THE EMPLOYMENT FUND

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22419, 4 June 1938, Page 16

THE EMPLOYMENT FUND

. + — . “In Perfectly Healthy Condition” MINISTER REPLIES TO “ THE PRESS” A declaration that the Employment Promotion Fund is in a “perfectly healthy condition” is made by the Minister for Labour, the Hon. H. T. Armstrong, in a reply which he has sent to a leading article in “The Press.” The article dealt specifically with the new policy of the Department of Labour m including in monthly unemployment returns details of expenditure out of the employment promotion fund. The statement of the Minister follows: . “My attention has been drawn to a leading article in ‘The Press’ of May 31 headed ‘Unemployment Finance,’ in which the writer says that ‘in an expansive moment the Department of Labour has added to its very meagre monthly returns of unemployment a statement® of expenditure out of the Employment Promotion Fund other than expenditure on unemployment relief.’ The writer goes on with surprised interest to inspect this, to him, sti anger in the statistical world, and by the end of the article has decided that it has a sinister aspect and denounces it as the forerunner of bad news about the state of the Employment Promotion Fund. “As a matter of fact, the amount spent from the fund for other than y urely relief purposes has been included regularly since October, 1937, in the returns of unemployment figures issued each month to the daily press. I might conclude by soothing the fears of. ‘The Press’ concerning the state of the Employment Promotion Fund. It is in a perfectly ’healthy condition.” COMPUTATION OF UNEMPLOYED GOVERNMENT’S METHODS - DEFENDED “POSITION BACK TO NORMAL” AUCKLAND, June 3. The Government’s unemployment policy and the present method of compiling unemployment statistics were defended in detail by the Minister for Labour (the Hon. H. T. Armstrong) in a pre-sessional address at Otahuhu to-night. The Minister was enthusiastically received by an audience which filled the hall. 1 He had been accused by the Leader of the Opposition (the Hon.. Adam Hamilton) and by certain newspapers of “rigging” the unemployment figures, said Mr Armstrong. He took the expression to mean that he was trying to make out that unemployment was less serious than it really was. When he had finished ho would leave it to the audience to decide who had been the real “riggers.” Mr Hamilton had said that everybody who was paid wholly or partly out of the Employment Fund should be shown as “unemployed.” If an industry was subsidised out of the fund, or if money was used to pay half the wages of local body employees, so that the local body could pay the other half, all the workers concerned were to be “unemployed.” If Mr Hamilton wanted figures compiled in this way. why had his party not made them so in the months immediately before Labour was returned to power? he asked. “We say that we show as unemployed everyone who is registered and who is not receiving full-time employment at award rates of wages,” continued the Minister. “If we are not to do this, why should not unemployed include all public works employees, railway servants, civil servants, and all who are paid out of public funds? Our opponents want to know exactly what vvork the men are doing. We have given all that information, including a published statement which was made available to the newspapers but which they did not see fit to publish.” Work Financed From Fund Works carried on with the aid of the fund, Mr Armstrong said, included roads, railway deviations, land development, forestry, repairing flood damage and river erosion, improving recreation grounds and school grounds, and putting towns in order where local authorities needed help to do so. New Zealand to-day was about back to normal in unemployment. According to the census figures, the average number of unemployed over a long period had been about 10,000. The present number of physically fit unemployed was now not so large as that last September. They amounted to about 1 per cent, of the total population, or 3.6 per cent, of the adult population, excluding boys and youths. This was one of the lowest figures in the world. Comparing conditions in New Zealand with those in Australia, Mr Armstrong said that when he visited Sydney there were 100,000 unemployed men there. He had also seen in Adelaide men waiting in queues with sugar-bags to collect rations valued at 5s 8d a week. Figures lately supplied to the Hon. W. E. Parry by the New South Wales Minister, for Labour showed that a single unemployed man there got only rations valued at 15s a fortnight, whereas in New Zealand he got 40s in money. A married man, with one child, got 38s, compared with 78s in New Zealand, and the other rates corresponded.