Mr Cracknell Slates Overseas Borrowing

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31207, 3 November 1966, Page 18

Mr Cracknell Slates Overseas Borrowing

(New Zealand Press Association! AUCKLAND, November 2. The leader of the Social Credit Political League, Mr V. F. Cracknell, opened his election campaign in Auckland tonight by criticising the country’s banking system and the Government’s overseas borrowing policy.

For more than half of the meeting, in which he addressed an audience of 450, Mr Cracknell faced continuous heckling from a group at the rear of the hall, but supporters loudly applauded each point he made.

Mr Cracknell said New Zealand was headed for bankruptcy unless Government borrowing was checked. Why is it, he asked, that New Zealand was experiencing a credit squeeze at a time

when export earnings had ! reached record levels? “Why are we always having crises in the matter of our balance of payments? Be cause money is in short supply." Borrowing rates within the country were high. “Our money is being held so tightly in the palms of those who have it,” he said. “With Begging Bowl” j Mr Cracknell said New Zealand was touring the world with a begging bowl in hand, offering 71 per cent interest. i It was no wonder that the loan was snapped up in a minute and a half on the London Stock Exchange, he said.

i Mr Cracknell said Britain ! and other countries were going through a stringent period because money had become the master of men instead of the reverse. He said it was a matter of the utmost concern that in New Zealand—a country with a wonderful climate and the best grass in the world—only half of the 40 million acres of farmland had been developed. “What is the trouble?” I would tell you quite unequivocally that so long as we go |on piling up the debt these economic maladies are inevitable,” he said.

Referring to the address by the Prime Minister (Mr Holyoake) on Monday night, Mr Cracknell said he considered Mr Holyoake’s remarks were not even a veiled defence of the Government’s borrowing policy. Rise In Debt

Since the last election the national debt hau gone up £l6O million and since the present government came into power by £3OO million. In the last generation the national debt had trebled to £llOO million and was still rising. The interest bill on this was about £1 million a week. Mr Cracknell said the Government covered this up by saying the money had been lent to Government departments. Interest was then built in to the cost structure of the departments, so that the public faced increased power costs, Post Office charges and rail fares. Most of the debt was prepayable in the lifetime of this generation. As it fell due it was converted into more debt. It was unfair and unjust that future generations had to bear the cost, he said. He said Social Credit would aim to stem the tide of overseas borrowing. The party would introduce a system whereby individuals rather than monopolies and bureaucratic governments had a share of the national credit. The credit system, he said, was a simple matter of bookkeeping similar to that used by the Government for its own purposes.

Mr Cracknell was heckled throughout his address, and although the Mayor of Auckland, Dr. R. G. McElroy, made two appeals for order, the interruptions, many of them unintelligble, continued. One man in the gallery was asked to leave by the hall caretaker. One heckler imitated the noise of a trumpet while others made catcalls. Unruffled by the barracking, Mr Cracknell frequently stopped speaking to catch words shouted at him from the back of the hall.