SHIPPING SUBSIDIES.

Auckland Star, Volume LVII, Issue 24, 29 January 1926, Page 4

SHIPPING SUBSIDIES.

In reference to future prospects of shipping Sir Kenneth Anderson, chairman of the Orient Steam Navigation Company, said at the company's annual meeting in London on December 15: — "Shipping in general is still a very black spot, if not the blackest spot of all, but shipowners have never asked for subsidies. What they do ask for is Government economy and lower taxation, a halt in the incessant growth of statutory regulations, and abstention on the part of the Government from ratifying and giving effect to international conventions before they have been ratified and given effect to by other maritime nations. Such gestures of well-doing may be laudable, but they are very detrimental to British shipping. "As though to make matters worse, we have lately been threatened with a scheme for subsidising shipbuilders. I believe the proposal, like the extension of the Trades Facilities Act to shipping, to be unsound and unjust. Far from y ur "}?. it would but confirm the disease of high costs. It is a policy of dope. It purchases a little easement of the shipbuilder 8 present distresses by mortgaging his future. It thrusts yet more tonnage, and subsidised tonnage at that, on to an already gorged market at the expense of those owners who have heen the shipbuilders' best clients in the past J. Hope we hav e iieard the last of it "