LICENSING OF IMPORTS

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22590, 21 December 1938, Page 10

LICENSING OF IMPORTS

PRESENT SITUATION IN CITY

MORE THAN 8000 APPLICATIONS

ONLY ESSENTIAL NEEDS BEING MET

More than 8000 individual applications have been received to date by the Christchurch Customs Department under the Government's new regulations for the control of imports. These are for individual items covering the importing of all types of articles and do not include export items, which are also involved in the regulations. As an official of the department said yesterday, the applications for import licences have covered every conceivable type of imported goods, from "a needle to a haystack." The list of applications has grown daily by hundreds and as some of the city's most important firms have not yet stipulated their requirements under the act, it is expected that before many more days are out the list will have at least doubled itself.

Already the department has on its files the applications of more than 1700 individual firms wishing to import goods under the regulations. These firms, of course, embody applications for some hundreds of goods in the one schedule, so that their files include a total of applications amounting to a figure approaching the 10,000 mark. To date licences to import goods have been issued only for essential foodstuffs and necessary manufacturing articles and for drugs and articles necessary for the maintenance of the public health, in the absence of further details from Wellington which would indicate the type of goods to be excluded or allowed into the country. The administration of the export licensing side of the new regulations has proved much more simple than the import regulations, the export applications being covered by a general over-all licence which meets most cases of export trade. Exports from the Dominion are so few and are of such magnitude under individual titles that the work has been comparatively simple, it was explained yesterday.

Staff Increases' Although the authorities here are not in a position to comment on this point, it seems certain that the additional work involved in the local administration of the new regulations will mean not only additions to the Christchurch staff of the Customs Department, but considerable additions to the accommodation. So far two new rooms have had to be provided in the main Government building block in Worcester street—one for the export licensing work and one for imports. The imports branch is easily the biggest staffed and the most used by the commercial community and it is expected that as the demands on this branch increase a bigger staff and better accommodation will certainly be necessary. An unofficial but highly authoritative opinion on the likely future operation of these new regulations is that they will not be used as extensively as was at first thought, but that they will be operated merely to assist local manufacturers and that only those goods will be prohibited which would, by their entry to the country, endanger the future of local industries dealing in the same type of goods. A suggestion that such luxury lines as high-class wines and liquors would be prohibited was scouted.