The Outlook.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 19064, 28 July 1927, Page 8

The Outlook.

The Prime Minister spoke very encouragingly Tuesday to the Dominion Conference of Farmers Unions, and seemed to have the facts on his side. There is the big fact, to begin with, to which we have already drawn attention ourselves, that the trade balance for the first five months of the year is better by nearly four million pounds than it was for the same. period last year. We know, also, so far as exports are concerned, that an increase in money returns means an increase in quantity produced, since prices have not, on the whole, turned in our favour; and we can quite safely feel about our reduced exports that the change is due mainly to reduced buying. Quantity, improvements are not of course sufficient in themselves, though they are very encouraging. We must maintain, and gradually improve, the quality of the things we send abroad, and it is not quite as certain as it ought to be that we are doing this with our lamb and our butter. In the case of imports, also, it is necessary, not merely that we should, while the depression lasts, reduce our buying in the aggregate, but that we should reduce on the right kind of commodities, and it is enormously difficult to bring this about, even tinder the pressure of hard times. But one thing can be, and is being achieved, and it is not always realised. The rest of the Empire, and especially the Homeland which is the heart of the Empire, is getting to know more and more about us, and beginning to cater more and more deliberately for our requirements, so that it is increasingly possible to buy what will help us to increase production. The Prime Minister also, told the simple truth when he said that no other Government in the Empire had the same " representation from the fanning " community." Here again it is not enough that the Government, or Parliament, should be strongly representative of the farming community numerically. Although no one wants a Farmers' Party, we have often had to complain that farmer-members of the House seem to forget, when they reach Wellington, that this is a farming country, and that legislation which hamper's farmers, or places them at a disadvantage at home or abroad, is

bad legislation whatever Government passes it. And yet it is generally true that the Government understands its "job to be to improve the farmers' "capacity to increase production"; that it "thinks in the terms 1 of a " farmer" and realises that when primary producers prosper all share in their prosperity; and that even when the Prime Minister talks of "a scientific tariff," and of "considering "each item on.its merits," he is not forgetting the farmer, but revealing the Government's anxiety about him, and its honest desire not to enmesh him further in the manufacturer's net.