Printing Paper

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30093, 29 March 1963, Page 10

Printing Paper

Can the disagreement on prices between New Zealand printers and New Zealand Forest Products be settled by negotiation, without reference to the Government, which has created the difficulty by giving Forest Products something like a monopoly of the printing paper market? The bbvious settlement was suggested by one delegate to the master printers’ conference: give Forest Products a monopoly in only a few selected lines and permit the importation of other lines subject to a protective duty. If Forest Products then concentrated its efforts on the most economic lines instead of trying to make everything, it should be able to reduce the price of the selected lines to the point where they would be

preferred to more expensive imported substitutes. Forest Products would then be producing at a price that would make exports possible. Though such an arrangement would permit a form of competition to regulate the New Zealand market, it would surely be in the best interests of Forest Products itself. As matters stand, the longestablished printing industry is handicapped by higher prices for its paper. It should be possible for the Government to make some more reasonable arrangement that would give both the paper mill and the printing shops a chance to prosper. Because the mill uses indigenous raw material it is pre-eminently the kind of industry’ that New Zealand needs to establish on a sound footing.