CRITICISM BY MR CARR

Press, Volume LXXXVIII, Issue 26814, 20 August 1952, Page 10

CRITICISM BY MR CARR

EMERGENCY AID TO POOR PEOPLE FIGURES. OF SPENDING FROM SPECIAL FUND (New Zealand Press Association) WELLINGTON, August 19. A vote of £200.000 was on the Estimates last year for the Social Security Emergency Fund, and of that amount £2192 was spent, said Mr C. L. Carr < Opposition. Timaru), speaking in the Budget debate to-night. The same vote was on the for this year, and he wondered whether any more would be expended than was spent last year. “The poor people are promised a gold watch, and they get a turnip with a cricket in it,” said Mr Carr. He described the Budget as a "budgie budget—all tweet, tweet, and chatter, chatter.** He added that it was also a “birdseed budget.” He had no doubt, he said, that all the lovebirds who sang the Budgets praises were in the- aviaries of the National Party. “It’s a budgie birdseed budget, because a budgie is about the only thing which can get anything out of it,” he said.

Mr Carr said that the terms of trade were not so much against New Zealand as the Budget indicated. It was only the fortuitous wool prices New Zealand received which saved the country from bankruptcy and the Government from annihilation. Mr Carr considered that sentiment

and affection would be more fruitful for New Zealand than the driving of a hard bargain to secure higher meat and produce prices from Britain. He said he could not understand why the auction system for wool and other products was continued. All the violent fluctuations of that system “reeked of the madhouse.”

After frittering away the country’s overseas exchange the Government now did not know how to finance the Murupara project, he said. Discussing that portion of the Budget relating to local body loans,' Mr Carr said that the loan market for local bodies was “fully hopeless.” There were “ominous signs” and “subterranean rumblings” because money was not being made available to local bodies.

Mr Carr said the Government had refrained from going on to the market for a public loan because it knew that the loan would not be filled. Discussing other portions of the Budget, Mr Carr said that the people had to live “like long-tailed sheep—on their own Farmers were going back again into the hands of stock and station agents. He did not believe in the sale of State rental houses, he said, but the Government, which had once criticised the Labour Government for raising Reserve Bank money to build those houses, was now glad to accept the £600,000 profit frojn the sales.