouble with conservationist measures is that they deter oil search. If the government will not allow you to sell the good oil on the world market, why bother looking for it? The greater the conservationist tendency of the government the more risk there will be for oil searchers that they will not get rewards for even successful drilling efforts. The conservationist policies toward iron ore deterred the proving of reserves for decades and deprived Australia of tens of millions of dollars of export income in the late 1950s, when the economy very badly needed it. The Japanese bought their ores from the Philippines and India when they would have been buying them in Australia but for the local conservationists.

Former PM John Gorton introduced restrictive conservationist principles into Australian oil production, with his enforcement of an arbitrary price freeze and export ban on Australian oil.

It is just this kind of suppression of the price mechanism which has led to the so-called energy crisis in the United States. Connor appears to want to follow the same path with his promise of nation-wide uniformity of natural gas prices. This is the introduction of vague social welfare concepts at the cost of severe distortion of economic resource allocation and a general increase in cost levels.

Connor is also continuing the ban on exports of natural gas, despite evidence that Australia has supplies beyond any conceivable needs. At least, he says he is continuing the ban 'until our reserves are established'. The trouble with this approach is that reserves can never be finally established. In any case Connor's own advisers say that there is a plethora of natural gas. Oil and gas specialist Konecki says: 'Not only will Australia's needs be satisfied, but also considerable volumes of gas will be available for export.'

But government policy towards gas is unlikely to be based on careful, rational analysis. The most striking evidence for this pessimistic prediction is Connor's commitment to a vastly expensive national pipeline grid ahead of any benefit-cost study whatever. Connor has already spelt out how the pipeline at millions of dollars a mile will be extended to Brisbane and Melbourne from central Australia and backwards to the Pilbara, Kalgoorlie and Perth. He is prepared to commit Australia to the most expensive civil engineering project in its history without any expert analysis of the returns which might be expected.

Melbourne stockbrokers, Williams, Tolhurst and Co. who specialise in mineral affairs, say in a recent report that the project 'could be the greatest white elephant this country has seen'.

'Resources diplomacy' is a bright new phrase which is being played with like a toy by government ministers. No one will spell out what they mean by it, but it seems there is a vague idea that Australia may be able to exploit its minerals riches to extract special concessions --of economic and other kinds-- from minerals importers. It seems unlikely that this will be possible, even if it were desirable. Even though Australia is relatively rich in many minerals, it has nothing like a monopoly of any item and prices will be determined by the world market. The withholding of supplies because the government does not like the price offered will merely mean reduced sales by Australia and the diversion of customers elsewhere.

Resource surplus does not give Australia any particular bargaining power as implied by the concept of 'resource diplomacy'. Australia could never threaten to withhold supplies of minerals and expect to make gains. Certainly Japan, for example, is heavily dependent on Australia for supplies of iron ore and coal and could become heavily dependent on Australian liquefied natural gas. But Australia has become just about equally dependent on Japan as a market. We would have just as much as they to lose by disruption of minerals sales, so what diplomatic power do the resources provide? The answer has to be: very little indeed.

The sheiks of the Middle East are at least bargaining for realistic prices for their superb oil reserves. But they are just about as dependent on the oil importers as the importers are on them, and the idea of the U.S.A. being 'held to ransom' or more wittily 'put over a barrel' by the Arabs is rather unreal. The sheiks have had the opportunity to exercise 'resources diplomacy' for a couple of decades, and it has not amounted to much. The U.S.A., for example, continues to sell armaments to their obsessive hate-object, Israel. If 'resources diplomacy' cannot stop that, what can it stop?

Australia is not heading towards any genuine energy crisis but could be facing crises of government policy and regulation, due to woolly thinking and prejudice.

An energy crisis will come if the proposed government minerals authority, staffed by rule-bound public servants and financed in competition with welfare funds, is unable to perform up to the standard of the free-wheeling entrepreneurs with their risk capital, who have traditionally produced the mineral and energy goods.



This chapter originally appeared as an article in "The Bulletin", 14 July 1973, pp. 23-25.

Chapter 5 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974

IN DEFENCE OF FRENCH NUCLEAR TESTS



By John Ray

Amid all the recurrent hysteria about French nuclear tests some very pertinent considerations appear conveniently to have been forgotten. The first is that the French do have a very good reason for continuing to want these tests. To many plastic radicals the very idea of a French nuclear deterrent seems hilarious. What purpose could a French bomb serve in comparison with the overwhelming might of the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R.? How many times over do we need to be able to destroy ourselves?

Viewed through French (or even European) eyes, however, the question is altogether different. It centres on the reliability of the U.S.A. It didn't come to the help of Europe for several years during the two world wars. Why should Europeans believe that it will do differently in the next one? In the next one, however, even half an hour might be too long to wait. In a limited Russian attack Europe certainly could rapidly be subjugated using nuclear weapons and America might be very tempted not to 'escalate' the war by unleashing its missiles on Russia. Isolationist America is a weak reed indeed for Europe to lean on. In these circumstances Europe must have a deterrent of its own. It is like a crab without a shell until it does.

But how credible is the French deterrent? It doesn't really need to be very credible. Just the chance of one H-bomb exploded over Moscow would surely be enough to restrain any Russian military adventurousness. Missiles are still hard to intercept and only one of the French missiles has to get through to make the gain not worth the cost.

Realising all this then, we can see that France is being far from unreasonable. Indeed what can we expect any member of such a traditionally proud race as the French to think of a deliberate attempt by others to prevent him from having the protection that other nations have already acquired for themselves? This is a point that should be stressed: the U.S.A. and Britain are deliberately trying to exclude France from the nuclear club. If the U.S.A. were willing to share with France the nuclear secrets it already shares with Britain, there would be no need for the French tests. Protests about the Pacific tests should be made as vigorously at the American embassy as the French.

Indeed, pressure on the Americans does seem the most reasonable strategy for those who oppose further tests. France is by now so well and truly in the nuclear club that continued American refusal to share its secrets makes no sense at all. 'Proliferation' has already occurred. It is too late to prevent it. There is even a precedent (Britain) for such sharing once a country has attained independent nuclear capability.

Another thing we need to look at, however, is just how dangerous the French tests are. It should be remembered that they are estimated to increase radiation levels here by only one hundredth of the background radiation level. We all are exposed to radiation from natural sources for every day of our lives. In comparison, the French tests are neither here nor there. If someone is really, worried about radiation causing his wife to have a miscarriage (with a radiation-damaged ovum or zygote your wife probably wouldn't even know she had a miscarriage anyhow. It would just be part of a normal period) he would do more good by ceasing to wear a luminous wristwatch than by protesting about French tests.

The tales we hear about the damage tests will do to the unborn are in fact one of the less creditable forms of scientific generalisation. They are based on extrapolations that assume that if X amount of radiation causes so much damage then one thousandth of that radiation causes one thousandth of the damage. This ignores the possibility (often asserted) that radiation may have to reach a critical level in order to do any damage at all. If normal scientific caution reigned in place of ideology we would have to say that there is simply no evidence that radiation levels as low as those created by the French tests will do any damage.

Chapter 6 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974

Decentralisation: or the myth that it is good to get people to live where they don't want to



John Ray

OF ALL THE political lobbies, the decentralisation lobby is perhaps the most confused. Of all the trend-setting causes that represent a desire to have your cake and eat it too, decentralisation could well be the major. How can one have the benefits of the big city without having a big city? That is the question that decentralisation proponents have to answer.

