WHAT IS "PRINCIPLE"?

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 145, 16 December 1933, Page 8

WHAT IS "PRINCIPLE"?

It is very hard for a Government to be either, logical or consistent when it sanctions the various interferences with industry that Governments are called on to sanction. The New Zealand Government's high exchange benefit, like the rain, falls alike on the just and. the unjust, but the Commonwealth Government's wheat bounty goes only to him who has not taxable income. Immediately this was known, the Government was asked why the wheat bounty was for some when the iron and steel bounty was for all; why an inefficient wheat farmer who was worth nothing to income tax should be preferred to a

successful, taxed farmer; and so on. Perhaps the Government took this [p heart, because it brought down a Bill to give the Australian apple and pear growers £125,000 compensation for going through the bad export season that the New Zealand apple exporters also went through, and this time the Government proposed that all apple and pear growers (not merely those without taxable income) should get the bounty. Asked in the House the reason why wheat bounties are for the poor, and apple bounties for everybody, the Government did not seem to know. Then the Government decided to give the growers of dried fruit (prunes, apricots, peaches, pears, and nectarines) power to regulate inter-State trade. As an apology for giving these glowers a chance to dictate to individual growers, the Government hit on an idea that was old even in the clays of New Zealand's Prohibition Bills—it proposed that the growers could not regulate interState trade unless they carried it at a growers' poll by a 60 per cent, majority. Then the logicians got to work against what Mr. Scullin called a 41 per cent, tyranny, and carried an absolute majority poll against the Government. Mr. Lyons smiled at this amendment and went on his Avay. Democracy and dried fruit have at last been reconciled.