NOTES OF THE DAY

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 284, 27 August 1930, Page 10

NOTES OF THE DAY

New Zealand timber millers are again complaining because dairy factories use foreign timber for butter boxes and cheese crates. They suggest that it is a reflection on the Dominion that our .products should be sent abroad in foreign containers. Perhaps it is but surely the reflection is also on the mills on the spot which cannot compete with Swedish and Californian lumbermen. As the dairy factories contend, it is purely a matter of cost. They are subject to fierce competition in markets overseas and nowhere do they receive any preference or protection. It is essential, therefore, that they should keep costs down and that, as one of their number says, costs should be the guiding principle. Unless New Zealand producers can keep costs down< unless, in fact, they can reduce present costs, they are going to have a hard fight to hold their place in free markets. This' question of costs, in which artificial wage standards comprise the largest factor, is going to be the big question in New Zealand these next few years, as it is in Australia to-day.

A practically aboriginal tribe in India, known as. the Gonds. has been responsible for the latest native clash with authority. The outbreak, it is stated, originated in a breach by the Gonds of the Indian forest laws. This touches one of the most difficult of the problem® enumerated by the Simon Commission in its survey of the conditions to be studied in elaborating schemes for political reforms in India. Referring to the “backward tracts” arid the treatment of aboriginals “who have hardly emerged into civilisation,” the committee observes: “To the loss of self-respect, of confidence in their war-like prowess, of belief in their tribal gods, and of unfettered enjoyment in their patriarchal (or rather, in some tribes, matriarchal) customs —changes which tend to exterminate so many primitive races—there has now been added the curtailment of freedom to burn down the forest and sow seeds in its ashes.” Here constitutional authority has to deal with a religious and an economic question rather than inspired disaffection. The incident just reported should add further emphasis to the value and authority of the Simon report. */* * *

In advising investors on countries in which there is a field for profitable investment, The Financial News, London, includes New Zealand in its list. Apparently the Dominion is included on the score that “recovery will first come from the countries providing the primary materials. It will be speediest in countries . not embarrassed by political unrest or involved in national depression.” Most of this prescription applies to New Zealand but it must rest with ourselves whether we capitalise our “chances of earliest improvement.” For one thing we shall not keep clear of “national depression” if we cry “stinking fish” in season and out of season. Our salvation is in our own hands and, as has been said before, there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. On the authority of The Financial News our “chances of earliest improvement” are among the best and we have only to work hard to make chances into certainties. In any case London’s good opinion of New Zealand is worth money and it is for us to justify and so preserve it. * * * *

A reminder of the fact that valuable and suggestive data lie forgotten in Government pigeon-holes is Mr. J. .Campbell Beggs published condemnation of the New Zealand. hospital system. ‘Our hospitals,” he says, “have become purely political. . A Minister from the party in power is in general charge, and national politics have invaded board elections. Much political propaganda undermines the whole structure, and some of it unfortunately has found its way into the Statute Book.” In a report to the New Zealand Section of the British Medical Association in April, 1926, Dr. M. T. MacEachern, associate director of the American College of Surgeons and Director of Hospital Authorities, said practically the same thing. “A great weakness of the present system,” he observed, “is the danger from political interference, as has already been evidenced in the case of so many hospital districts in the Dominion. . . . There are at present 46 hospital districts whereas approximately 21 would be sufficient.” Any suggestion that too much is being expended on hospital administration is met with the cry that the expenditure is for the benefit of suffering humanity. It ought to be clear, to most people that if economies could be effected on the administration side, more funds would be available to treat the sick.