NOTES AND COMMENTS

Dominion, Volume 37, Issue 127, 24 February 1944, Page 4

NOTES AND COMMENTS

It may be hoped that the sharp sentence of four years’ imprisonment passed by the Chief Justice on a woman convicted of the crime of using unlawfully an instrument of abortion w’ill serve as a check to the activities of those who engage in what his Honour described as “a loathsome business;” This, as he remarked from the Bench, was not not like an isolated ease. ‘‘There is a trade, a traffic, being carried on,” he said, “and not a small one.” This much has been proved by statements to hospital boards and the report of the Commission on Abortion. The offence has been notoriously difficult to shoot home in jury trials, but for once in a fairly lengthy scries of prosecutions a verdict has been returned without prejudice, on the evidence. The law against abortion has been vindicated, and the public conscience, it may be hoped, given a salutary hint.

The question of Government subsidies to various industries is more than due for serious examination and discussion by Parliament. This method of paying the losses inevitable from the higher costs imposed on the community by Government policy works two ways. It helps to bolster up an unsound economy in industry, resulting from Government policy, and it mulcts the taxation revenue received from the people by hundreds of thousands of pounds annually. For the Government it is in effect an easy and no doubt it is hoped, an unobtrusive way of getting round, at the public expense, problems which usually are the result of ill-judged acts of ministerial policy. The point to be made; now is that the basic principle of subsidies to industry has been departed from. This principle, as exemplified in one of its earliest applications, the subsidy to the wheatgrowers, is that if State assistance is necessary to promote an increased production of something essential to the people’s welfare, it is in the public interest that such assistance should be given. But it is one thing to do this, and another to subsidize an industry at the public expense! to meet the cost of palliatives to sectional interests or to conceal from the public the rising volume of costs. What is now imperative is a demand in Parliament for a full statement covering the complete history of subsidies of all kinds, the circumstances connected with the granting of each, and the total sum Io which the people of New Zealand are now annually committed to pay in this connexion.