BANKING MEASURE

Evening Post, Volume CXXXIX, Issue 147, 23 June 1945, Page 7

BANKING MEASURE

ATTACK IN AUSTRALIA

CANBERRA, June 22. The Commonwealth's new banking legislation at best would restrict the activities and services of the trading banks; at worst it would crush them, said the Leader of the Opposition, Mr* R. G. Menzies, when, speaking on tha second reading of the Banking Bill xa the House of Representatives. - .. "The whole plan of the Government is to nationalise the banks, not by = the process of buying them up, but by first exhausting them and then absorbing them," Mr. Menzies declared. The Government claims the Bill will regulate the -banking system, safeguard depositors, control the volume of credit, control exchange, and coordinate Australia's banking policy under the direction of the Commonwealth Bank. Mr. Menzies said that many people believed that if hundreds of millions of pounds could be found for. war purposes, the same amount of money could be found for peacetime projects. This was an extremely dangerous fallacy. In the past year Australia had spent about £700,000,000, although the 1939 Budget had been the first to reach £100.000,000.

The great expansion had been possible only because the Government had set in motion expenditure running into hundreds of millions of pounds and had then withdrawn from the public a large proportion of * the purchasing' power cheated by the spending power.- , When people said the Government could spend as many millions oh peace as on war, concluded * Mr. Menzies, they were assuming that the economic and social conditions applying to wartime would be continued in time of peace. ' '