IMPORT POLICY

Evening Post, Volume CXL, Issue 54, 1 September 1945, Page 10

IMPORT POLICY

EXPANSION OF INDUSTRY

Replying to critics of the Government's import selection policy, the Minister of Works (Mr. Semple) stated when speaking in the Financial Debate in the House of Representatives yesterday that since the policy had been operating, 1200 new factories had been established in the Dominion, employing 40,000 men and women. Their annual wage and salary total was between £10,000,000 and £12,000,000. If import restrictions were lifted, he continued, the result when industry got into its stride would be that those 40,000 people would have to be looking for a job because New Zealand industries could not compete against the sweated labour of other countries. But that, he added, was not to say that New Zealand should not trade with the Old Country to the limit. "These remarks about industry are mischievous, poisonous propaganda, the sort of thing of which the Minister is a past master," said Mr. J. T. Watts (National, Riccarton). The Opposition, he continued, had never said it would allow the country's industries to go out of existence, for it had just as great an interest in them as any other party, and when it became the Government it realised it would not last long if it put people on the labour market by causing unemployment. Nor had they ever said they would remove tariffs. Their idea was that tariffs should be utilised to make-ad-justments, bridging the gap between the higher wages and better conditions in New Zealand compared with competing countries, with a realisation that New Zealand industries had the' adyantages of high exchange, and the shipping and insurance charges which had to be imposed on imported goods. .