OVERBUILDING AND SUBSIDIES

Hawera Star, Volume LIII, 4 November 1933, Page 14

OVERBUILDING AND SUBSIDIES

C'PEAKING at tne annual meeting of ° Nitrate Producers’ Steamship Company, Limited, Sir John Latta said: “We cannot possibly blink the fact that an eminently dangerous situation has overtaken British shipping supreiiiacy, both from within and without, and demands the most scrupulous analysis in the- national interest; first, from within, against the adoption of too precipitate protective measures; secondly, to guard against sacrificing !that incalculably great asset which has never failed us in the past —our heritage as an island people, gifted with the sea sense, and possessing traditions and experience in ship management unsurpassed by any other country. ‘lt has hitherto withstood' every form of attack. “The present paralysis is due in a measure to improvidence and to misjudgment of the trend of affairs, and those most guilty are crying loudest.

Acute Problems in Shipping Trade

The over-building. of tonnage, chiefly on the part of inexperienced foreigners, has created such an overwhelming supply of Vessels, in excess of any reasonable demand for them, as has meantime lifted the issue outside the sphere of economic competition. Therefore, ! until the complex commercial potentialities at stake can be more accurately gauged, I think We should stand to our guns a little longer. Foreign subsidy payers are becoming alive to the fact that their shipowners are making as heavy, if not heavier, losses than we, without a scintilla of evidence that their lavish uneconomic expenditure is advancing their cause in the slightest. It would be unwise to Counter foreign subsidies, the risk being too great of I simply developing a political fight between Governments, on the basis of the survival of the fittest, the commercial factor, which is our nest egg, disappearing' altogether.”