SICK INDUSTRY AND STATE LIFEBUOY

Evening Post, Volume CVII, Issue 59, 13 March 1929, Page 8

SICK INDUSTRY AND STATE LIFEBUOY

It was to be expected that the Labour members of the Balfour Committee of Industry and Trade would file a minority report, and that one of the subjects of difference would be State intervention. Some Labour people at Home seem to look to the State with much the same sort of faith as was common in New Zealand thirty years ago. But the New Zealand of that period was so weakly industrialised that there can bo no parallel between anything that was done then and anything that could be done in Britain to-day. Their problem was not and is not our problem; and, in any case, we in New Zealand can now see that State action is no cure-all. In its day, the Seddon Government's establishment of a Stajo coal-mine was a spectacular move, but in a non-manufacturing country its capacity for either good or harm was limited—a fact which New Zealanders soon recognised by ceasing to think about the State mine at all, except when there happened to be a strike there. The huge British coalmining industry, on the other hand, is confronted with an economic revolution in which it must work out its own salvation or perish. As the inefficient units in the coal industry go to the wall, men become unemployed, but no State coal-mine or measure of nationalisation is likely to be able to do any better so far as giving them economic employment is concerned. "Initiative and reorganisation," says the majority report, "must come from industry itself; the State can only ease the difficulties of transition." Needless to add, the majority opposes compulsory arb/tration. British industry may embrace many inefficiencies, but New Zealand and Australian experience holds out no hope whatever that it will ever find economic fitness in a State strait-

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