FARMERS’ CHIEF CRITICAL

Evening Star, Issue 22414, 11 August 1936, Page 14

FARMERS’ CHIEF CRITICAL

WAGE INFLATION WITHOUT PRICE INFLATION GRAZING LAND UNWORKABLE WITH NEW TAXATION [Per United Press Association.] MASTERTON, August 10. Addrcssing a gathering of district fanners this afternoon, the Dominion president of the Farmers’ Union (Mr W. W. Mulholland) strongly criticised the policy of inflating wage and other costs without at the same time inflating the prices of agricultural products so as to bring them into a reasonable relationship with costs.' He emphasised that it was imperative to-da/ as it never had been before for the farmers to get together in their own interests and those of the community generally and urge the Government to complete the policy on which it had gone to the country. Air Mulholland. in the course of his address, said the Government had gone to the country on a policy of artificial inflation as opposed to the policy by which the preceding Government had reduced costs and brought these into reasonable relationship with the prices of agricultural products. The present Government, however, had got the wrong foot first. Had it first inflated prices the inflation of wages and other costs would have followed naturally. It had inflated costs without inflating prices, and so had re-established, though on a higher price level, the conditions of 1931—the disparity between prices and costs which had led to the slump. There was no question of going hack on the policy of the last six months. The farmers, if they were to escape being ground down by those sections of the community that were compulsorily organised, must unite in doing everything they could to induce the Government to complete its policy by inflating prices and bringing them into conformity with costs. Mr Mulholland, as in a previous address, condemned the heavy increase in company taxation, which, he said, was totally at variance with the professed policy of the Labour Party. He contended that in its reintroduction of the graduated land tax the Government had taken no account of the position of the sheep _ farmer, and said that particularly in the South Island considerable areas of grazing land could not be worked under the taxation now imposed.