The Franklin Times PUBLISHED EVERY MONDAY, WEDNESDAY AND FRIDAY AFTERNOON FRIDAY, APRIL 5, 1929. THE TARIFF AGAIN.

Franklin Times, Volume XIX, Issue 39, 5 April 1929, Page 4

The Franklin Times PUBLISHED EVERY MONDAY, WEDNESDAY AND FRIDAY AFTERNOON

FRIDAY, APRIL 5, 1929. THE TARIFF AGAIN.

Office and Works: ROULSTON STREET, PUKEKOHE. P.O. Box 14, . Phone No. 2. Night Phone, No. 328. "We nothing extenuate, ,nor aught ■ set down in malice."

THE Bay of Islands- by-election is brinigng into prominence the freetrade v. protection question. The Country Party alarmed at the effects of our protective tariff upon our great primary industry, has strongly advocated a gradually reduced protective tariff, until, at the end of a series of

years, Empire-made goods would be admitted into New Zealand free. • A policy somewhat on these lines has been.advocated by the Times,for years, but it has never gone so far as the Country Party, believing that a low tariff, for revenue-producing purposes, must be kept on even the products of our best customer, Great Britain, but not such a one as will shut out the goods of any British country. Absolute Empire free-trade we have always considered to be impossible for financial reasons. At first the Times had not many sympathisers with its views, but is finding by degrees that more and more people are coming round to its way of thinking. We have instanced before how many of the Chambers of Commerce, notably those of Auckland and Christchurch, once firmly protectionist, have begun to realise the danger to our export trade from the unfair disadvantage at which our fiscal system places the farmer, and have decided it is high time to put a peg in. The latest recruit, we are glad to see, though apparently not too wholehearted a one, is Mr Allen Bell, the Reform—or does he desire to be called Independent—candidate for the Bay of Islands. Six sessions in Parliament as a follower of a protectionist Government has convinced him that the present tariff is too high, and he favours a reduction to a reasonable level, "but not to such a level as would crush out the secondary.industries." There is of course no desire to crush out the secondary industries, for we must always have them. But it has to be recognised that there is no hope of our secondary industries being able to-export anything, and that consequently everything they can gain by having a tariff which enables them to charge a higher price for what they produce, is a direct tax on the consumer; and that it injures the farmer more than anyone because he has to sell what he produces in the world's open market, against the world's unchecked competition,- must also be recognised. The effect of a protective tariff on a country that cannot export any of its secondary manufactures is simply to raise the cost of living, so that the in r creased wages which must in consequence result are of no benefit to those receiving them, and to handicap the farmer because his unprotected industry cannot pay these wages and carry on. The result is unemployment, and a check to the development of our waste lands, and the situation can only be met by borrowing from abroad, a policy that cannot continue indefinitely. There will come a time when we shall have nothing left to take to the The obvious lesson is that we are paying too dearly to try and establish most of our secondary industries. The decay—for we can give it no othsr name—of land settlement alone is enough to make us pause and consider whether an alteration of our fiscal system is not merely desirable, but absolutely necessary before we go so far down the hill that we cannot scramble back. We must always remember that

land has been broken in and abandon-

ed, as hundreds of thousands of acres

have been abandoned, is infinitely more difficult to bring in again than un-

touched land is