NOTES OF THE DAY

Dominion, Volume 24, Issue 286, 29 August 1931, Page 6

NOTES OF THE DAY

A great dear of thought on and : valuable counsel in New Zealand’s present difficulties was contained in the address of the Governor-General at the. opening of . the Winter Show. ; The central idea of' his Excellency was .that the Dominion is a unit, each part being dependent on all the others, and that co-operation toward the common objective should therefore be the watchword. Lord Bledisloe particularly emphasised the interdependence of industry and commerce and agriculture, and "the poverty and distress occasioned by the failure to recognise tlieir intimate relationship and to frame national policy accordingly.” It cannot be said that in New Zealand we fail to recognise, for instance, the special place of agriculture in our. economy but it is nevertheless the fact that there is considerable, maladjustment due to -the sudden fall of commodity and food prices while production costs have remained high. At t|ie present time an attempt is being made “to ( frame national policy accordingly” and, if Lord Bledisloe’s hint as to the identity of our several interests is taken and acted on, the attempt should .prove successful.

Mr. Ramsay MacDonald’s broadcast speech, published yesterday, is in general terms- a justification of his refusal to accept the Labour Party Executive’s decision that he should ignore the recommendations of the Economy Commission. There is a special reference, however, to the'question of ’ reducing the unemployment benefit,. which the Commission recommended, the Labour caucus and executive opposed, and which Mr. MacDonald felt impelled by the logic of circumstance to accept. . The force of that circumstance may be realised from the fact that the aggregate effect of the Commission’s reforms in this particular connection would be to reduce the annual deficit on the Unemployment Insurance Scheme from nearly .£40,000,000 to under £8,000,000. In the face of these telling figures the Trades Union Congress vetoed the recommendations of the Commission. In similar circumstances the Australian Government refused to accept the advice of its own committee of independent economic experts, and nine mbnths later, with more leeway to make up, was forced by economic facts to act upon it. As the Financial News, London, observed in a survey of the position, “economic truth is like any other truth —when driven. underground, it grows, and grows.”

Anyone reading the discussion in the House on the Wellington City Milk Supply Amendment Bill cannot fail to reflect on the large powers required to support this experiment in municipal socialism. All the advantages are ' with the corporation (a practically absolute monopoly, economy in distribution, large-scale organisation, rationalisation, exemption from rates and taxes, cheap finance by pledging community credit, and payment by cash in advance) and still Wellington does not get cheap milk. Even the hours of delivery have now been fixed, not to suit the consumer but the corporation’s convenience, and the housewife must accept delivery of milk at the end of the day instead of at the beginning. That is a plain advertisement of the artificiality of the system and causes the consumer to reflect on the age of the milk by the time it reaches his table. Certainly it is not a natural product and in the end people may wonder if there are any great advantages, considering the difference in price, between the condensed and the city article. Believers in the theory of socialism should observe its practice in Wellington and note also the words of one of the advocates for the latest inquisitorial Bill that “it is not possible to run a municipal enterprise at the same cost as a private business.”