FARMERS AND LIVING EXPENSES

Evening Post, Volume CXIII, Issue 98, 27 April 1932, Page 8

FARMERS AND LIVING EXPENSES

(To the Editor.)

Sir,—l; have, been instructed by myj executive to ■ ask for publicity 'for its' opinions' relative to: certain remarks made by a Stipendiary Magistrate, and widely reported. These were to the effect that an applicant under the Mortgagors': Relief Act,-operating an account with a mercantile .firm should draw that account to the limit in ordei to meet current interest and should not: retain money' for living purposes. ' The Magistrate! supplemented this with a suggestion that the man could live, indeed that all farmers could live practically entirely from the land and added more remarks/with regard to the unemployed living on rabbits, which my executive considers to be most uncalled for and terribly callous. > It is unreasonable that a man should use up the last pennyworth o£ credit available to him in the payment of interesh . That ■"'ould be merely to put.himself into an utterly impossible position for fresh interest would be payable in due course and he would then ■ neither be ble1 to pay interest nor to carry on his farming operations, but what my executive feels'more important still is the attitude of mind in a gentleman wliose attitude it is to weigh all circumstances justly and tairly. If it is characteristic of Magistrates in general,, then all that can be said is "Heaven help the farmer." My executive considers that the -whole question of justice between I mortgagee and as also between various sections of the community, should be administered by Parliamentary enactment over the'whole economic life of the country and that to set upon Magistrate's Courts, Commissions,? etc., to grant concessions in. one direction and not in another, is merely to multiply and perpetuate injustices on an #er-wideuing scale, it a remission of interest is right and proper to any man who now finds himself unable to pay, interest that fact alone is proof that remission .pf interest is due to thousands,of others who:do not find it necessary as yet to appeal to the Court — I am, etc., ~'. . "

; A. E. ROBINSON, Provincial, Secretary, .. ' , Auckland Farmers' Union; Auckland, 22nd Aprjl. :