Historically, the great advocates of decentralisation in Australia were the military men and the farmers. The farmers wanted decentralisation for the quite obvious reason that it would bring at least some of the benefits of the city closer to them. They could enjoy farm life while their wives enjoyed the variety of the city supermarkets and shopping centres and their children enjoyed the social opportunities of the city. For them it certainly was a fantasied way of having their cake and eating it too. Of course they were seldom so brash as to advance publicly such considerations as the reason for decentralisation. They would normally in fact appeal to the strategic considerations of the military men.

The strategic advantages expected of decentralisation were fairly obvious for a conventional war. An empty countryside can be advanced through by an invader much more easily than one infested with farmers-turned-guerilla. Having your population scattered also meant that a sudden onslaught on one place (such as any of the great seaboard metropolises) would not immobilise the defenders nearly as much. The loss of one city would not be nearly so tragic and the forces required for occupation of the country would be all that much larger.

Such considerations, however, do seem to have become rather outdated by the nature and probabilities of modern warfare. Australia's defence forces are so weak that any enemy who got as far as landing here would have a practically uninterrupted conquest. Australia being so vast and yet so little populated is practically indefensible by conventional military means. Australia's entire defence effort has been directed towards winning reliable friends in the region and in preventing any invader ever reaching these shores. The armed forces that are maintained have no realistic purpose other than assisting in brushfire wars in neighbouring friendly countries. For all intents and purposes the only significant military defence Australia has is the American Seventh fleet and the U.S. Air Force.

I have no wish to be understood as saying that I consider the level of military preparedness described above as adequate. What I would point out, however, is that there are many more urgent military steps to be taken before any investment in decentralisation for strategic purposes becomes worthwhile. If we were serious about defending the place, we would be better off training some more soldiers. It is no good making one's country defensible if we are not also going to provide it with some defenders. Contrast Australia's army of 34,000 with Taiwan's army of 600,000. The two countries have similar populations. Obviously, in the face of any real threat, neither decentralisation nor anything else will save Australia. An army division in Darwin, however, would be a more realistic defence move than subsidies to rural New South Wales or Victorian farming towns.

Recently, however, new forces have been added to the ranks of the decentralisation advocates. Instead of conservative farmers, we now have radical ecology cranks. An unholy alliance has been forged.

The ecology people see decentralisation as attractive in that it offers relief from what is generically called "urban blight" -- things such as traffic congestion, crime, polluted air and water, overcrowded recreational facilities etc. There are also certain economic attractions in smaller centres -- principally cheaper land.

No one can dispute that smaller cities and towns are superior to large cities in the respects listed. Does it follow however that we should encourage people to live in smaller cities? I think not. Australia has a great range of urban centres. You can live in a small town such as Innisfail (pop. 7,000 ), a small city such as Cairns (pop. 27,000 ), a larger city such as Townsville (pop. 69,000 ), a small metropolis such as Hobart (pop. 150,000 ), a large city such as Newcastle (pop. 340,000 ) , a metropolis such as Adelaide (pop. 820,000) or a very large metropolis such as Sydney (pop. 2,780,000 ).

In the above circumstances, with this range of size, if anyone is really honest about preferring smaller centres to the larger ones, why don't they go there? The smaller towns and the country generally need people. Country people are always bemoaning the drift to the cities. What is holding our trendies back from reversing the drift?

A great deal! While it may be true that the big cities have disadvantages, what is overlooked is that they do have positive attractions as well. Why is it that many country towns cannot get a resident doctor? Why is it that the Education Department has to resort to coercion to get teachers to go to country schools? Why is it that academics are so reluctant to apply for jobs at country institutes of technology that even a bachelor's degree will get you a lectureship there instead of the doctorate that would be required in the city? Why is it that the Australian public service has to offer accelerated promotion to get its officers to go and work in our beautiful decentralised national capital? Because small towns are dead. They lack the social variety and range of recreational opportunities of the big city. The jobs are there and the pay is in many cases better, but still people prefer the big city. And what basically is it that gives the big city its attraction? People! (see Part 1, Chapter 1, page 3 also.) To have social variety means to have more people. To support a variety of recreational and educational facilities there needs must be more people. To have a greater variety of jobs on offer means there must be more people to fill them all. To have a variety of restaurants available means there must be more people to eat in them. To find sufficient people to support minority interest groups means that there must be enough people for the minority still to amount to significant numbers in absolute terms. Most of our rewards ultimately or primarily come from people and people in abundance are what the big city offers. Urban growth is no accident. It is, in at least a large part, the result of people voting with their feet. If the balance of costs and gains was against the big city, the trend would be away from the cities. It is in fact the opposite. More people are moving to the cities than away from them.

Of course, in their foggy way, the trendies do know that big cities have advantages too. They are not moving out, after all. What they believe is that government action can still give the small centres comparable attractions to the larger ones. It is all a matter of subsidies! So simple! What they have to tell us is how subsidies can replace people. What they also overlook is that cities have immense economic advantages -- principally the advantage of minimizing transport costs. 'Transport costs'! some will say. 'How dull. Surely transport is only a minor and highly secondary economic factor!'

Far from it. Depending on what you include, up to half of our GNP goes on transport-related costs. Up to half the work done in the community goes into transport-related activities. Think of the motor vehicle industry, the oil industry, the railways, the airlines, the buses, trams and taxis. Think of our largest single employer, the Post Office. Think of transport substitutes such as the telephone service. Think of shipping firms, sailors, wharf labourers, ship builders, road builders, truck drivers, hauliers and delivery men. Go for a drive on city roads during the day and try to get some faint inkling of how many commercial vehicles there must be in use. Think of the mechanics and the petrol stations on every second corner. Think of the number of people who spend precious hours driving themselves to and from work every day. It may seem absurd, but one of the most characteristic and most frequent of human activities is motion -- transport of ourselves and of objects from place to place.

We all have some conception of the immense number of intermediary steps that have to be gone through before something such as a television set can be produced. Not one of us would be able to, unassisted, make a single component. Think, that for every step in that set's production the components have to be transported from one workman to another -- often to workmen in separate factories. If those factories were far apart imagine the huge extra costs that would be incurred. Concentration of factories, workers and customers in one large city minimizes these costs. Without large cities we would all be so much poorer and so much more lacking the luxuries that we regard as part of the good life. Whatever it is that people want to pay for, they would be able to afford less if it were not for big cities.

Therefore, industrial firms could seldom justify setting up outside major urban centres. Their transport costs would be too greatly increased. The land they build their factory on will be cheaper, but most of the materials they use to build it will be dearer. Hence they will have increased costs getting supplies for their factory and increased costs in distributing the finished product. There normally have to be great natural advantages for an industrial activity to be set up outside the major urban centres.

Big cities have, then, both social and economic advantages. On the social side they offer variety and on the economic side they offer economy of transport. They are one of man's oldest, most versatile and most successful inventions.

When, therefore, governments intervene in the natural settlement process in the name of decentralisation, what they find they have to do is to offer inducements both to the industrialist and to the people who will work for him. These "inducements" are usually of a monetary form -- such as the infamous 60:30:10 rule whereby the New South Wales government pays with the taxpayers' money ninety per cent of the establishment costs of factories built in rural centres. Nominally, of course, the money is lent -- but at such low interest rates and for such long terms as to be (particularly given the rate of inflation) essentially an outright gift. A poorly conceived enterprise that would never get backing elsewhere can always get government backing if it promises to set up in the country. If it has enough taxpayers' money spent on it (including subsidies and outright grants as well as loans) any enterprise will flourish.

