The Sydney Morning Herald from Sydney, New South Wales, Australia • Page 47

mm BY ONLOOKER CI W'E are all motorists these days, some of us willingly, some unwillingly. Convention, affluence, and the indifferent state of public transport have put us all out on the road together and a bumpy and poorly lit road it is too. Just where it is leading can be sometimes a reason for despair. The book we discuss on the opposite page makes something of that reason clear. In Britain, an average of 15 per, cent of the family earnings goes on cars.

In the words of one expert, "Never has so much been paid out by so many motorists for so little." Social cost It is not simply that cars dominate our lives and our domestic budgets. The entire social cost is now being challenged the dominance of the expressway over the countryside, the effect on pollution, the numbers killed and maimed. We cannot turn the clock back. Nor can we deny the economic value of the internal combustion engine in its role in the industrial revolution. No one wants to lead a Luddite counterrevolution against the car.

What is wanted is a steady look at where it is taking us, so that we can make the wisest use of it and not be enslaved. After all, the people of "Brave New World" dated their era AF, for "After Ford." Is that the sort of world we want here and now? success stories is of Sydney-born International Grandmaster Walter Shawne Browne, living in New York but still an Australian citizen, who is ranked next to Bobby Fischer in the latest US ratings. Browne, at 23, and a professional full-time player, still has years of chess ahead of him but then so has Fischer. Moscow gold K7HO would have thought we'd see the day when Russian bankers would be offering money to help a Sydney development plan? Yet if the lavish Woolloomooloo redevelopment is to be translated from drawing board and spectacular model to the reality of steel and concrete, it will be the Russians' loan millions that make it possible. The Russians won't exactly be buying strategic strip of our foreshores.

It is just a business loan. They don't become part-owners. The money, as Euro-dollars and other resources, comes from that dizzy world of international finance run by fat men in fur coats and top hats, as the communists would have said once. Now the drably suited Russians are doing their bit to help run it. The Woolloomooloo plan, if it does become a reality, will make a striking new skyline, but it shares the faults of so many of our plans.

Office space is all-dominant, not living space. If central Sydney is not to become a sterile working place, something better might have been hoped for, in such an off-centre area. The State planners think so, too. Celtic power A SCOUT is courteous at all times and Roger Kelaart's apology for his black power salute to the Governor of Victoria was well considered. The salute was wrong in the first place.

But can anyone put themselves in the place of migrants who become the targets of the rough words that disfigure migration policy discussions? Arthur Calwell, who as Minister for Immigration long ago mixed administrative skill with unnecessary rigidity in individual cases and once coined the "two Wongs don't make a White" phrase, can hardly protest if people react in a hurt way to his "smell of an oil rag" style. Mr Calwell, you notice, got his priorities fixed in a television interview. Australia wants, in his view, "people who are predominantly Celtic, Anglo-Saxon. Even in such a context, poor Britain has to run second. Aborigines ran nowhere.

Man of the West QPPOSITION Leader in WA Sir David Brand, who does not turn 60 until August is retiring early for a politician. He leaves behind one record, a term as Premier from 1959 until 1971 that beat the 10 years the legendary John Forrest (Lord Forrest) that no other Premier had been able to surpass. If Forrest is the name for the pioneering of the west, Brand is the one associated with the miracle story of today. He was Minister for Works when the Kwi-nana oil refinery was started, and was Premier for the great mineral developments that have changed the whole history of WA. Dynamic Charles Court had the limelight for a lot of that developing term, but Brand after all was the leader.

He was also the Premier, as I recalled some years ago, singled out by Sir Robert Menzies as the man to admire at Premier' conferences for his "repute and authority." THE world that waited for an outburst from Russia over President Nixon's mining of Haiphong and other North Vietnamese ports must have been surprised at its mildness when it did come. The American action was "fraught with serious consequences," the official Tass newsagency said. It is the language of indignation, highly conventional at that, rather than of anger or belligerence. The preparations go on for a Moscow summit meeting just over a week away, and top Soviet visitors pay a courtesy call on President Nixon in Washington. Has Russia something else up its sleeve or is it intent on a smooth summit meeting above all? One current opinion from America is that Henry Kissinger, the presidential advisor and the man behind this diplomatic poker-game for such high stakes, acts in the belief that when Moscow agrees to a summit meeting it believes that meeting to be in its compelling interest.

On that theory, the United States could dare an action such as this blockade in the expectation that Moscow would put up with it rather than bieak off the talks. Which may be all very well, except for the 30 assorted ships now tucked away behind the minefields. Does the summit meeting go on while they are blowing up? Looking up WHEN business, as they say, is flat on its back, at least it is looking up. Bill McMahon must have felt after last weekend's Gallup Poll that he had only one way to go, and that was up. His 3 per cent improvement in the latest poll, taken after the mini-Budget, is some small comfort.

But 40 per cent of the electorate to Labor's 48 per cent still leaves him running second. It is a long uphill way to come back yet. The only thing to sustain him, apart from the secret knowledge of how many more millions he has tucked away to promise the electorate, is his hope that Labor hot-heads are always capable of bringing about some disastrous policy split in public, to their own electoral ruin. With Eyre Jr. millions and millions of beaut A DOG CALLED JUDY TVTOT all dogs live pampered lives, but few have served a cause as nobly and selflessly as Judy.

Her story, in our news columns today, is of a stray whose work in World War II included saving the lives of Allied servicemen in a mass rescue. For that she earned a VC and a place in history. JOHN HOUSTON For the widows9 homes Widows and politicians IN one State at least the plea to save widows from penury has reached sympathetic politicians' ears (politicians become sympathetic to a variety of causes about election time). In Queensland, both the Government and the ALP Opposition have promised probate exemption on estates left to widows or children of the deceased of up to $20,000. In NSW terms that is still far too low.

Here we generally start at $30,000, but the Queensland minimum has been $15,000. Labor leader John Houston had other probate reforms in his policy speech, including one which would exempt the capital sum of superannuation annuity of up to $6,000 a year, "in the hope that all normal superannuation scherhes will be exempt and no widow or child will have to dispose of their home or possessions to pay tax." All this may have little impact on an election fought on the issue of lavish Labor promises and Premier Bjelkc-Petersen's "law and order" plea. But it shows that someone is thinking of estate duties, and NSW and Federal politicians may catch the idea too. Australian gambit SO Australia, after its belated flurry of big bids to stage the world chess championships, has missed its early chances. Only little Iceland will do, it appears, for the two giants from East and West to use as a battleground.

Interested in the discussion about fabulous sums available for televising the Spassky-Fischer contest, and what the interested viewer might see, I questioned Garry Koshnitsky, who is "The Sun-Herald" chess editor as well as organising secretary of the Australian Chess Federation. How, I asked, would a television audience react to a player gnawing his lips for half an hour while pondering a move? Koshnitsky felt the best effect would come from an edited version of highlights inside the battle ground, with a commentator and a demonstration board outside. Otherwise filling in those long minutes might strain the most imaginative cricket broadcasters and not even a seagull in sight. Australia might put In a bid for the next title contest in 1975. Don't be surprised if the challenger is himself an Australian.

No, that is going too far at the mom-v viiw Oi uiv uuit-ncidiueu cness THIS WEEK 1 ri 1 KV.B t7a. "Back homo we have sunshine, beaches, and ii THE SUN-HERALD, MAY 14, 1972 4.