Govt has swift response to Whakatu closing

Press, 14 October 1986, Page 3

Govt has swift response to Whakatu closing

By

MARTIN FREETH

in Wellington

The Whakatu meat works closing has met a swift response from the Government.

It is eager not to see up to 1500 workers dumped on the dole in an area were unemployment is already high. The Cabinet yesterday assigned four Ministers to study the social costs of the closing and discussed short-term assistance for workers of up to $lO million.

Government members with Whakatu workers in their electorates were busy at the week-end, and after reports from them, the Prime Minister, Mr Lange, said the closing was serious for Hawke’s Bay.

The Ministers of Employment and Social Welfare, Mr Burke and Mrs Hercus, went to Hastings yesterday as members of the Cabinet committee to be chaired by the Minister of Education, Mr Marshall.

The Opposition went on the attack yesterday, laying blame for the closing squarely on the Government’s agricultural policies.

The national lamb and sheep kill had been al-

lowed to run down by 10 million over the last 12 months, said National’s spokesmen on agriculture, Messrs John Falloon and Denis Marshall. The lack of new investment in agriculture because of the financial pressures on farmers would lead to more closings, they warned. Mr Lange rejected allegations of Government blame but agreed that more meat works would have to close because of the industry’s over-capa-city.

The Press Association reports that Mr Lange agreed that at least one closing was likely to be in Otago-Southland. He said the fault lay with the National Government’s farm income support policies which encouraged production that was unwanted on world markets.

Labour’s policies to put agriculture on a sounder footing stopped such production, and, while the rural decline that followed was now levelling out, some in the processing industry still faced “excruciating short-term pain,” Mr Lange said.

He said Whakatu workers could understand the situation and would not blame Labour.

“They are not stupid. They know what the inevitabilities are. Their judgment on us will depend on how much we reach out to them in a human response to help them through that change, and that is what we are about now,” he said. 7 Mr Lange said he had reports from the local members of Parliament — Dr Bill Sutton (Hawke’s Bay), Mr David Butcher (Hastings), and Mr Geoffrey Braybrooke (Napier). Mrs Whetu TirikateneSullivan, the member for Southern Maori, had also spent the week-end in Hastings. Although National held Hastings before 1978, Hawke’s Bay is now the only one of four seats marginal for Labour on 1984 electoral majorities (974).

Mr Lange based some of his confidence over the closing on recent opinion polls commissioned by the party which apparently show Mr Butcher and Dr Sutton gaining more popularity in their electorates.

Mr Lange also drew the Whakatu company into the argument by criticising the suddenness of its announcement.

The Government had been led to believe the

closing of some works would be revealed late this week. The first the workers knew last Friday was from news media reports that it was Whakatu that would shut, Mr Lange said.

“It was about as poor an example of how you should deal with that situation as you could get,” he said. The Hawke’s Bay Farmers’ Meat Company had now indicated that it might contribute towards the cost of relocating workers, Mr Lange said. While no monetary sums had been discussed, “I am instructed that they (management) appreciate that they are part of this ongoing social responsibility.”

The Cabinet had discussed estimates of between $5 million and $lO million as the Government’s contributions to “transitional adjustment” costs.

“What we now have to do is work out the scope of the problem and see if we can’t move these people into productive employment. “We can’t accept the possibility that 1300 people are long-term written out of the workforce. It is not on,” Mr Lange said.