PAYMENT OF INTEREST.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 98, 27 April 1932, Page 6

PAYMENT OF INTEREST.

I have been instructed by my executive to. ask for publicity for its opinions relative to certain remarks made by a stipendiary magistrate, and widely reported. These were to the effect that an applicant under the Mortgagors' Relief Act operating an account with a mercantile firm should draw that account to the limit in order to meet current interest, and should not retain money for living purposes. The magistrate supplemented this with a suggestion that the man could live, indeed that all farmers could live, practically entirely from the land, and added more remarks with regard to the unemployed living on rabbits, which my executive considers to be most uncalled for. It is unreasonable that a man should use up the last pennyworth of credit available to him in the payment of interest. That would be merely to put himself into an utterly impossible position, for fresh interest would" be payable in due course, and he would then neither be able to pay interest nor to carry on his farming operations; but what my executive feels more important still is the attitude of mind in a gentleman whose duty it is to weigh all circumstances justly and fairly. That attitude appeals to my union as extraordinarily biased. If it is characteristic of magistrates in general, then all that can be said is, "Heaven help the farmer." My executive considers that the whole question of justice between mortgagee and mortgagor, as also between various sections of the community, should be administered by Parliamentary enactment over the whole economic ;life of the country and that to set upon magistrates' courts, commissions, etc., to grant concessions in one direction and not in another is merely to multiply and perpetuate injustices on an ever-widening scale. If a remission of interest is right and proper to any man who now finds himself unable to pay interest, that fact alone is proof that remission of interest is due to thousands of others who do not find it necessary as yet to appeal to the court. A. E. KOBJXSON, Provincial Secretary, N.Z. Farmers' Union.