The Hastings Standard Published Daily. SATURDAY, AUGUST 29, 1896. ANOTHER JOB FIXED.

Hastings Standard, Issue 107, 29 August 1896, Page 2

The Hastings Standard Published Daily.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 29, 1896. ANOTHER JOB FIXED.

For the cause that lacks assistance, For the wrongs that need resistance, For the future in the distance, And the good that we can do.

The Premier has met the unwarranted and malicious statements of the Evening Post in his usual vigorous manner, and that respectable Tory journal should profit by the castigation. The Evening Poat in a recent issue reproduced the statement from the Iron and Steel Trades Journal that " the New Zealand Government have undertaken to place with any company or syndicate developing such industries in the colony the whole of their requirements in iron and steel for railways and public works generally at such prices as will give the company a bonus of 10 per cent, over the imported cost, such arrangement to extend over a period of five years." It is this unsupported assertion of an English Trade Journal which the Evening Post characterised as being " Another Job," and it is journalistic efforts of this nature that bring ridicule upon the Press of the Colony. This is not criticism, it is not a fair comment but a gross prostitution of the privileges of the Press. Is it right to accuse the Government of perpetrating a job such slender and unreliable evidence as furnished by the Iron and Steel Trades Journal ? Political spleen and Tory vindictiveness can go no further, and we are surprised at a journal of the respectability of the Evening Post descending to such tactics. The misdeeds of the Government must always be exposed; it is the duty of the public journals of the colony to expose these misdeeds, but no journal has a right to manufacture wrong-doing for Ministers. There is no defence for such tactics as that adopted by the Evening Post, and if the Premier was scathingly severe in his denunciation of the offending journal, he was more than justified by the spiteful and unwarranted heading of "Another Job" which the article in question bore. The Premier's refutation was complete. Instead of there being another job perpetrated by the Government, the Premier showed that Ministers have been particularly careful to safeguard the colony. No bonus has been offered for the manufacture of iron-in the colony, but the Government is willing to take 50,000 tons of iron of good quality for railways and bridge

construction at the rate of 4600 tons a year, at a cost not exceeding that at which a similar class of iron could be procured in the highest iron could with the cost of freight added. This was the answer of the Premier, and a man must be daft if he can call this by the ugly term of " a job." Surely this is a legitimate way to encourage local industry and help in the development of a mineral which so far has refused to be developed. The Government is pledged to encourage local industries, its tariff is framed on the lines of protection, but in this iron industry, with its great potentialities, the encouragement is of the most feeble character. There is no bonus, no special preference ; if the locally produced iron is of equal quality and of the same price as the imported iron, then preference is to be given to the local manufacture. We confess we see nothing extraordinary in that, except that the Go er mient has been extraordinaily misery in its encouragement of so important an industry. But this is what our contemporary calls " Another Job," and we are unable to say whether it was intended facetiously or in dead earnest; but whatever its intentions were, the Premier has smothered them with his luminous explanation.