POVERTY AND PLENTY.

Evening Star, Issue 22194, 23 November 1935, Page 12

POVERTY AND PLENTY.

TO THE EDITOR. Sir,-—“ True Bill ” says the silly season is on. After reading his letter I quite believe him. As an example, the New Zealand mother does not throw the children out on the street to look for scraps of food when there is plenty of food in the cupboard. She controls her domestic economy in her kitchen—her world. But if we look at the Dominion as one vast family we throw over 60'000 men, women, and children out on the streets, .although in the national cupboard there arc mountains of moat, mutton, butter, and in the Dominion wardrobe tons of wool, because the financiers control the national economy. “ True Blue ” tries to ridicule Mr Campbell on thp pi'inciplo apparently that nothing kills like ridicule, but I would remind him it is specially fatal when self-inflicted. Mr Campbell is wise enough to know if w© cannot get a market abroad that we can extend our market at home. Where else is it to be found? Take butter, one of the items your correspondent mentions. Germany has closed her doors to imported butter, with the result that 130,000 tons of Danish butter which no longer find entrance there is being unloaded in Britain. Holland is subsidising the production of butter, so that the home price is 190 s a cwt, while the surplus is dumped on the English market. Australia increased her exports of butter in five years from 1926-27 to 1931-32 by 83 per cent. And over and above all these factors of glut is the greatly increased production of butter ■by Britain herself. The ‘ Statist ’ quotes an estimate by Dr V. A. Venn, president of the British Agricultural Economic Society, in which the total value of Government assistance to British agriculture was given at more than £45,000,000 a year. George Bernard Shaw told us that “ Britain was going to milk her own cow.” Fear of the submarine and the aeroplane menace to shipping in wai time is making Britain self-supporting for defence reasons. Until that fear is removed from the once importing nations of the world free trade is vanishing and markets are closing to us. Iho New Zealand shearers and shed hands award provides that not less than one pound of butter and one pound of jam a week shall be provided for each person employed. If each person in INew Zealand ate what the Arbitration Court lays cT&wn as a necessity our total consumption of butter should be 62,000,000. and our local consumption of jam should be also 2,000,000. Again, as a young man L worked as a butcher and general hand on a sheep and cattle station in Australia. The ration of meat for each man I had to cut up and weigh out was 201 b a week. That amounts to 1,0401 bof meat a year, it New Zealand’s million and a-quarter inhabitants each got one-half of what is a ration for an-Australian station hapcl they would consume 750,000,0001 b of meat, and the local ■market would absorb the surplus which cannot be sold abroad. Even if one takes wool, which is not so perishable and can be stored in times of glut, consider what can be used if each man bought _ one new woollen suit a year containing 41b _ of wool, also a jiair of blankets containing 101 bof wool, two pairs of woollen underpants, weighing 41b for the two pair, and two woollen singlets weighing the same. iEach worker would prefer saddle tweed trousers to synthetic wool, shoddy, or denifns for working clothes. When one goes through the wardrobe of the family he understands the vast room for expansion. If people do not buy our locally-made goods now it is not because they do not want them, hut because they do not have the money to .buy them. What mother would buy Japanese-made singlets that look so shabby''and lustreless in a tew days if she had the purchasing power to buy decently made woollen singlets from onr up-to-date New Zealand mills? I am glad there is a candidate who understands how interdependent are our primary and secondary industries. each providing a local market for the other when the markets abroad fail, and if it were not for True Bill some of the electors’ would not know about it.—l am, etc., ‘ J. E. MacMaxus. November 22.