RETRENCHMENT

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 144, 21 June 1938, Page 10

RETRENCHMENT

NATIONALIST POLICY

MR. SEMPLE AS PROPHET

IF LABOUR GOES OUT

(By Telegraph—Press Assoefatron.) CHRISTCHURCH, This Day. "Retrenchment is the only alternative to the policy of expansion initiated by the present Government, and retrenchment is the basic principle upon which the National Party will contest the General Election," said the Minister of Public Works (the Hon. R. Semple) in an address at Fairlie last night. Mr. Semple added that it did not require the mind of anything more than average penetrative power to see what was at the back of the thinly-veiled policy of the National Party. Its leader, Mr. Hamilton, had repeatedly told the people that wages were too high and that too many public works had been put in hand. He had not openly declared that his party would reduce wages, but cruel as were the wage cuts imposed by his party when it was last in power, an even more cruel and cowardly method of forcing wages down had been devised and would certainly be put into operation if the National Party ever again became the Government. Under that retrograde policy of retrenchment, public works would cease, industry would be held up, and thousands of men would be thrown back on the labour market to compete amongst themselves for the smaller number of jobs that would be offering.

The restoration of wages had helped materially to bring back the nation's prosperity, but today the country was once more being asked to return to lower wages and stifled industry under the guise of retrenchment, which would probably be called an economic necessity. Labour would be artificially forced up in excess of demand and reduced wages would follow as naturally as night followed day. The effect of this policy would be felt in the farming districts as well as in the towns. Not all farmers were exporters. Many of them depended for their living on internal markets or, in other words, upon the cities. If that was destroyed the farmer would be destroyed with it. COMPENSATED v. GUARANTEED PRICE. The compensated price meant nothing more than that the farmer would have to take what he could get. He was being asked to accept it instead of the guaranteed price offered by the Government during the past three months. "I have addressed thirty-four meetings, mainly in farming centres, and I have not heard a single complaint against the guaranteed price," declared Mr.. Semple. "A big noise is coming from individuals who do not represent farming opinion. The sane farmer who can appreciate the value of economic security will never go back to Tafferty rules.' It is too much to ask him to throw away security and accept something that has no economic foundation, and which no one has yet been able to explain. The principle of the guaranteed price now operating in the dairying industry can be applied to other branches of farming, and as long as the Labour Government is in power all farmers have the prospect that they will be brought under its protection."