SPECIAL AID OR BLANK CHEQUE?
Starting in 1928, about a year before the Wall Street crash, New Zealand's rural short term credit sys-. tern hit the beginning of a very peculiar cycle. The five-year period referred to by the chairman (Mr. J. N. Masseyy M.P.) "of: the conference at Hamilton was fated to be a most momentous quinquennium, the end of which is not yet. But if economic stress should continue into 1933, and if short term credit- should become frozen in our farm lands as it is in Germany and elsewhere, the fact will have to be faced, and the chairman's advice is to face it with■-.! anursing policy. After 'declaring that realisation of farm securities was proving bad for lender as well as borrower, he added: : .;•■■-.
Wherever possible borrowers and securities should be Vnursed, in order- to avoid-such realisations,.not only in the interests, of the funds, but to keep as many people as possible on the land. '
Fortunately, v the policy Mr. Massey advocates is a discriminating one. If the administration is efficient, nursing need not be wasted on farmers who do not need it or who are incapable of being saved in any case. By being a discriminating plan, it escapes the reproach justly made against the artificially high, exchange rate. As an expansion of farm-income, artificial exchange is a bonus falling alike on big and. little farmers, on the strong and the weak, the just and the unjust. Can the rest of the community subscribe to individual nursing policies, plus an exchange-bonus policy of general farm inflation? The rural credit administration can at least draw the line somewhere. The exchange-bonus is a blank cheque. l
SPECIAL AID OR BLANK CHEQUE?
Evening Post, Volume CXIII, Issue 57, 8 March 1932, Page 6
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