To get people to move into the country the inducements are similar. Generally they are not so unsubtle as to pay obviously higher salaries -- though "loadings" of various sorts do from time to time appear. The qualifications needed for a job are watered down. This means that you get a higher classification than normally and with it goes of course a higher salary. Yet because of this little subterfuge, it can still be claimed that officers in the country and officers in the city are being paid equally for equal work. Canberra postings for Commonwealth Public Servants are the best known instance of this potent, but hard-to-prove practice.

What it all amounts to is that people who would not normally want to go to the country are being tempted to give up the attractions of the city by monetary bribery. People who do not want to go to the country are being forced to do so by their own monetary need. And for whose good? The people who go are not as happy as they would be in Sydney or Melbourne on a similar salary (though some do eventually learn to like their new environment) nor is the taxpayer as happy as he would be in spending the tax dollars that it costs on himself.

It would make better sense (though nothing in this connection seems to make good sense) to give the unwilling emigrants from the city the extra money anyhow and let them go on living in the city where they want to live: Then at least some people would feel greatly benefited by the outpouring of taxpayers' dollars.

At this point the whole exercise seems to look a little like the outcome of some moral conviction that decentralisation or country living is merely, in some mystical sense, "good", or to be admired. What makes it "good" no one seems to know. Perhaps it is something like "kindness" -- we just know it to be good. Being what people want to do is not cause enough to make it good -- for the excellent reason that it is not what they want to do. It being essential for our defence cannot be what makes it good because, in fact, if anything, it diverts money that otherwise might go to really necessary and effective defence spending -- such as training more soldiers. Its being necessary because only country life builds up the character and fortitude that a nation needs cannot be the reason or someone will have to explain where the city-bred people of London found the splendid fortitude and character they displayed in the Battle of Britain. Generations of city life with hardly a breath of country air does not seem to have turned them into moral marshmallows.

No, the only possible justification for decentralisation can be that it springs from a fascistic conviction that something is just good for people for some abstract or aesthetic reason and even if people cannot see it for themselves they should still be forced or induced to comply with its requirements. The Nazis thought that blue eyes and fair hair were a good thing for reasons that could never adequately be demonstrated (but which were probably mainly aesthetic) so they determined to fasten such a mould on the whole of humanity. Decentralisation mania seems to be a democratic and fortunately weaker strain of the same virus.

In summary, on the evidence of people's own choices, the balance of costs and gains is in favour of the big city. For people who sincerely disagree with this evident majority judgment, there is already a great variety of smaller centres they can go to.

'But Sydney is the only place I could get a job as good as the one I have now', someone will say. 'I would love to live in the country if only suitable work were provided'. Given the difficulty that employers have in getting people to take the lush jobs of Canberra, anybody who makes such a claim is probably in fact making a false claim. The big city is not the only home of good jobs. It may however be the only home of many specialised jobs and if for you the only good job is one of these then it may be true that you are forever condemned to city life. If, for instance you are a merchant banker you will under no government have congenial job prospects in Coffs Harbour. And the reason is an inevitable one -- because personal contact with the heads of large corporations and financial institutions is so important to your work or the work of your firm. Scattering the financial institutions and big corporations throughout the countryside would be scant help. It would simply render your work less effective, reduce the call on your services and cost you a lot more in trunk-line telephone charges.

The very essence of many specialised jobs is that they are made possible only by having within reach a large population to support them. If only 0.001 per cent of the population on average want your services, it is going to take a very large agglomeration of people to make your service into a full-time job. If you have chosen such a job while also having a liking for 'wide open spaces' then you are certainly in need of help -- but perhaps help of a psychiatric rather than of a monetary kind.

It is nonetheless surprising how few jobs, even ones which are apparently specialised, are limited to the big city. Even computer programmers, systems analysts and university lecturers can, if they try, get jobs in centres as small as Townsville (pop. 69,000). 'But who would want to live in Townsville?' To that there is only one answer possible -- the trite-sounding but ineluctable answer that one must give to all decentralisation advocates: 'You cannot have your cake and eat it too.'

Chapter 7 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974


Can We Afford Decentralisation?



By PETER SAMUEL

That big cities are bad, has been received wisdom for many Australians since the beginning of this century, when they showed their first shock symptoms after realising that they were the most urbanised nation in the world. Lately there has been added to it the new whizz idea that big cities are uneconomic. Mr Whitlam, more likely than anyone else who matters in Federal politics to hop on to whizz ideas, has had a ride or two on this one lately. Now there is sad news for both a conventional wisdom and a newly fashionable idea: big cities may be the most economic way of housing Australians. This news comes from a confidential Government document.

Why this particular document is confidential may be due partly to Australia's unique (among democracies) insistence on keeping practically everything secret. (See: 'Why can't we know what the public servants are doing,' The Bulletin, 6 March 1971.) But it may also come from the vested interests of the governing coalition parties in keeping their rural seats. Now that so many farmers are going broke it can seem to be good politics to theorise away about how there must be decentralisation of new industry away from the big metropolitan areas.

Not that anyone does anything about this question. There is plenty of blah, but Government machinery stays still. It is five years since a Commonwealth and State Decentralisation Committee was established. The Committee commissioned a series of studies on the costs and benefits of decentralisation. Now the findings of these studies remain secret. Mr Whitlam has asked for them to be made public but he has been refused. One reason why they remain secret may be that they deny politicians' blah.

The Bulletin has obtained a copy of one of the key reports. Under the forbidding title of 'A study of the comparative costs of providing public utilities and services in Melbourne and select Victorian centres,' prepared by Dr J. Paterson of the consulting firm Urban Systems Analysis, Melbourne, and circulated to Commonwealth and State Departments but otherwise kept secret, the report suggests that decentralisation may be uneconomic.

The sixty-page document fails to find any significant diseconomies in Melbourne's growth compared with eight smaller cities. Indeed, it finds that the cost of maintaining services in the smaller centres 'was at least fifty per cent higher on average than the cost of services in Melbourne.'

The main conclusion of the study is that the size of urban centres is probably relatively unimportant in urban costs --that in determining costs, geographical location, resources, management and planning are all much more important than size.

The Paterson Report is rather tentative in some of its conclusions because it is unable to allow for differences in the quality or range of services, so that it really measures expenditures rather than real costs. For this reason it is just possible that the results of the study would favour the big city against the small centres rather more strikingly if it had been possible to adjust for different levels of service.

Here are some of the report's main findings:

* In education and hospitals, at least, Melbourne's standards look higher than those of the small Victorian cities, and only in the case of roads, where the metropolitan centre suffers severe traffic congestion, does the big city provide clearly inferior levels of service to its citizens.

* Expenditure on police services in Melbourne and also in the larger Victorian provincial towns is lower than in the towns under 20,000-about $5.50 per person per year against an average $7.50. There was no significant difference in education spending as between the larger and smaller centres, despite the better facilities available in the larger centres-which suggests strongly that real education costs are less in the big city. Much the same appeared true for hospitals.

* Unit expenditure on running water supply and sewage services in Melbourne were significantly lower than in small centres-about $4.00 compared with $8.50 per citizen per year. Postal services were $3.95 against $6.79.

* The small centres do much better in only two areas-- garbage disposal and Local Government. The small centres spend $1.51 on garbage and sanitary work against the $2.46 of Melbourne, which clearly requires more sophisticated garbage incinerators and cannot rely so much on open rubbish dumps as the small towns. As for local government administration, this costs almost twice as much in Melbourne, at $5.60, as the $2.86 per citizen per year of the small centres.

