AN INDEPENDENT

Evening Post, Volume CXX, Issue 87, 9 October 1935, Page 4

AN INDEPENDENT

WELLINGTON EAST

MR. W. J. CAUDJINI'S VIEWS

About thirty electors met at Eoseneath last night to hear Mr. W. J. Gaudin, Independent candidate forj Wellington. East, open his election campaign. Mr. T. W.Ward presided and at the conclusion of the candidate's address a vote of confidence was carried. ■-• . ••■, ..;■••:■...■:■;.

Mr. Gaudin: referred to his activities in public affairs during the last twenty years, and that he was seeking Parliamentary honours as an Independent because he wished to be free to vote in the interests of the electors rather than in the interests of party. The policy at the present time was to govern by boards,,he said,.and that was dangerous to true democracy.

. Mr.: Gaudin' attacked the Go vernment's . policy during :the slump, and said that, instead of reducing unemployment that policy had, until the last twelve months, produced an ever-grow-ing army of the workless. The crowning blunder was:the raising of the exchange rate. A year after it went up to 125 the unemployed total reached the startling figure of 80,000,- It was 50,000 today,l yet had the Government pursued a sane- policy at the outset the position would not have been so acute.

Another serious aspect of the high exchange impost was its effect in bolstering land values up to a level which was not economic. Any number o? farmers did ,nqt r need the support of '!ffi£LcsiJ!^ge''jratou^^mdihan3r--werei not entitled to such benefit. The' Wellington City Council would have been able to reduce its rates by 5 per cent had exchange not been pegged at ,25 per' cent above sterling. Up to the end of next March high exchange would cost the council £151,000. One party in the House proposed -guaranteed prices, which was a very similar thing to high exchange, both involving a foricn of subsidy to farmers who did not need it, as much as to those who did.

' The1 solution of unemployment lay in the establishment of new industries, Mr: vGaudin said. Mr. Lloyd' George had formulated a vast public works programme *or. Great Britain, but. the Government had" wisely declined to adopt his plan, in the light of previous experience. The expenditure of £19,000,000 a year by British local bodies-for ten years on public works had provided work for only 75,000 out of 2,000,000 unemployed at any one time, and temporarily at that. Great Britain began to reduce her unemployment figures when her industries began to recover. *At the conclusion of his address the candidate answered a number of questions.