MR FRASER AT ROTORUA

Press, Volume LXXXV, Issue 25954, 7 November 1949, Page 8

MR FRASER AT ROTORUA

REFERENCE TO DOLLAR LOAN

(New Zealand Press Association.) ROTORUA, November 5. Before the advent of the Labour Government, there had been thousands of unemployed, sometimes as few as 4000. or 5000, but they were always there, said the Prime Minister (Mr Fraser) in an address last evening. In 1927, a normal year, two out of seven timber workers, one in every six builders, and one in three seamen had been out of work, he said. Farm produce prices had been stabilised, yet some farmers had fought against their own freedom, said Mr Fraser, just as there had been regiments of negroes fighting in the Confederate Army for slavery. Although Labour disliked resorting to borrowing, so urgent was the need for machinery to increase production and to break in land that they were prepared to float a loan in the United One of Mr Holland’s complaints was that £672,000 had been paid to the orchardists of the country by the Marketing Department, said Mr Fraser, but that was at a time when there was no shipping available to carry fruit. Rather than see growers ruined, the Government had bought the crop at the market price. The fruit was then sold for what i* could get or distributed free to schools and so on. That, insisted Mr Fraser, was a legitimate war expense.