Grey River Argus FRIDAY, May 9th, 1930. PARLIAMENT'S JOB.

Grey River Argus, 9 May 1930, Page 4

Grey River Argus FRIDAY, May 9th, 1930. PARLIAMENT'S JOB.

The latest news from Auckland shows New Zealand has still an unemployment problem no less real than Australia, Britain, America, and many other countries. The call for Parliamentary action is indeed a timely one. The situation in our cities threatens to become very serious as the winter advances, unless something is speedily done to relieve the many thousands who are in want. Thousands are' reported hungry in the northern city, while, the position at the capital is nearly as bad, and there are seven hundred men idle in Dunedin, many so desperate that they would do almost anything to give their wives and families at least one good meal a day. At Christchurch yesterday the Minister of Internal Affairs met a deputation _of unemployed whom he promised to find work for a couple of hundred. It is certainly not surprising to find so many cases of breaking and entering now occupying attention in the Courts of the Dominion. The increase in this class of delinquency is in no small degree due to hardship, and the example is being, followed more readily as conditions remain the same. The Dominion may not be so badly off as other codntri.es, but it is as badly off as it fever was in this respect, and relief is increasingly urgent. The Charitable Aid Boards in the cities have turned down the unemployed in no uncertain way, and local taxation is evidently not the means to a remedy. More cblnprehensive measures are in other States being taken. In America these have largely been the work of private canitalists in co-operation with the Federal authority.. Apart from the slump there, it is computed that in eight years improved machinery has driven out of the farming, manufacturing, railway, "i and mining industries .more than two and a quarter million men, and those factors are also operating here. In Britain the estimated cost of works approved up to February last for Government financial assistance to relieve unemployment amounted to no less than forty millions sterling. In Victoria there is now a scheme to tax all incomes above £312 in a ’ graduated manner to cope with this problem, and there is a similar plan in New South Wales, complicated, however, by the Goverment’s policy, of , reducing wages and increasing hours all round, causing among other things, strong resistance on the part of thirty-two thousand public servants. What New Zealand does not want is anything like the scheme of the Queensland anti-Labour Government to put ten thusand men on public works at £2 10s per week. Yet the capitalists of the Dominion appear apathetic towards the unemployed. Thus Sir Harold Beauchamp, a representative spokesman, while objecting to the scheme proposed bv the Committee on Unemployment for a fund, suggests taxing such neces-' saries as tea and sugar to the extent of an extra half million per annum. The danger is that if the hardship existing is not remedied there may ultimately be such a crisis that some such expedient as that of the New South Wales Government may be attempted. It is therefore the obvi- . ous thing for the workers to demand that, the State shall no longer procrastinate in this matter. A stitch in time saves nine. No permanent provision has heretofore been attempted in the Dominion, probably because it was so fortunate for over a generation prior to the war, as to have escaped any serious unemployment problem. One result has been that until things became acute in very recent years, the means of ascertaining the hardship prevailing had been lacking. The Government is to be given credit for what it has done in way of temporary measures, but even of these the need remains,. and that is one reason why Parliament should meet early and scanction ample measures in the meantime. The definite and systematic measures which in Australia are being adopted indicate that some special provision of the kind must be made in New Zealand, as there are not a few whom those measures would oblige to help now questioning the expenditure on a number of public works, which find the unemployed a means of subsistence, if no more. The aggregation of workless thousands in the cities cannot be regarded with equanimity, and if this country is not to degenerate to the level of those where pauperism is a traditional thing, an effective means of prevention must be found, and found quickly.