PRICE GUARANTEE

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 284, 28 August 1935, Page 10

PRICE GUARANTEE

Labour’s Challenge to

Ministers

FARMING PROBLEMS “Controlled Public Credit” By Telegraph.—Press Association. New Plymouth, August 27. After dealing exhaustively with Labour's policy, the Leader of the Opposition, Mr. M. J. Savage, at Stratford to-night made the following summary covering farming problems, and challenged Ministers to deal with them seriatim: — (1) The total trade of the Dominion, internal and external, depends upon the buying power of the rank and file of the New Zealand people and cannot be increased unless at the same time the people’s buying power is increased. (2) The .raising of the rate of exchange did not increase the buying power of the rank and file of the people; it merely transferred portion of the existing buying power from some pockets into others. It also acted as a brake on United Kingdom sales to New Zealand, and as a consequence it lessened the British market for Dominion products, as there cannot be one-way trade.

(3) The only substantial alternative to the high rate of exchange is guaranteed prices, beginning at an average of the prices ruling during the last eight or ten years. Mortgage liabilities to be immediately readjusted on that basis.

(4) Guaranteed prices depend upon guaranteed wages and other incomes. They are kindred parts of modern industrial life aud interdependent.

(5) The money system should be based on goods and services, which are meant to be exchanged, thus enabling payment to be made from public credit to farmers and others in equitable relationship to the services rendered and without increasing taxation or placing any barrier against Britain’s sales to the Dominion. (G) Public credit should be controlled in the interests of the people by a national credit authority, whose duty it would be to provide a money service sufficient to give effect to the will of Parliament.

(7) Recent legislation provides no immediate solution of the difficulties facing farmers, but establishes a virtual dictatorship in primary industries, destroys the State Advances Office, and increases tbe powers already possessed by private lending institutions. Placing farmers under supervision and budgetary control will reduce a large percentage of them to the position of serfs.

' (8) Government records show that for the ten years ended 1933 the dairyfarmers of New Zealand more than doubled their production without any material increase in money incomes. Substantial increases have also been made in the production of wool and meat, and in each case the incomes of the producers have shown considerable fluctuations.

(9) The farmer is entitled to receive the difference (if any) between what he now receives in the market overseas and the amount it takes to enable him to continue farming in New Zealand.