"FORGOTTEN MAN."

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 70, 23 March 1935, Page 11

"FORGOTTEN MAN."

THE FARMERS' CREDITORS. MORTGAGE ADJUSTMENTS. The forgotten man under the Rural Mortgagors' Final Adjustment Bill is the farmer's creditor (says a statement by the Associated Chambers of Commerce of New Zealand). Hβ has been forgotten for a long time. Despite the fact that he was making voluntary agreements at the time the farm finance problem was developing, the Mortgagors' Relief Act of 1931, in a stroke, deprived him of his right to foreclose, had he wished to, and had he thought it advisable to do so. Under this Act he has made sacrifices by way of reduced interest rates, the postponement of arrears of interest, and the wiping off of arrears. Now, under the Mortgagors' Adjustment Bill he may have his principal arbitrarily reduced, and part of his ownership of the property confiscated and handed over to his mortgagor. The picture usually drawn of the money-lender —obese, surrounded by illgotten gains, intent on getting his pound of flesh, is a fantasy which is nevertheless still credited to a certain extent. It savours of bathos to insist that widows and children are largely the real money-lenders, but it is curiously true. Thousands of people of small means, whose payments to insurance companies for policies, to friendly societies, building societies, investment companies and trustee savings banks, have gone to make up millions of pounds which are to-day invested in mortgages —it is people such as these who are going to suffer under the present hill. The farmer's creditor was once a good fellow, but has now become odious to some because he has the colossal impertinence to want to preserve his capital against a legalised raid under State machinery. There is not and cannot be any justification for penalising one section of the community, namely, the farmer's creditors, many of whom are as hardpressed as borrowers. For the creditors of the farmer to be selected out of the whole community, his contracts violated and part of his property confiscated is an indefensible and unjust discrimination. England has upheld the sanctity of contract, and there is no legislation in any British country on all fours with that now proposed for New Zealand. If the. farmer's mortgagee must face up to losses on his investment, well and good, but there is all the difference in the world between his arriving at his loss by voluntary agreement with his mortgagor, and having his losses determined for him by the State on a basis of complicated and cumbersome procedure which is most unlikely to achieve justice to both mortgagor and creditor. The farmer's creditor is still the forgotton man because, while the bill lays it down that allowance s'lall be made for the farmer's living expenses, nothing is said about the living expenses of the necessitous mortgagee—who may be an old man or woman threatened now with penury and with no hope of rehabilitation. The mortgagee is not to be represented by anybody appointed to act in his interests on either the Adjustment Commissions or the Court of Review. Again, supposing a property under a mortgage could be sold to-day for £4000, but under a "stay order" it was carried on instead for the five-year period, and then it had to be sold for £2500, who is to bear the loss which the mortgagee would then ' sustain ?