POSITION IN CHRISTCHURCH

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 5, 7 January 1928, Page 15

POSITION IN CHRISTCHURCH

DIFFICULT PROBLEM (By Telegraph.—Press Association.) CHRISTCHURCH, This Day. .About 100 unemployed attended at the City Council Chambers yesterday to meet the Deputy-Mayor (Mr. D. G. Sullivan, M.P.), with a request that the council should undertake extra work for their relief. After hearing the views of several speakers, Mr. Sullivan said he had known himself what it was to be without work for months. The problem was a tremendous one and had hit practically every place in the world. The fact that the trouble was world-wide was no consolation to those present, but it added to the difficulties of those who were trying to solve the problem. No other city in New Zealand had made the same effort to meet the position as Christchurch had. Mr. Sullivan then detailed the steps taken to provide between 100 and 200.men with work alternately as long as the money available lasted by transferring the amounts for certain works which were held up to other purposes. The distress, ho was convinced, had been intensified by the Tramway Board, which had added to the difficulties by calling for tenders for work. It had reduced the number of its employees, and he had been told that 80 men were discharged. Work at Lake Coleridge had stopped temporarily, further adding to the difficulties. Yesterday he had sent a long telegram to the Prime Minister urging him to meet the position. Mr. Coates had replied: "I am having inquiries made immediately." The Hon. K. S. Williams, Minister of Public Works, who was at Rotorua, had replied to a similar message as follows: "I am wiring Wellington, instructing the Department to see what it can do to help the position immediately. I will be in Wellington myself next week." The position had been brought fully before Ministers, said Mr. Sullivan, and he was under the impression when he telegraphed that 300 men were out of work in Christchurch, but later he telegraphed that the number was estimated at 600. He did not think that there was much hope in the outlook, but he had asked the Government whether, in view of the great efforts by the City Council, the Government would depart from its precedent and give the council straight-out help to enable it to carry out work at the Bottle Lake Reserve. Unless the Government acted the position would be very bad indeed. The City Courteil had 170 men in excess of its ordinary staff* It had done a great deal. All the loan money would be exceeded within the next two or three months. There would not be a penny left in any loan account that could be used for the unemployed. His colleagues and ho would bring under the Government's attention tho urgency of the position, and what the community was threatened with during the next month or two. He sincerely hoped that the position would improve. Tho Government should faco it and be prepared to meet it.