* In total, current costs of urban services in Melbourne come to $71 a year per person against $117 average for eight country centres, which varied individually between $89 and $149. On the capital side the cost of providing overhead services for extra people was found to be much lower in Melbourne than in the smaller centres-$1192 per extra person compared with an average of $3582.

The opponents of decentralisation could use these figures to tremendous propaganda advantage. They could claim that to house an extra 100,000 people on the fringes of a big city would cost only $120 million in capital services compared with about $360 million in small centres.

One of the difficulties the report points up is to distinguish between economics of size and economics of fast growth. The mere fact that Melbourne grew the fastest in absolute terms may have been the reason why services could be put on at lower unit costnot that additions were being made to a big city system. Urban facilities are often what economists call 'lumpy' projects. They cannot be built in bits and pieces. That is to say, a new water main has to be built bigger than immediately needed and there are economies in rapidly taking up its full capacity.

Another defect in the Paterson report is its narrow scope. Urban centres in Victoria are not very big. Most of the more sensible advocates of new cities in Australia have been thinking of the advantages of cities of half a million or so. But the Paterson report certainly puts paid to any idea of just dispersing population round existing small-population centres. It may not put paid to the idea of building new cities of 250,000 or more. But that is not what most of the a flicionados of decentralisation mean when they use their favourite word.

It is a most valuable report-- an example of how rationality can deflate emotion and of the necessity to base policy on something stronger than unalloyed prejudice. For this reason, it makes one question the validity of the present vogue for opposing present immigration policy on mere hunches. For all we know --until the new studies the Government has ordered have come in-- it is just as likely that it would be more economic to increase our rate of immigration than to reduce it.



This article originally appeared in "The Bulletin", 27 March 1971, p. 21-22.

Chapter 8 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974


Pollution: The Cost of Clean Living



By: PETER SAMUEL

Economics used to be called the dismal science, but compared with the newly modish science of ecology it is almost utopian. The ecologists --or more strictly the collection of people jumping on the bandwagon of conservation and anti-pollution --are the new prophets of doom. There is now a very real danger that by misstating and grossly exaggerating the very important case for a greater concern with the environment, conservationists may be dismissed as cranks. If the case for conservation is stated only by biologists and natural scientists ignorant of politics and economics, then it is not going to get far. In fact, a reaction will set in against it.

Nevertheless, scientists do recognise the relevance of economics to the environment, even if they make fools of themselves when they enter an area they know so little about.

The first economic point that needs to be made to the conservationists is that some current economic trends are working very much in their direction. The growth areas of all advanced economies are information (computing, control systems, telecommunications), education, health, tourism, leisuretime activities and the like, and these are 'non-polluting'. Most manufacturing is growing much slower than these activities. And the economic sector which has had the most devastating effect on the environment --agriculture --is hardly growing at all.

Another point is that a great deal of the growth in productivity which conservationists tend to despise is actually on their side. Many of the great economic advances are associated with more efficient utilisation of natural resources. A ton of steel can now be manufactured using considerably less iron ore and coal and limestone than it could twenty years ago. A ton of steel now means less digging and messing around with the earth. Most of the increases in agricultural production have been achieved without using more land. Very often technological advance reduces pollution; for example, the switches to natural gas and electricity for heating, away from the use of coal, wood, and oil.

If scientific research is directed specifically toward the problems of pollution it should be possible to make considerable progress. But scientists seem to have lost faith in the possibility of progress. They talk all the time about the impossibility of finding a technological solution to every pollution problem. That no doubt is true. But surely it is also true --though the scientists in their pessimistic mood tend to overlook it --that technological advance can solve many pollution problems and reduce others to satisfactory dimensions.

The supporters of anti-pollution measures should also recognise that much of the concern about the environment and the demand for conservationist measures is elitist and inegalitarian. Cleaner air must be regarded as a luxury item in most conditions in Australia, for example. It is one thing for the professor of biology with his income of $16,000 a year to be keen on conservation. He probably is very well set up with housing and associated gadgetry, and he can take trips to conferences and elsewhere. His wife does not have to count housekeeping money. For him, the prettiness of the countryside and the freshness of the air are relatively very important, since his other needs are relatively satisfied.

But this man is part of a very small minority. The average man is on an income of about $5,000 a year and he is often battling to keep up the payments on his house, and he values his modest collection of household gadgets and his car quite highly for the freedom from drudgery, the entertainment and the mobility they give him. He will not be prepared to sacrifice much of these for cleaner air. And similarly he will value the preservation of the countryside less highly than the richer man.

For the higher-income man it is nothing that he, together with everyone else in Australia, has to pay an extra $50 for his car because of the cost of incorporating anti-pollution devices. But for the man who can only just afford a car, and who is paying hire-purchase interest rates, the anti-pollution regulations will be an unwelcome burden when he is already struggling to maintain a vehicle which will take him and his family into the countryside at weekends or during holidays. At present levels of income and under existing pollution conditions, the majority of Australians are probably not prepared to pay very much for cleaner air and other aspects of a better environment.

The fact that conservation is often an inegalitarian measure does not mean it is wrong. All sorts of things governments do are inegalitarian --like subsidising the arts. The country would be culturally very impoverished if egalitarianism were the only criterion by which policies of governments were judged.

And while the mass of present-day Australians might not be prepared to pay a great deal for a better environment and the conservation of the natural wildlife and vegetation, it is a safe bet that future generations of Australians will value these things much more highly. In a generation --twenty-five years' time --Australian per capita incomes should be more than twice what they are now and by then the average householder will have far less difficulty in financing his gadgetry and will be prepared to pay much more to have a good environment. So, to satisfy the needs of the next generation --not to speak of future generations --there is a case for conservation policies now which will preserve a satisfactory environment for them. An environment is not something, like a washing-machine or a house, which can be manufactured to meet immediate needs. It can only be moulded over a long period by positive conservation measures on the one hand and negative 'development' measures on the other. A balance between development and conservation which suits present-day Australians is probably stressing conservation inadequately (and over-emphasising development) for the needs of future generations.

But the first target of conservationists should be those so-called 'development projects' which are not really development at all, because they are likely to require subsidies to make them go. They should be concentrating their anger on schemes which make neither conservation sense nor economic sense. The elimination of these will both improve the environment and increase people's incomes. There are plenty of uneconomic developments which the conservationists could attack. They did this with great success in the Little Desert affair in Victoria recently. But almost every new rural water-storage project in Australia is uneconomic --because of the paucity of market for the produce of irrigated land. Each of these dams is impoverishing the country by consuming resources in the building which could be used productively elsewhere and by putting into business another collection of farmers who will have to be subsidised steadily over the years ahead. Each dam also impoverishes the environment by submerging vast bush valleys and disrupting the whole ecology of the river downstream. Many of Australia's water birds as well as smaller species of river life are threatened by the changes in river behaviour caused by dams.

Though it is hard to believe, there are governments in Australia still encouraging farmers to grow more. The worst offender is Victoria, which is still clearing bush for new dairy farms, though Western Australia must rank next in silliness with its continuation of land clearance for new wheat farms. The Commonwealth Government is an offender in a less direct manner. By giving extraordinarily generous tax deductions for capital expenditures, it encourages 'development' beyond the limit which is economically sound. And by subsidising fertilisers so heavily it encourages their excessive application. The deleterious effect of fertilisers outside the farm, once they are washed into creeks and rivers and then into the sea, probably means that even what makes economic sense for the individual farmer is an excessive use of fertiliser from the viewpoint of the nation as a whole. Fertilisers, insecticides and other chemicals which pollute the environment should be heavily taxed, not subsidised. (The farmers could get the money gained by the Government back in the form of a straight tax deduction.)

