The Premier And The Socialist - Analysis

A nursery-rhyme stroll that turns into a raid

Paterson’s central move is to dress a grim piece of public finance in the sing-song clothes of a children’s tale, so the cheerful rhythm keeps colliding with what the characters are actually doing. The Premier and the Socialist begin as unlikely companions walking through the State, united not by principle but by temptation: they wept at the sight of the Savings Bank’s money accumulate. That word, accumulate, matters—it frames other people’s careful thrift as an offense that begs to be cleared away. From the start, the poem’s friendliness is a disguise for appetite.

Cross-party agreement: spend what you can’t earn

The first sharp tension is between competence and power. The Premier imagines three financial amateurs controlling the funds for a year, as if inexperience were a virtue so long as it loosens the vault. The Socialist agrees: They would -- or very near! Yet when the Premier turns to the government’s own credibility—trying to raise some cash / On assets of our own—the Socialist suddenly becomes realistic: I doubt it, and even groaned a doleful groan. The contradiction is plain: they’re sober about their inability to earn trust or money on their own, but breezy about confiscating money that belongs to cautious depositors. Paterson suggests a shared opportunism beneath the supposed ideological divide.

Barrack Street and the failed seduction of Savings

Paterson personifies the Savings Bank as a character being coaxed away from safety: Oh, Savings, come and walk with us! The invitation includes a telling detail—Away from Barrack Street—as if the bank must be lured from its proper place, out of sight of where it’s established and watched. The Premier flatters himself as a guide for inexperienced feet, but the Savings Bank answers with the poem’s most direct statement of the real argument: a socialistic crank with legislative rank is not automatically qualified to teach experienced Banking men / The way to run a Bank. In other words: political authority is being used as a counterfeit credential.

They passed an Act or so: legality as camouflage

Once persuasion fails, the tone slides from cajoling to procedural force: They passed an Act or so. That casual or so is devastating—it makes lawmaking sound like a quick errand run, a convenient tool for moving the little Savings out so they can have a blow. The poem keeps calling the deposits little, and later the savers very small, insisting on their modest scale and vulnerability; against this, the government’s ease with which it reassigns the money reads as bullying dressed up as administration.

From public need to private feeding: Tom Waddell and the dried-out farm

The next turn reveals what the money is for, and it isn’t a neutral public good. The Premier trots out an expert—There’s Tom Waddell—then admits his own cynicism: he used to prove Waddell’s Estimates were rot, but has recently forgot. Paterson nails the moral flexibility of power: yesterday’s rot becomes today’s authority when there’s money to be moved. The proposed policy—Advances on a dried-out farm—sounds like development, but the poem immediately narrows it to favoritism: loans to friends of Ms.L.A. are very good, indeed. The culminating image is animal and predatory: back-block Cockatoos rolling up to feed. The “cockatoo” in Australian slang can hint at the small settler, but here it also functions as a flock—no individual conscience, only collective pecking. What began as a walk becomes a feeding frenzy.

The small depositor’s protest—and the glitter that wins

When the Savings Bank objects—most of us are very small, / And none of us are fat—it voices the poem’s quiet moral center: this is not a rich institution being humbled, but ordinary people being skimmed. The Premier’s response is pure wounded ego: Before I’d be dictated to / My billet I’d resign! He treats criticism as insolence rather than warning. And the Socialist, instead of defending the “small,” is mesmerized by the money itself: How brightly the little sovereigns shine. Paterson’s satire lands here: the Socialist’s stated mission should align with the small saver, yet he is seduced by the same glitter as the Premier. The poem’s tone tightens into a cold joke—principle dissolves in the light off coins.

What kind of theft is hardest to name?

The ending turns the earlier personification into a disappearance: they try to call the Savings back, But answer came there none, because the Cockatoos / Had eaten every one. It’s not framed as a single villain stealing a bag; it’s a whole system consuming deposits under the cover of an Act, of expertise conveniently remembered, of “advances” that sound like policy. The poem forces an uncomfortable question: when money is taken by paperwork, committees, and cheerful rhetoric, who is supposed to feel responsible?