The Press TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 1943. Campaign Notes

Press, Volume LXXIX, Issue 24052, 14 September 1943, Page 4

The Press TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 1943. Campaign Notes

Facts and Figures.—Government propagandists are using figures without much respect for the facts behind the figures. The Minister of National Service, for instance, answering criticisms of manpower policy, said that if half the criticisms were true, production would have dropped disastrously, whereas it had “ increased enormously.” Agricultural cropping production, up from £8,200,000 in 1938-39 to £10,600,000 in 1941-42, and pastoral production, up from £29,100,000 to £38,100,000, showed increases of 29 per cent, and 31 per cent. They do, if value is considered. But the official figures for volume of production show that the farms produced 13 per cent, more in 1941-42 than in 1938- This is a sufficiently good achievement. The Minister should be content to display it. But there is a reason why he looked past the official figures for volume of production, and it is not merely that values appear to show a three-year increase more than twice as great as it was. The truth is that the Minister’s argument slides off the volume table to the ground. Between 193839 and 1939-40, farm production increased by 2 per cent. Between 1939- and 1940-41 it increased another 14 per cent. But between 1940- and 1941-42 it fell by 3 per cent. Farm and factory production combined fell by 2. per cent. The Minister likes value statistics because they screen these facts.

Figures and Forgetfulness.—The Prime Minister, for campaign purposes, indulges a similar taste. He holds up as emblems of Labour achievement the figures which show how high wages and private income have climbed. But he forgets, as he does so, the anxiety he solemnly expressed, last December, over the danger to social security—as an “order of society in which every “ citizen ... is safeguarded against “economic fluctuations”—rising in the swell of spending power over a diminished and diminishing supply of goods. Mr Fraser forgets this anxiety, or sinks it. But the elector whose memory and common sense co-operate will not fail to observe that December’s inflationary swelling looks queer, dressed as the Labour Government’s September pride.

The Money-spinner.—The Labour candidate for Dunedin North, asked why the Labour Party had not fulfilled its promise to abolish the sales tax, resorted to two lines of explanation, one cynical, the .other ridiculous. “We couldn’t afford to “take it off,” he said. “It is such “ a good money spinner that we “ couldn’t let it go.” The moral of this is that it pays to promise anything at all, because if it turns out that it will pay better to do nothing or to do something quite different, the promise need not stand in the way. But the elector may, if he works out the real sense of this doctrine. Second, “Who is against it? “ Only the traders, and not the “general public,” Mr Munro asked and answered himself. It would be difficult to invert the truth more neatly. Sales tax has been rapidly assimilated in the system of commerce, which it has affected chiefly as an irritant; but as a ramifying form of indirect taxation, it increases the cost of living, acts as a clumsy licensing system on luxury manufacture and consumption, which ought to be more efficiently controlled, and conceals tfrom the taxpayer the real extent of his burden. The National Party has made no rash, wholesale promise. It has promised to remit sales tax on certain important classes of goods, in furtherance of certain social policies. That is a useful promise, useful as a beginning and useful because the elector can accept it. •