The current crisis in Australian agriculture gives conservationists a heaven-sent opportunity. Because of the world surplus of grains which has developed in the past three years, and seems likely to persist because countries like India are now self-sufficient, the Australian wheat industry must take half its twenty-five million acres out of use. That is equivalent to over half the area of Victoria. Wool prices are going down not because of any conspiracy of Japanese buyers -- if only it were as simple a problem as that! -- but because the market for wool is steadily weakening. Synthetics are being used more, heating in houses, workplaces and cars is making people all over the world dress more lightly. (Like many Canberra people, I do not own an overcoat.) Butter and tobacco are being used less because more people believe they are health hazards. For many items of Australia's agricultural production protective tariffs and import quotas in other countries make the future look grim. And possible British entry into the EEC makes the future of many rural industries look disastrous.

In this context, there is no economic logic in further land clearance for farming or for any more rural dams. There is a positive economic case for progressively taking marginal farms out of agricultural production. 'Let the bush grow back' is a sound slogan for Australia in the 1970s. And it opens new horizons for conservationists. Conservationists can demand an end to policies of agricultural expansion and the beginning of reconstruction, and they should be able to get every taxpayer on side. Every acre of land given back to bush will not only improve the national environment but it will save the nation the costs of surplus agricultural production.

But perhaps the most important advice the economist will give the conservationist is that he should harness the price system to his cause. In other words he should try to extend the economic system based on price incentives into the area of 'the environment' and use it to combat pollution. Use of the price system will generally be more effective and practical than use of direct controls or regulations. Take the example of exhaust emission from cars. Being advised by bureaucrats, governments are in the process of introducing a complicated series of bureaucratic controls. All new cars will have to be fitted, for example, with devices suppressing emission of pollutants below one per cent. This regulation may help somewhat in reducing car-exhaust pollution, but it is an extremely crude device. It means that old cars can go on polluting as before. There is no incentive to the car operator, once he has got his car out of the showroom, to maintain his car so that its pollutant emission is kept down. And there is no incentive to the car manufacturer or fuel supplier to get pollution further below the mandatory ceiling emission set in the regulation. Finally, it is an unfair and wasteful imposition on the country man, who lives in an area of low motor-vehicle density.

Most of the shortcomings of the bureaucratic regulation can be overcome with a 'pollution charge'. Each car owner should be charged an amount proportional to the estimated emission of pollutants from his car. This would be an easily implemented measure as most States now have the requirement that for safety reasons each car is inspected annually when re-registration comes up. Exhaust emission could be measured and related to the miles driven as indicated on the speedometer. The charge could be set at a level which equalled the estimated nuisance value of extra exhaust in the particular registration centre. In country areas there should be no pollution charge, and probably it would not be considered necessary in most smaller towns and cities. In the bigger metropolitan areas it might be substantial and raised steeply should the general problem be judged to be getting more acute.

The pollution charges would give manufacturers an incentive to spend money on research and development into cheaper and better emission-suppression devices, since 'save on emission charges' could become a selling point. In the same way, fuel makers would have an incentive to get the lead and sulphur and other pollutants out of their fuels. And motorists would have an incentive to maintain their cars after purchase in a condition in which their exhaust emission was controlled.

Such pollution charges could also be applied to other processes which vent private garbage into the public domain of the atmosphere: domestic heating systems, industrial plants, airliners.

And why not noise charges in cities, where this is practical? Life in suburbia would be much more pleasant if motor-mowers were taxed proportionately with the noise they make. Again there would be an incentive for the makers to progressively reduce noise levels by introducing new silencing systems and eventually produce new motors and power sources. The regulation that a mower shall not emit more than forty decibels is an inferior rule, because it is set at a level which is 'practical' with existing technology and therefore gives manufacturers no incentive to find improved technology, because it gives the purchaser no incentive to buy the marginally quieter model.

On the other side of the ledger there are private activities in cities which improve the environment of the city community generally as well as benefiting the individual. Tree planting is an example. Surveys in Sydney by the Urban Research Institute recently have shown just how highly suburbanites value the tree-ness of their environment, but each individual cannot do much. The institute thinks there is a clear case for subsidised trees for the suburbs.

The motor car is generally recognised as one of the main damagers and not only because of exhausts. The 'road toll' makes it a major health problem and it requires seemingly endless expenditures on roadways and parking facilities. One approach to the safety problem might be to try to adopt some set of 'danger charges' based on a safety rating of the vehicle. Some car safety features are so valuable that there could be severe fines for not using them. An American estimate puts the average cost of not wearing a seatbelt in terms of extra death, hospitalisation and time lost at about $2000 per $5 seatbelt. There should obviously be a very heavy fine for not wearing a seatbelt. But more general 'danger charges' would give car makers a reason for getting busy designing and introducing other safety features. We have heard for a long time about rapidly inflating air cushions for protecting the occupants of cars in case of collision, but very little real work is being done on this important innovation. Danger charges related to danger ratings (based, say, on survival probability in given collisions) would have the motor industry working like beavers to design and introduce new safety measures.

The non-economists' answer to the obvious overuse of cars in cities is to say let them congest: do not build the new roads and parking stations which seem justified by the existing traffic flows and congestion. The better answer is to start pricing the use of roadspace according to the cost that the motorist imposes by occupying that space. If he puts sufficient value on the mobility he gets out of using the roadspace at a particular time to pay the costs to the community of providing that roadspace, then equity and efficiency dictate that he should be able to get that roadspace to use. If motorists were charged the costs of the use of their roadspace, and if parking charges were everywhere related to the rentable value of the space taken up by parking, then the car would be brought under control. There would be an indicator of the social value of new roads, and a better use of existing roads, since charges in peak hours would encourage a de-peaking of traffic flows. Public transport would be able to compete on a more equal basis with the car.

These are only a few examples of an economic approach to pollution control and an improved environment. A whole range of other measures is obviously needed. Governments spend pitifully small amounts. The Commonwealth could well take more initiatives. Why not a program for the Commonwealth acquiring and running a number of large national parks? And running field-study centres in various places to study and report on changes in the environment as the Weather Bureau reports on the weather? There is obviously a great deal to be done in education, and the idea of 'biological centres' (higher-level zoos which display whole systems of plants and animals together in an ecological setting rather than just the animals in isolation) is most interesting. Finally, the Commonwealth's contribution of $50,000 to the Australian Conservation Foundation is pathetically small in a Federal Budget of $7,000,000,000.



EDITORIAL NOTE

Since the above was written, farming has become a better business than it once was and the overpopulation prophets have created the fear that chronic food shortage may be around the corner. A little history, however, will show that the present tight supply of rural commodities is at least in part merely one temporary phase of an often repeated cycle of boom and slump in agriculture. There is little doubt that the long-term situation in Western agriculture is one of oversupply. The 'dynamic cobweb' cycle in agriculture often described by economists has in recent times been distorted and extended in period by government 'propping up' operations but cyclic effects must still be expected. The present good market for agricultural products is also partly due to the once-in-a-lifetime coincidence of bad harvests throughout the world. Such coincidences cannot be relied on for long term planning. ( J.J.R. )



This chapter originally appeared in "The Bulletin", 30 May 1970, p. 39-41.

