Works and Work

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25269, 22 August 1947, Page 6

Works and Work

The Financial Statement, with which Mr Nash introduced the 1947-48 Budget last night, offers the interesting anomaly of a great deal of sound preaching on the subject of production and productivity, with special reference to the help New Zealand can give Great Britain, and of proposals which feebly apply the preaching to New Zealand’s own threateningly unbalanced economy and do not apply it at all to the problem of aid for Britain. Mr Nash deserves spme credit for being the first Minister to acknowledge what the official statistics have declared for some time: that New Zealand’s production is not rising but has been sagging since 1940-41. The Prime Minister, the present Minister of Labour, and a former Minister of Agriculture stand corrected. Mr Nash went on to say that purchasing power is excessive, against the supply of goods, which is four-fifths of what was available in 1938-39; that this decline gives us “ the real measure of our gen“eral standard of living”; and that increasing money incomes cannot alter that fact. There is no unemployment; there is a labour shortage of 33,000. An essentially inflationary system can be corrected and the standard of living restored and aid be given to Britain, then, only “by making better use of our “ available resources and above all “ by increased output per unit of “ labour ”, of all kinds. This is very true; but Mr Nash advances from the truth to policy proposals dhly so far as to speak approvingly of payment by results—and the approval is welcome—and almost wistfully of the need for “ a better “understanding of the real posi- “ tion ”. It is this better understanding of the real position that the Government has for 10 years utterly failed to produce. It is a Labour Government; its leaders are leaders of labour, labour’s teachers, philosophers, and organisers; it has had a full decade of office, and unlimited powers of its own fashioning; yet production and productivity are less, men are earning more and doing J less; their cry is still—or has been j till the last moment—after the same

disastrous illusion of advantage; and the Minister of Finance, Minister of Finance for all this time, cries against their cry for “ a better “ understanding of the real posi- “ tion He blames—anybody but himself and his colleagues. “Ways “ must be found, and found quickly, “of galvanising our people into “ greater activity ”. It might enter a less complacent head than Mr Nash’s that the fault does not lie wholly with “ the people ” but can partly be traced to the Government policies to which the people react; and that it is not the people only that needs galvanic treatment but the people’s Government.

The situation to which Mr Nash so ineffectually addresses himself, in its purely internal definition, is also the situation to be mastered if Britain is to be helped. Mr Nash knew last night, and had known for some days, if he did not know when he drafted his statement, that Mr Attlee, replying to Mr Fraser’s inquiry, specifically mentioned the British Government’s overhaul of all capital development projects with a view to deploying the greatest force where it would now serve best, and that this was to be read for the moral in it. But Mr Nash has preserved the full programme of £26,875,000 loan expenditure on capital works—an expenditure which will require vast imports of capital goods; and he has not even studied to resolve the explicit contradiction between his account of the “ extent to which tfiese essential “ programmes are being accelerated ” —to the extent of £11,000,000 above the 1946-47 expenditure—and his solemnly expressed admission that, while industry as a whole is 33,000 workers short of its complement, *■ State works must be kept down “to the barest minimum ”. The Government has never learned to think seriously about bare minima, when its dear ambitions have been concerned. It will do well to try to think seriously now. Unless it does, neither New Zealand’s internal problems nor those in which its interests are critically interlocked with Britain’s will be solved by anything more heroic than apologies and excuses.