the 1920s).^12 The board established under the Transport Regulation Act of
1933 refused to license car services that Reginald Ansett provided between
Ballarat and two rural towns that were connected to Ballarat (Marlborough
and Hamilton). In response, Ansett purchased a plane, and offered weekday
services between Melbourne and Hamilton:‘It was not thefirst air competi-
tion for Victoria Railway’s passenger traffic, but it was thefirst airline estab-
lished purely to compete with the railways’(Lee 2009, p. 155).
9.2.3Spread of Government Ownership
It is hard to be confident that the example of‘colonial socialism’in rail directly
stimulated public ownership of other enterprises—where they were generally
afforded, if not monopoly rights, then competitive advantages over private
enterprises. However, there were indirect effects.
That governments had operated, reasonably satisfactorily, a public enter-
prise as large as a rail system; that colonial governments had achieved
favourable access to capital markets largely on account of rail: both could
have made for the further extension of the scope of public ownership. Indeed,
during the second half of the nineteenth or the early twentieth century, many
initially private utilities or infrastructure became publicly owned, including
wharves, telegraph, and telephone; and many other utilities that could have
been private were publicly owned from the start, including postal services, and
reticulated urban water supply and sewerage. In at least one case, there was a
complementarity between railways and another service that helps explain the
public takeover—the telegraph was a communications tool used by the rail-
ways, and the telegraph lines needed a right of way, which the railways had.
But in many other cases, the timing suggests that the existence or example of
rail was not important—and, besides, public ownership of some kind was
common in Britain and elsewhere for many of these utilities in the period.
Moreover, there were variations among the colonies and states: although
Sydney trams were publicly owned, Melbourne’s remained private. In add-
ition,fiscal stringency (caused, to some significant extent, by railwayfinance)
contributed to the later sale or closure of the‘petty socialist’enterprises of the
1910s—brick and lime works, quarries, timber mills, clothing factories—in
direct competition with private enterprises; and the reiterated socialist object-
ive of the New South Wales Labor Party to nationalize (with compensation)
was abandoned in favour of government controls on gas price and profit,
(^12) Much later Robert Menzies wrote that‘We have, for example, socialist railways and a socialist
Post Office, mostly to our great advantage’, and argued for the‘two airline’policy on the grounds
that‘free for all’competition was inconsistent with the maintenance of‘the highest standards’of
safety and service (1970, pp. 121, 138).
Jonathan Pincus