Chapter 9 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974


Concorde and the Destruction of Ozone



By S. T. BUTLER

Recent publications by two physicists from Columbia University, U.S.A., are of vital significance with regard to the question of pollution of the upper atmosphere by the exhaust gases of supersonic transports such as the Concorde.

The possible depletion of the ozone layer in the stratosphere by oxides of nitrogen in the exhaust gases of supersonic aircraft made headlines last year.

Ozone is a type of oxygen which resides in the atmosphere at high altitudes - primarily between 60,000 to 150,000 feet. The molecules of ozone consist of three oxygen atoms joined together, so that ozone is described by the symbol 03. Normal oxygen as we know it consists of two oxygen atoms combined - and has the symbol 02.

Ozone is formed in the first instance by ultraviolet rays in the solar radiation splitting the normal 02 molecules into their separate oxygen atoms. Each one of these, through a series of collisions, may become attached to normal (O2) molecules to produce the ozone (03) molecules.

Ozone molecules are in turn destroyed by being broken up by ultraviolet radiation, or by undergoing chemical reactions with other molecules which exist naturally in the atmosphere - the oxides of nitrogen providing one example.

Thus there is a continuous formation of ozone in the upper atmosphere and a continuous destruction of it. An analogy is that of water flowing into a tank but also running out through holes at the bottom. The water in the tank reaches a certain level, which stays constant when the rate of input is equal to the rate of output. The equilibrium 'level' of ozone in the upper reaches of the atmosphere is determined by the production rate of ozone being balanced by its destruction rate.

In terms of the atmosphere at ground level, the ozone is extremely small in quantity. If all the ozone were compressed to normal atmospheric pressure, it would form a spherical shell around the earth only about 0.3 centimetres thick (a little more than one-tenth of an inch).

Small as this effective thickness of ozone is, it is a highly efficient absorbent of ultraviolet radiation, and evolution on earth has evolved below this absorbing layer.

The ozone is responsible for strongly absorbing ultraviolet radiation of wavelengths which are highly 'biologically active'. These wavelengths are known to be most effective in producing skin cancer and skin inflammations (erythema), and can be damaging to the eyes. If the quantity of ozone were halved, the effects to human and plant life could be disastrous.

This is the crux of the concern about supersonic aircraft flying at high altitudes above about 50,000 feet. Their exhaust gases will inject additional oxides of nitrogen into the atmosphere which will, in effect, put another hole in the tank, so that the average level of ozone in the stratosphere may drop.

In 1971 Professor H. Johnston, of Berkeley Uuiversity, California, calculated that 500 supersonic aircraft, each flying about seven hours a day, might eventually produce a reduction in the quantity of ozone to one-half its present value. Such predictions could not be certain because of unknowns in the rates of the chemical amounts involved, and indeed the quantities of natural oxides of nitrogen which occur in the stratosphere anyway.

Committees were set up in several countries to report on the issue; these included one appointed by the Australian Academy of Science, which expressed the opinion that, on data presently available, it would not expect significant adverse effects to the ozone level from the flying of supersonic aircraft. However, uncertainties remained.

Professor Henry M. Foley, chairman of the Physics Department of the Columbia University, and Professor M. A. Ruderman, visiting Columbia University from the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton, have now pointed out that man has already injected into the stratosphere more oxides of nitrogen than would result from the flying of 500 Concordes seven hours a day for nearly ten years. Thus mankind has, albeit unwillingly, already exposed himself to the ozone reduction risk.

Foley and Ruderman point out that oxides of nitrogen are not only products of jet engine exhausts but will automatically be produced at high temperatures as a result of combining of naturally occurring nitrogen and oxygen in the air. This occurs in the 'fireball' of a nuclear explosion, and most of the products of this explosion are injected upwards into the stratosphere.

During one peak period between October 1961 and December 1962, the United States and Russia jointly exploded 340 megatons of nuclear bombs.

Foley and Ruderman calculate that these tests alone injected more oxides of nitrogen into the stratosphere than the flying of 500 Concordes seven hours a day for some five years.

If drastic ozone reduction had occurred, the world would already have felt the consequences. Yet detailed measurements of ozone concentrations over the world-wide system of monitoring stations has shown that in the last ten years the concentration of ozone has in fact slightly increased -- in some latitudes by as much as ten per cent.

The analysis by Foley and Ruderman seems unambiguous and undeniable. Whatever other problems the Anglo-French aircraft may be meeting, it seems that it can be freed from the charge of destruction of the earth's ozone layer.



This chapter originally appeared as an article in "The Sydney Morning Herald", 16 July 1973, p. 7.

Chapter 10 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974

This article originally appeared in Nation Review, 8 June 1973, p. 1042.

RHODESIA: IN DEFENCE OF MR SMITH



By John Ray

To MOST AUSTRALIANS, the Smith regime in Rhodesia is indefensible. They practice blatant racial discrimination, censorship, and imprisonment without trial. A more complete recipe for unpopularity would be hard to imagine. There is, however, more to the picture than is popularly supposed.

Why was Rhodesia not peacefully decolonised like the rest of Britain's African possessions? To answer this we must firstly ask ourselves another and quite basic question: Could white Rhodesians reasonably be expected to subject themselves to another Belgian Congo? Obviously not if they could help it. And in Rhodesia they could help it. They had been self-governing with their own parliament since the 1920s.

All the African decolonisations have been followed by mass slaughters and dictatorships. Some of these we hear little of in Australia because it is only blacks slaughtering blacks, but in Rhodesia all these things are right next door and the Rhodesians are acutely aware of them. If you were in their position, what would you do? Leave. That is certainly what many whites in other parts of Africa did before decolonisation.

In Rhodesia, however, the white community was relatively large (over 200,000 ) , self-sufficient and of long standing. It was their country, where they had been born and where they wanted to stay.

They were not going to throw in the towel and give their country over to another Amin-type dictatorship. But what then, were they going to do with the Africans? ,

The solution proposed was really a rather trusting one. They were going to put all their black people's children in schools and give them the vote as they completed primary education. Basically, only blacks with at least some education would be allowed to have a say in running their country. To cynics among us it may seem a trifle naive, but white Rhodesians were actually prepared to trust the power of education to avoid another bloodbath.

The world said it was not enough. Decolonise now. Give the blacks rule even if the only education they have had is how to use a spear. To the starry eyed idealists of Harold Wilson's British Labour government the realities of Africa didn't seem to matter.

It didn't even seem to matter that the good faith of the white Rhodesians was obvious. They had already succeeded in getting a higher proportion of their black population into schools than any other country in Africa. They had even shown themselves to be flexible on the education rule as the basic qualification for a vote. If an African adult did not have an education, but had shown his adaptation to civilised life by acquiring a certain amount of property or income, then he was given the vote nevertheless.

Since then the Rhodesians have been at war. A trade war, a war of nerves and an outside-sponsored guerilla war. As in all states at war, civil liberties have suffered. Instead of allowing to be tried the one solution that might have allowed the two races to live together in harmony, the outside world has ensured that Rhodesia must undergo that very bloodbath they sought to avoid. The world's Leftists must be proud of themselves.

The only solution now may be for the white Rhodesians to leave their homes, jobs, property and everything else that makes up a comfortable existence and emigrate en masse to some other part of the world. Naturally, they are reluctant to come to this conclusion -and they may yet be right. Despite nit-picking by outsiders, the Rhodesian economy is booming and South Africa has shown that black dissent can be controlled.

