My dear Prime Minister,

IMPERIAL AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH CONFERENCE

On Friday, October 7th, the Plenary Session of the Imperial
Agricultural Research Conference was discussing periodical
Conferences and as soon as it had been decided that it was
desirable to hold an Imperial Agricultural Research Conference at
quinquennial intervals, Mr. Julius [1] communicated your
invitation to hold the next conference in Australia to the
meeting. Dr. Grisdale [2], the Minister of Agriculture for Canada,
immediately supported the proposal, as also did the
representatives of New Zealand.

Your invitation was extremely warmly received and the Conference
carried a unanimous resolution in favour of holding the next
meeting in Australia. Bledisloe [3], from the chair, announced
that he intended to cable you, on behalf of the Conference, an
acceptance of the invitation and a cable was also sent from
Julius.

Later in the same meeting, Julius took an opportunity of moving a
resolution expressing, on behalf of the Conference, the
appreciation felt for the action of the British Government in
setting up the Empire Marketing Board and congratulating the
Empire Marketing Board on the way in which they had decided to
assist agricultural research throughout the Empire. This
resolution was warmly supported and I was very glad that
Australia, having up to the present derived the largest direct
benefit from the Empire Marketing Board and being, through your
action in 1923 in some ways responsible for the creation of that
body, should have been the Dominion from whom the initiative came
for such a recognition.

Julius, Dr. Richardson [4] and myself are all fairly confident
that the Conference is doing useful work and that we shall obtain
the type of resolutions that we think we need for the most
effective action for the encouragement of agricultural research
throughout the Empire and for the establishment of the most
convenient forms of interchange of information, so far as
Australia is concerned.

During this week Committees of the Conferences have been sitting
both on administrative and on technical questions and the
Australian Delegation has been very heavily engaged in Committee
work.

AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS

I enclose a copy of the report prepared by my Committee for the
Empire Marketing Board on this subject. [5] The report is quite
preliminary and is merely intended to indicate the scope of
agricultural economics. As, however, there has been no previous
attempt to define this scope, at any rate from an Empire point of
view, I hope that you will find the report interesting. I think
that the action that the Conference is likely to take on this
important subject of Agricultural Economics is to recommend the
establishment at the Agricultural Institute at Oxford of an
Imperial Information Centre on such subjects as survey methods and
agricultural costings and to recommend the Empire Marketing Board
should maintain a Standing Committee on Agricultural Economics
especially to deal with the marketing aspects of this subject.

TARIFF BOARD REPORT

In my letter of the 6th October [6], I referred to a sentence in
the 'Times' cable summarising the Tariff Board's report and stated
that I was going to get out information on the difference in the
standard of living between Australia and Great Britain. I am now
able to forward this information which I feel sure you will find
interesting.

Estimation of real wages in Australia and Great Britain and the
comparison of the results obtained are almost inevitably inexact
and would require a greater capacity for statistical work than I
can claim and also a much larger amount of time than I have been
able to give it. Nevertheless, the figures appear to show
definitely that, although Australian real wages arc still
substantially higher than those obtaining in British industry, yet
the gap between Australian real wages and British real wages is
lessening. I feel that this is a sufficiently interesting result
for me to suggest that you should ask Mr. Wickens [7] to go fully
into the figures because if they are sound, then the obvious
conclusion is that the vicious circle in Australia, which is
forcing up both wages and the cost of production, is a matter
which demands the serious attention of those charged with the
administration of the Australian tariff. [8]

Yours sincerely,
F. L. MCDOUGALL