MR. HOLLAND AND IMPORT REGULATIONS

Evening Post, Volume CXXXIX, Issue 123, 26 May 1945, Page 6

MR. HOLLAND AND IMPORT REGULATIONS

Sir. —From your special P.A. coi*respondent's lengthy cablegram from London on May 21, I gather that Mr. S. G. Holland favours the abolition of import regulations to enable British exporters to compete with New Zealand manufacturers and the workers they employ. This should induce in the New Zealand manufacturers all the emotions of exhilaration. There is nothing like having influential friends abroad. To me, however, Mr. Holland is a trifle confusing. He visited Australia recently and then opined that were Australian manufacturers to establish plants in the Dominion this would be a means of offsetting New Zealand's adverse balance of tr::de with Australia. Our Opposition leader used two arguments in support of this. One was that Australian manufacturing operations in the Dominion -vould release us from the necessity of iitilising New Zealand exchange in London to liquidate the aforesaid adverse trade balance, in which case, having more exchange available, we could finance the purchase of a greater volume of British manufactures for import to New Zealand. The other was that it would be possible for us to build up exchange in London. Mr. Holland's assumption apparently being that if the Australians manufactured here we would be under a lesser compulsion to buy from Britain. In the first case, having got the Australians here, Mr. Holland would make it difficult for them to succeed by increasing the flow of British nianufactures to the Dominion, and in the second British manufacturers would gain no advantage, because the idea is to accumulate exchange \vhich can only be done by strictly curbing its expenditure. Mr. Holland's pronouncements tend to bemuse my simple intelligence, but of one thing I am clear, and this is that if our manufacturing possibilities are not developed to the full, thousands of our young people will have to migrate to other lands to find employment.— I am, etc., JAMES THORN. House of Representatives, May 24, 1945.