The big danger is, however, that if they do have to resort to South African methods to control terrorism (note that as yet there is in Rhodesia nothing like the apartheid system that reigns in South Africa), they may so alienate the blacks that even education will not make it safe to give them the vote. Already this has started. The Rhodesian government has felt itself obliged to raise the educational level which will earn a vote from primary to two years secondary education.

If the governments of the world were sincere in their desire to avoid both a bloody revolution and a South African style system in Rhodesia, they would surely desist in their policy of pushing the whites into a corner. What the whites need is not attack -- there is enough fear in their future already -- but international guarantees for their safety and the security of their property. That way they might be able to afford to run the risk that the rest of the world seems determined to force upon them.

Chapter 11 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974

Reprinted from Nation Review, 6 April 1973, p. 753 and written under the pseudonym 'Libertas'.

THE RHODESIA INFORMATION CENTRE



John Ray

MR WHITLAM and his A.L.P. government have promised that they will restrict our freedom of information 'by legislation, if necessary'. I refer, of course, to one of his first acts on coming to office -- his attempt to have the Rhodesia Information Centre closed down. It is still open at the time of writing.

Legislation then would indeed appear to be necessary. I will predict, however, that it will not quickly be forthcoming. Sir Robert Menzies is on record in Hansard as referring to the Rhodesian prime minister as: 'My friend, Mr Smith' -- so you can imagine how likely the Liberals are to let any such legislation through the Senate.

If it was put up and the Senate did reject it, however, the defeat might be signal enough to require a double dissolution. Can you imagine Mr Whitlam going to the polls on an issue of restricting one of our most treasured freedoms, the freedom to speak? The Senate debate alone would be damaging enough to Labor without fighting an election on the issue, indeed it is some testimony to how disorganised the Liberals were after the last election that they did not take up the issue on these grounds when Whitlam raised it.

'But', you may say, 'what has the Rhodesia Information Centre got to do with free speech? Surely it is just a propaganda outlet?' The answer to that, of course, is that when you agree with it, it is information; when you disagree with it, it is propaganda. As they used to say: 'What's propaganda and what's proper goose?'

'But by propaganda is meant distorted information, and there is no reason to tolerate that!' someone might say. If that is so, why do we tolerate advertising?

Anyhow, who thinks that our press itself is free of bias and distortion? Bias will always be with us. The only safeguard is that everybody be allowed to present his own viewpoint. In comparing the same topic treated by people with opposing biases, we might have at least the chance of finding a golden mean that is somewhere near the truth.

It is a sad comparison that while the former government was in power we did not recognise Communist China. We even fought them (in Korea). And yet one could always go down to the appropriate Communist bookshop and cart away half a ton of pro-Chinese literature if that was one's inclination. Mr Whitlam doesn't want to allow the same freedom to supporters of a regime he does not recognise or approve of.

This just bears out the suggestion implicit in my own nom de plume -- that in our society it is the conservatives who are the guardians of liberty and the rights of the individual, not the socialists. This is in fact traditional. It was the conservatives who believed in free enterprise and thought the free world was worth fighting for.

Not of course that Labor leaders don't acknowledge their commitment to free speech in the abstract. It is when it comes down to actually allowing people to hear something that Labor does not like them to hear that we see how different words are from deeds. Mr Whitlam went to the polls with the promise of 'more open government' and specifically justified this policy with the assertion that we all have a 'right to know'. This policy, however, was formulated in the belief that it would help embarrass the former Liberal government. That it might embarrass Labor was not seriously foreseen.

Whitlam's policy then seems to boil down to 'freedom of speech for those who agree with me'. Not so different from Joe Stalin after all.

Chapter 12 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974

The article originally appeared under the pseudonym 'Libertas' in "Nation Review", 19 April 1973, p. 816.

RACISM IN AUSTRALIA?



John Ray

When you dislike a man who is black, that does not make you a racist. You are a racist only if you dislike him because he is black. This is a simple truth and yet I will venture to assert that much of what small 'l' liberals today call 'racism' falls into the first rather than into the latter category.

Take this affair recently headlined as Racism in Redfern. Several hundred white residents petitioned the local council to bar the takeover of several terrace houses in their area for the purpose of setting up an 'Aboriginal community'. Does this mean American style colour prejudice has come to Australia? Sydney television showed that there were indeed violent emotions involved --- with an actual confrontation between a white protester and a black organiser being shown.

The grounds for protest were informative, however. Aborigines were in fact already squatting in many of these terrace houses and the local residents had come to find them singularly unpleasant neighbours -- drunken shouting, fighting and bottle smashing at all hours of almost every night -- aboriginals urinating in the street and shouting obscenities at passing white housewives. Who would not want to see the last of neighbours such as that -- whether they were black, white or had purple polka dots?

It is in fact a most violent denial of civil rights if we stigmatise people who protest against such things as 'racists' just because the offensive group is identifiable in terms of colour. Black is not beautiful -- any more than white is.

The greatest obstacle to a reasoned discussion of white 'backlash' is an unstated assumption by many of Australia's suburbanites that Aborigines are just the same as they are except that they have a brown skin. It is this assumption that makes what anti-aboriginal protesters say seem so unintelligible and unreasonable. 'I wouldn't like someone to object to me just because I had a brown skin,' the suburbanite says.

Of course the anti-Aborigine protester is not just objecting to skin colour. He could scarcely be so puerile. He objects to what does factually go with skin colour -- habits, behaviour and practices that white society has long preached against and condemns. If it were just the colour of their skin that set Aborigines apart, there would be no backlash.

It is then this fact that Aborigines are characterised by behaviour that in a white we would find despicable that suburban small 'l' liberals find so hard to absorb. I know of several instances where such liberals, when actually meeting Aborigines for the first time, have suddenly become much more conservative in their views. It is well-known that it is in country towns and depressed urban areas that anti-Aborigine feeling runs high. What people from both types of areas have in common is that they have actually met and lived near Aborigines. They know what they're talking about.

Obviously, there is no necessary assumption that these differences between Aborigines and whites are inborn. All of them could be attributed to differences in upbringing. We come from a culture that values privacy, hygiene and industriousness. Aborigines do not. We see the virtue of competition and emotional reserve. Aborigines do not.

White backlash is then reasonable. Unless we expect whites to forget overnight the cultural values that they have learned and practised all their lives, they will find the proximity of Aborigines unpleasant.

There are three possible solutions to this problem: change the whites; change the Aborigines; or have the two groups live apart. The first two solutions seem totally presumptuous and paternalistic -- if not fascist. The last is the solution that has usually emerged. Blacks and whites, if left to themselves, normally do live in separate communities. It is only when governments and ideology-blinded white do-gooders interfere with the natural selection processes that problems arise.

Journal of Human Relations, 1972, 20, 71-75.

Also reprinted as Chapter 13 in: J.J. Ray (Ed.)"Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974

Note: The article below does of course offend against the common Leftist claim that there is no such thing as race. Anybody who takes that claim seriously should perhaps read this article as a preamble to what appears below.



ARE ALL RACES EQUALLY INTELLIGENT? -- OR: WHEN IS KNOWLEDGE KNOWLEDGE?



John J. Ray

There has recently been an extensive controversy in the psychology literature on the possible genetic base of racial differences in intelligence. This has been so acrimonious as to inspire the thought that the controversy itself forms an interesting case-study in the sociology of knowledge. I refer to the articles by Jensen (1968 and 1969) and Garrett (1969). One outcome of these controversies is the apparently justified accusation by Jensen (1969b) that an important body of his colleagues (the members of the council of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues) indulged in "propaganda" and disregard for the facts of the issue. Garrett (1969) makes similar observations. As Van den Haag (1969) points out, the cause of equalitarianism seems to have induced some remarkable failures of reasoning even among normally eminent social scientists. How may these phenomena be explained?

