UNEMPLOYMENT

Auckland Star, Volume LXXII, Issue 173, 24 July 1941, Page 4

UNEMPLOYMENT

IS THERE A DECREASE?

ONEHUNGA'S POSITION QUERIED (By Telegraph.—Parliamentary Reporter.) WELLINGTON, this day. "This Government has not grappled with the problem of unemployment. A certain section of the unemployed have grappled with the Government and beaten it!" declared Mr. Goosman (National, Waikato), when speaking in the financial debate in the House yesterday afternoon.

Challenging Mr. Nash's statement that unemployment had been reduced to negligible proportions; Mr. Goosman cited the case of the Onehunga Borough, which, he said, had received in all £172,843 from unemployment funds from 1938 to 1941. In 1939-40, for instance, the borough had received from the Labour Department's funds £65,313, or enough to employ between 200 and 300 men for a year at £4 10/ a week. Onehunga had only 11.400 people. Mr. Goosman said his information was that for the three previous years 1935-38 when Onehunga did not have a Labour administration the total receipts from unemployment funds were £32,000, but that from 1938-41, when there was a Labour council, the total amount received was £172,843.

Since the total rates for the borough for the three years would be about £90,000, Onehunga had received from the Government nearly £2 for every £1 collected from ratepayers. What had the borough to show for it? asked Mr. Goosman. On the figures he had quoted, w&s it not correct to assume that something of the same kind was being done all over the country? Yet the Minister had had the audacity to make the claim that appeared in his Budget.