PUBLIC WORKS POLICY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 226, 23 September 1936, Page 17

PUBLIC WORKS POLICY.

I think it is a pity that the Govern- ' inent have not concentrated on one big scheme designed to abolish unemployment for ever, instead of scattering o, sum of £8,500,000 amongst a multitude of small schemes, whose return to the State cannot be remunerative, seeing that all the schemes (except the railways) will not earn revenue directly, and the recurring expenditure on the same will have to be met by additional taxation. The writer believes that the unemployment problem in New Zealand could be solved once and for all by a comprehensive scheme so attractive that it will induce the unemployed and their families, numbering, say, 200,000 in all, to leave the cities and settle m new all-electric -model towns, proposed to bo built near the big hydro-electric power stations and run on Christian, profit-sharing, co-operating lines, with the aid of very cheap electricity. -Thus an expenditure of £6,000,000 annually for five years would enable such model towns to be founded to provide 50,000 "income" homes, each on half-acre plots, with up-to-date cottage industries electrically worked to give interesting and remunerative employment, partly for the needs of the family and partly for that of the whole community. Such a scheme would help to build a new social order into our structureless society, which sadly lacks the cohesion and unity afforded by the guilds and clans and tribes of our ancestors and amongst the Asiatics of to-day, amongst whom unemployment is absent. THOMAS A. F. STONE, 8.E., A.M.I.M.E.