THINKING IN MILLIONS.

Evening Post, Volume CXV, Issue 82, 7 April 1933, Page 6

THINKING IN MILLIONS.

Those proposals that New Zealand should*borrow limteen millions to reestablish herself recalls this incident to us. It was a few years after the war, and the party then in opposition, looking around for a new policy, plank with which to sweep the Government off its perch, discovered;agricultural banks. It was a bait for the farmers. However, on the boat home from Sydney we encountered a Very, High Politician of that Party—he is now comfortably ensconced beyond the hurly burly of politics—who insisted (that's the word) on discussing th» agricultural banks proposal with us. Denmark, he said, had rural banks; Dakota, too; why not , New Zealand* And how would the V.H.P. finance such.' a scheme? Airily, he replied that the idea was to borrow £20,000,000. But, wo countered, why not apply that sum, if you must" borrow, to enlarge the activities of our State Advances Department, which neither, Denmark nor Dakota possessed? The Big Man. laughed jollily and smacked us on the shoulder. "Don't you see," he said, "that agricultural banks are different from a State Advances Department?" And he pushed along the decanter an* passed us quite a nice cigar.