EXCHANGE POOL.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 250, 21 October 1932, Page 8

EXCHANGE POOL.

POLICY OF THE GOVERNMENT. CHAMBERS OF COMMERCE CRITIC Alj.

" CYNICAL . INDIFFERENCE." In the executive's report to be presented to next week's conference in Dunedin of the Associated Chambers Of Commerce of New Zealand there is some outspoken criticism of the Government's monetary policy with respect to the recent exchange pool.

"This last year," says tlie report, "has revealed beyond any doubt the necessity for the work of this association. The burden and restrictions upon business— irksome as they were in previous years —have become intolerable in the third year of the depression, and' the work of resisting further, encroachment on the liberty to trade and additional burdens on trading in the interests, not alone of business people, but of our Dominion and people as a whole, has become one requiring never-ceasing vigilance and public enlightenment for thp preservation of freedom to do the business by which we all live. i.

"The strain of the economic situation has been felt by Government, both national and local, which have tried to protect their decreasing revenues, and antecedent and current obligations, at the expense of private enterprise in trade, industry, and commerce and the professions, without apparent regard for the fact that it~ is only by the results of encouragement to prosperous trading that any Government can continue to live.

"The two reports of the National Expenditure Commission have now confirmed the attitude which this association has for several years taken up on the question of the burden of public expenditure, and the efforts it has made to resist and reduce this imposition on the business of the Dominion. These reports justify and necessitate our continuance to urge these reforms.

"The . apparently cynical ■ indifference on the part of the Government to the effects on individual ® commercial -busi-

ness of the exchange pool regulations issued by Order-in-Council last Christmas Eve, for the purpose of providing the Treasury and local bodies with a short way out of their own overseas monetary difficulties, indicate what would happen had the commercial community no organisation for its protection. . ~- r . . . . _ "Therefore it seems that there, is a. real danger in this Dominion (which has accumulated' the highest debt per capita of its population in the world' of a divergence, which might become ai antagonism, between the view of thos responsible for Government, that the; method in the short view of uphojdii? the credit and prestige of the Stae must be carried out at all costs, and tic view of those responsible for the buy ness of the community that the cost aid burden of Government must be stricly proportionate to what the resources of the Dominion can afford' and' busiiess can bear. "It might well become the high fraction of this association to prevent the incipient antagonism from growing,and to discover a via media along vhich both can travel in future toward the common end of the geneial good."