Study of Intelligence as the Hereditary Given

Before one can understand what is really going on in this controversy, it is necessary briefly to recapitulate some basic findings.

There is no doubt that American Negroes obtain lower average scores on standard intelligence tests than do American whites (Tyler, 1965, p. 306; Garrett; 1969). In fact the differences found are often so large and so regular in their incidence that this might be held to be one of the most impressive uniformities in the whole of psychological measurement.

To use Hebb's (1949) terminology there are two types of intelligence -- A and B. Intelligence A is the inborn, hereditary "given" whereas intelligence B is intelligence as measured, i.e. intelligence A plus some variable overlay of learned problem-solving strategies. It is mean differences across races in intelligence A that is of concern here.

Substitution of Ideology for Science

The way to assess differences in intelligence A is to control or equalize the influences and opportunities affecting the B Component. When this is done, differences remaining are attributable to intelligence A variations. Tanser (1939), Bruce (1940), and McQueen and Browning (1960) have carried out such studies where environmental influences on white and Negro groups have been controlled. All reported significant superiority of the white groups. In spite of this, most psychologists (Tyler, 1965, 9, 300) continue to claim that there are no innate differences in intelligence between whites and Negroes. The usual reason advanced for adherence to this credo is that the tests used must in some way be unfair to non-members of the dominant white culture (even though the Negroes and whites of Tanser's study had attended the same schools since 1890!). If this claim is true, how does one explain the consistent finding (Pintner, 1931) that Chinese and Japanese school-children get average test scores equal to or above those of American whites? One is asked to believe that the tests are unfair to people who have sat in the same classrooms as whites but not unfair to Chinese and Japanese who have a totally different cultural background.

Why is it that psychologists, who are most in a position to observe racial differences in intelligence, resolutely refuse to believe the evidence before their eyes? The answer to this is, I believe, an instructive, if sad, incident in the sociology of knowledge. Often drawn to their profession by humane or humanitarian considerations, psychologists are so committed to the belief that whites and Negroes morally should be treated equally that they seem to conclude, albeit unconsciously, that the best way of securing this morally desirable end is to convince people that whites and Negroes in fact are ontologically equal. If the facts fell into line with this account, all would be well, but as it is, the present author would question whether any moral goal is ultimately well served by denying reality as it is. If there are native differences in intelligence, our strategy in pursuing humanitarian goals must presumably become more adaptive by a recognition of it.

This question of the ideology subscribed to by the scientist is also relevant to the question of what we accept as a criterion for evidence. There have been many attempts to construct "culture fair" tests but their application has not been successful in removing Negro-white differences. We must then at some point ask ourselves: "When do we stop?" When do we consider the case proved? When do we start to conclude that there might not after all be some real difference there that is not attributable to a measurement artifact? Given the impressive uniformity of the findings to date, it seems abundantly clear that the existence of a real difference between races would long ago have been considered to have been proven out of hand were it not for an ideological commitment to the opposite viewpoint.

When is Moral Moral?

Just how much ideology can cause even an outstanding psychologist to drift into self-deception is exemplified in the position taken by McElwain (1970). McElwain is head of the Department of Psychology at Australia's largest university (Queensland) and author of the definitive "Queensland Test" of Aboriginal intelligence. This test was normed and validated on Aboriginal groups themselves. It includes only those sub-tests which could be shown to discriminate within the Aboriginal population. Although he does not appear to have committed himself in print, he has repeated to the present author in writing, an assertion often made to his students -- that when the Queensland test is given also to whites, a negative relationship between the discriminating power of a subtest within the Aboriginal population and the size of the gap between white and Aboriginal mean scores appears, i.e., as the test gets better so Aborigines rose closer to whites in average test scores. From this McElwain appears to suggest that if we got a really discriminating test, the difference between whites and Aborigines would disappear altogether.

Here, then, McElwain appears to commit the same fallacy in reverse that is so frequently alleged against tests normed and validated for whites! A test is designed specifically for an Aboriginal culture and yet whites still get higher scores on it! The amazing thing is that whites do not get lower scores on it. Of course the discriminating power and the size of the cross-racial gap are related. As the test is more and more characteristically Aboriginal in specific background, so whites are more and more disadvantaged. A true comparison study of the question set by this paper using the Queensland's test would require that a group of whites be found who shared an environmental background similar to the Aborigine culture. In that case only, might mean scores on McElwain's test be reasonably compared across the two racial groups.

If racial differences exist how do we explain them? A possible explanation is the ecological one: different racial groups develop different areas of excellence according to the specific demands of their characteristic environment. In the harsh European climate, forethought (symbolic thought) has historically been essential to survival -- particularly through the long winters. In Africa these same mental qualities have not had the same relative importance. Because of the more beneficient climate the importance of certain physical and psychomotor abilities has risen in comparison. In time the process of natural selection has ensured that these differentia became racially fixed. With the different characteristic environments of the white and Negro races, it would in fact be highly surprising to find similar levels in all abilities. What one would expect and what one does, I believe, find is that whites would be higher on cognitive abilities and Negroes higher on certain physical abilities.

Using the concept of a morality hierarchy proposed by Hampden-Turner and Whitten (1971) it might be said in fact that the attempt to deny the empirical findings of racial differences in intelligence in order to secure the moral goal of having all races treated equally represents a very low level of moral maturity. The person at the highest stage of moral development would presumably not need to have his moral resolve to treat people equally bolstered by assertions that people are equal anyhow. He would be anxious to do justice to the empirical findings in the awareness that they are essentially irrelevant to the moral decision he has made.

For the future then, humanitarian aims might perhaps best be served by abandoning the unlikely enterprise of proving all men equal. Instead, perhaps, we might concentrate on the question of what the difference between groups are -- and how differences might be used in the betterment of all.

REFERENCES

Bruce, M. 1940. "Factors Affecting Intelligence Test Performance of Whites and Negroes in the Rural South." Archives of Psychology, No. 252.

Garrett, H. E. 1969. "Reply to Psychology Class 338 (Honours Section)." American Psychologist. 24:390-391.

Hampden-Turner, C. and Whitten, P. 1971. "Morals Left and Right." Psychology Today. 4:39-43, 74-76.

Haag, E, van den. 1969. "Addendum to Jensen." American Psychologist. 24:1042.

Hebb, D. O. 1949. The Organization of Behavior. New York: Wiley.

Jensen, A. R. 1968. "Social Class, Race and Genetics: Implications for Education." American Educational Research Journal, 5:1-42.

Jensen, A. R. 1969(a). "How Much Can We Boost LQ. and Scholastic Achievement?" Harvard Educational Review. 39:1-123.

Jensen, A. R. t969(b). "Criticism or Propaganda?" American Psychologist. 24: 1040-1041

McQueen, R., and Browning, C. 1960. "The Intelligence and Educational Achievement of a Matched Sample of White and Negro Students." School and Society. 88:327-329.

McElwain, D. W. 1970. Personal communication.

Pintner, R. 1931. Intelligence Testing. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Chapter 20.

Tanser, H. A. 1939. The Settlement of Negroes in Kent County, Ontario. Chatham, Ontario: Shephard Publishing Co.

Tyler, L. E. 1965. The Psychology of Human Differences. New York: Appleton, Century Crofts. Chapter 12,