The Australian Crisis
We have written in a leading article about the Austra- lian crisis, but may mention here the exact de- cisions of the Loan Council on Tuesday. There is to be a £28,000,000 Conversion Loan maturing on December 15th. £18,000,000 of this is for the Commonwealth War Loan payments and £9,400,000 to meet State loans. The proposal of Mr. Lang, the New South Wales Premier, that there should be no normal conversion of the existing loan this year but simply a year's postponement was decisively rejected. Mr. Lang denounced the arrangement by which the Loan Council controls all borrowing, and declared that he would try to raise the money required by New South Wales whether the Council approved or not. Mr. Barnes, according to the Canberra correspondent of the Times, had drawn up a motion expressing a general condemnation of all forms of repudiation, but this was not pressed—perhaps because the sense of the meeting was that the rejection of Mr. Lang's policy was in itself a sufficient condemnation of the tactics of repudiation.
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