INTERNAL SURVEYS

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVII, Issue 127, 31 May 1944, Page 7

INTERNAL SURVEYS

NEW ZEALAND INDUSTRY

The necessity for internal surveys of New Zealand industry so that it would be in a position to prepare its plans now for the transitional period from war to peace production was a keynote of the quarterly conference of the New Zealand Manufacturers' Federation Council held at Christchurch. The council considered that any concrete recommendations on the rehabilitation of industry had to be based on an analysis of past and present performances, and taking from those returns an estimate for the future.

It was realised that business men, and particularly manufacturers, had already contended With many analyses of various kinds specifically concerned with war production and that a desire for further surveys might at a cursory examination be regarded as an imposition. However, it was felt that the gravity of the issues involved fully justified the effort now envisaged. Point was made that some 100,000 men and women now in the Services had to be replaced in civilian employment, while hundreds of others engaged in what were purely war industries had similarly to be rehabilitated.

Experience had shown, the conference considered, that plans laid without a complete knowledge of the factors involved were not plans at all, but conjecture. The present was not too early to commence the first surveys, and when the first flood of active and wholesale rehabilitation and reconversion started it would certainly be too late to lay out" a programme.

Delegates instanced cases where some New Zealand industries had already made their own surveys to within a narrow margin of anticipated requirements. Such surveys from all industries in the Dominion would do much to place New Zealand industrialists in a state of operational readiness to shoulder the problems of labour, raw materials, production, and allied issues that the peace would undoubtedly bring.