ADVERTISEMENTS BY STATE

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25300, 27 September 1947, Page 10

ADVERTISEMENTS BY STATE

QUESTIONS ASKED BY OPPOSITION “PUBLIC FUNDS NOT USED ” (From Our Parliamentary Reporter.) WELLINGTON, September 26. Several Opposition members in the House of Representatives to-day asked questions about the manner and policy of placing Government advertisements. The discussion was part of a general debate on estimates on the Prime Minister’s Department. Specific complaints were made by Mr S. W. Smith (Opposition. Hobson), who said he had read one notice exhorting farmers to build a laystack and put a wire fence round it, when every farmer knew that it was not possible to buy wire at any price. Other speakers complained that some advertisements exhorted people to retire on social security at the age of 60. and -at the same time said that production must be increased. Mr J. R. Hanan (Opposition, Invercargill) said that advertisements which were published last year shortly before the General Election, and which had the effect of boosting Labour’s administration. carried at the foot the words: “Issued by the New Zealand Government.” He asked if those advertisements were paid for by the National Publicity Studios. He considered they were “a prostitution of Parliamentary democracy,” and he was sure that if the Prime Minister (Mr P. Fraser) had been aware of the implication and effects of those advertisements he would have stopped their publication at that time.

All the Labour Party’s advertising was prepared and paid for by the party’s head office, without any assistance from any Government department, said Mr M. Moohan (Government. Petone) and it was carrying political venom too far to suggest that public funds were used for party purposes.

Mr T. L. Macdonald (Opposition, Wallace) praised the work of the publicity studios and the film unit, but questioned the propriety of such activities being conducted under the wing of a Prime Minister. There must always be a tendency for publicity mediums to be used in difficult times for propaganda purposes, he said. The Minister of Rehabilitation (Mr C. F. Skinner) said the vote of £49,000 for the National Film Unit should have been three times as great as the unit did more than any other agency to ..nit the people of New Zealand together. Commercial undertakings had not attempted that task, and it was the Government’s duty to do it by fostering the production of worthwhile films. ¥

Mr Fraser, defending the activities of the National Film Unit and the publicity studios, said the Government was *• .| rus^ee f°r the people, and was entitled to tell the people what it was doing.