The Press Monday, January 6, 1930. New Zealand Manufactures.

Press, Volume LXVI, Issue 19819, 6 January 1930, Page 8

The Press Monday, January 6, 1930. New Zealand Manufactures.

It is natural that representatives of secondary industry in the Dominion should welcome the encouragement offered to them in Sir Joseph Ward's New Year message, and not very surprising that they should let their enthusiasm get a little out of hand; but it is not advisable to let that fact excuse thoughtless statements. A correspondent, whose letter is printed to-day over the signature "Watchman," draws attention to one such, in some comments made by Mr F. L. Hutchinson, vicepresident of the Canterbury Manufacturers' Association. It is not true that '* every country must be self-contained"; it is dangerous to believe it, and fatal to act on the belief. Many erroneous things might be said, without much fear of harm, in over-emphasis of the case for developing secondary industry in the Dominion, and of course they have been said; hut this remark of Mr Hutchinson's is of a different kind. It presses towards an extreme, and it suggests that he welcomes the Prime Minister's message because he reads in it a sign that the Government can be persuaded to po as far. It is possible that Mr Hutchinson does not mean as much as his words mean; most people will hope so. But what they mean, in effect, is that New Zealand " must" forgo the real advantage of producing, with the strong help of Nature, a surplus of some commodities, and pursue the doubtful one of producing, without it, a sufficiency of all. No country can be economically " self-contained " un- ! less its natural resources are co-exten-I sive with its needs, and proportionate to them. Not even America is such a country, and New Zealand is very far from being one. The distribution of its natural assets, like its geographical position, may be on the whole its good fortune or its bad; but wisdom consists in making the best possible use of them as they are in the world as it is. If we are sensible, we shall work with the grain and not against it; and we work with the grain when we realise that we can profitably produce a surplu ■. of some commodities, which the world wants, and use that surplus to supply ourselves with others that we cannot produce at all, or can only produce in artificial conditions and at excessive cost. Obviously these facts, though they are hard facts, do not preclude the Dominion from producing much besides wool, mutton, beef, butter, cheese, and fruit. It has done a great deal to supply its own need for manufactured goods. The success of the manufacturers has been assisted by a considerable measure of tariff protection; but nothing is clearer than the fact that those have succeeded best, both in producing goods of high quality and in making their business pay, who have displayed the greatest skill and energy themselves and whose manufacturing is most closely allied to the country's staple production. That is, those have succeeded, best whose best claim to protection has been the evidence of their being able to become less and less dependent on it. But in the theory that " every country must be "self-contained" there is implicit the notion that it pays to develop any and every industry, at whatever sacrifice of external trade and behind protective barriers however high. It does not pay; in New Zealand's case it would be ruinous. Nothing of the sort will ever happen, of course; but the belief that New Zealand could be made to prosper if the people lived by taking in each other's washing might be responsible for painfully dear experiments.