The Press Thursday, March 27, 1930. Unemployment.

Press, Volume LXVI, Issue 19888, 27 March 1930, Page 10

The Press Thursday, March 27, 1930. Unemployment.

The Canterbury Manufacturers' Association last night sharply attacked the recent and unfortunate Unemployment Report; but it would have been much easier to support the attack if it had not been so narrowly delivered. The Association had before it a report prepared by a special sub-committee, which, perhaps not unnaturally, laid itself out to show that the Unemployment Report was very bad because it paid no attention to secondary industries and would have been very good if it had paid chief attention to them. This is far too narrow, and it was faxtoo narrow for some members of the Association itself, who wished the report to go back to the sub-committee " in order that some constructive ideas "should be incorporated in it." The fundamental weakness of the Report is that it accepts unenployment as an institution and seeks to legislate for its upkeep and security, instead of laying bare its causes —which are not in the least obscure —and proposing the necessary remedies, which are not in the least obscure, either. Criticism which makes another line of attack central advertises its want of proportion; and that is the defect of the criticism offered by the Association's sub-committee. We may grant that it is one of the defects of the Report that it overlooks . secondary industries, though a minor defect; but, had it rested firmly on the rock of wisdom, it must still have dissatisfied critics who invert the importance of primary and secondary industry to New Zealand. For that is what they do, in spite of themselves and in spite of their own statements that "New Zea"land recognises that her primary in- " dustries are of first importance." The sub-committee considers that " the "greatest field for the development of "industry . . . lies in the secondary "industries at the present moment, "and that a further development of " the primary industries will naturally " follow and not precede this"; but these opinions can only be held and worked out politically in defiance of the fact that the Dominion must live by producing, for overseas markets, must sell at a profit, and therefore must keep her costs down. We can afford to pay for the development of secondary industries only such a price as primary industry can bear; and this is a price whit&i is not carefully estimated, and often not estimated at all, in the arguments for the vigorous development of secondary industry behind protective tariffs.