COMMUNAL PLAN.

Auckland Star, Volume LXII, Issue 233, 1 October 1932, Page 6

COMMUNAL PLAN.

ONLY BASIS FOR ECONOMICS. OLD ORDER HAS FAILED. POVERTY IN MIDST OF PLENTY. "Some working system of economics based on the communal plan is the only system suitable for the needs of to-day, and along those lines lies the solution of the depression," said Mr. G. Mtzpatrick, an Australian, prominent in New South Wales in hospital administration, who, while in the Dominion on a health trip, is studying our hospital methods and system of economies, "In New Zealand you do not appear to have a Labour leader like Mr. Lan™ , , but on the day I arrived, some tons of fish were destroyed, not because the fish was unusable, but because it was -unsaleable. People in New South Wales are hungry, where there are millions of bushels of wheat, and yet not enough bread. So much of commodities ig pn). duced so fast that people cannot buy. In tho middle of plenty there is abject poverty. On the one hand. there are warehouses packed with goods, and, onthe other, those who have produced them, too poor to buy. "Technological adjustment of unemployment is, in the opinion of some people, almost as important as stabilising the exchange. The exchange hag been pegged in Australia at a much higher rate than in New Zealand, and yet people there can only gaze on bins bursting with wheat. ■■■•■; "One comes to New Zealand, where conditions are different from in New South Wales, humbly but hopefully, I came over to listen and to learn, not to talk; but ill-equipped as I am, I say that if we produced for use and not for profit, we might find a way out. I do not subscribe to all the tenets of the Douglas system, but some of them are interesting and worth investigating. This much is true, anyway. The old order of economists has failed and must give way to new thinkers who at least cannot do worse than their predecessors,"