UNEMPLOYMENT LEVIES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 124, 27 May 1932, Page 6

UNEMPLOYMENT LEVIES.

Not long ago a country magistrate laid it down that a man must pay his unemployment levies even if his grocer and butcher had to wait. On Monday last a man was charged in the Magistrate's Court, Whangarei, with failing to register and also with failing to pay his unemployment levies. He pleaded his 'inability to pay as he was hard up. The magistrate evidently believed the man, as he remarked, "This man seems genuinely hard up, but he must realise his unemployment payments must come first," and proceeded to impose a fine of £1 and costs on the unfortunate "hard up." The magistrate wa3 only carrying out the law, but it seems incredible that such a law can exist in the twentieth century in "God's Own Country." It is difficult to gauge the mentality and want of vision of a Government that has placed such a law among the statutes ofi the Dominion, and it shows that it has reduced the process of "obtaining blood from a stone" to a fine art. The sooner the law relating to unemployment levies is amended to remove the grave injustices that exist the better. At the-present time a man who is unable to pay these taxes is regarded as a criminaL JUNIUS, JR.