‘Wide consequences’ of Social Credit win

Press, 4 March 1978, Page 5

‘Wide consequences’ of Social Credit win

Parliamentary reporter

The Social Credit win in Rangitikei will ultimately have world-wide consequences, according to the finance spokesman for Social Credit, Mr L. Hunter. “The growth of overseas debt is crippling the New Zealand economy and driving standards down to those of a Third World country,” he said in Miramar. “New Zealand and the developing countries of particularly the Pacific and Asia cannot get their economies going until the present overseas debt and trading problem is solved. “Social Credit has the policies to make New Zealand, by example; the economic and moral leader of the Third Word,” Mr Hunter said. “The present international financial system is failing to provide a just and reasonable basis to promote modern trade.” Third World countries could not remain inside a trading system which forced them to pay “topshelf prices” for imports from the advanced economies while receiving “barroom returns” for their exports. “Overseas debt will continue to grow while the international financial system forces every country to try to sell to the advanced economies at bargain basement prices,” said Mr Hunter. “Britain

and the E.E.C. do not want New Zealand’s farm production. Japan and the United States are the most unwilling of customers and are able to impose severe buyer terms upon us.

The Minister of Overseas Trade (Mr Taiboys) at Massey University said that the world could probably get by without New Zealand’s agricultural production. I find this a most astonishing statement when two thirds of the world is suffering from malnutrition and the great worry is to find ways of feeding the world’s growing population. “Nations such as India, which is the tenth industrial country in the world, have a desperate need for the food we can produce. India has the same sys-tem-induced problem ' of selling her industrial output at fair prices as we have of selling our food products,” Mr Hunter said. “What is needed is a new and just financial arrangement which allow’s trade to proceed relative to need and not the dictates of an obsolete system.” The present international system of finance was based on the American dollar which had displaced gold. Money was available for everybody’s trading needs only to the extent that the United States printed new money to pay for her excess of imports over exports. “Trading money is at

present available to countries only to the extent that they succeed in trading with the exclusive club of countries who hold a stock of American dollars,” said Mr Hunter. “It so happens that the exclusive club of the United States, the E.E.C.. Japan, and the oil States who have a large of United States dollars do not want what New Zealand offers in trade. “America in 1977 printed SUS3O billion of new trading money, which vast sum was used to pay for her excess of oil and other imports. The huge injection of new American dollars into the international money markets is just keeping world trade going but at the ' same time threatens to wreck the United States dollar as a viable currency.” In a starving world the present international financial system was not only stupid but immoral, Mr Hunter said. Any system which forced the poor to sell to the rich, or borrow at interest from the rich, as the condition of trading with each trther was wrong. Trade was nothing but barter and money need be used only as a measurement of the terms of bartering. The national currencies of two willing trading partners would allow fair trade to proceed without introducing the American dollar into the act at all.