Political Exile Wants Broader Economy

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31343, 13 April 1967, Page 19

Political Exile Wants Broader Economy

Every time prices fell New Zealand was going to have another false depression, said the best-known exile In New Zealand’s political history, Mr John A. Lee, of Auckland, in an address to the students at the University of Canterbury, sponsored by the Politics Society. “We must broaden our industrial base, develop our capacity, and get more industrial workers into the country,” he said.

“New Zealand’s economy has been built on a lopsided basis. For too long we have seen ourselves as an agricultural appendage of Great Britain.

“So, in spite of our capacity to increase production, whenever we have a price fall in two or three commodities, a deflationary policy is imposed,” said Mr Lee. As long ago as 1918 he had written that New Zealand should be economically selfsufficient.

“Crash campaigns are not easy. Industrialisation of our economic basis is a long term plan. You cannot industrialise in a minute but we should have begun long ago.”

Mr Lee said New Zealand was now beginning to industrialise with the iron and steel mill and hydro-electric development “We have enjoyed cheap power for a long time and we have owed it to socialism. But people think it is not spectacular enough. They forget you must sweat for a cause as well as speak for it. “In 1943 I spoke in Christchurch on broadening our industrial basis,” he said. “ ‘The Press’ did me the

honour of saying I had talked more sense on industrial development than anyone had for years.”

There had to be a good industrial base in order to guarantee a good price to the farmers—as the United States had done and Great Britain was doing. “We’ve got plenty of grass and the world wants beef, but we keep on putting another slice of butter on their bread. I dbn’t hear any politicians talking about a switch.” Mr Lee said in 1922 he bad been the youngest member of Parliament in New Zealand and in 1940 had been heaved out of the Labour Party. Two years earlier he had gained an electoral majority that was still a New Zealand record. “But I am not a sour old bastard. In recent yean I seem to have been relegated to respectability—longevity seems to accumulate respectability. “There is a tradition in politics that one party stands for paradise and the other for hell,” he said. “But it is never quite as good or as bad as this. “We have a tradition of humanitarian legislation and sociologists once came from the four corners of the earth to look at us. No Government has quite been able to reverse this trend. “Where there is a flrm foundation the people will build a magnificent edifice, even under the most reactionary Government,” he said.