HUNTLY RELIEF FUND.

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume IV, Issue 240, 24 September 1914, Page 3

HUNTLY RELIEF FUND.

MINERS STRIKE A LEVY. Hamilton, Sept. 24. At a well attended meeting a committee was set up to watch the interests of widows regarding compensation and it was agreed to strike a levy of five per cent on the first fortnight’s salary of each member of the union for relief of distress in the town. The Dunedin “StaY,” in urging upon the Government an immediate and complete revision of the legislation affecting accidents in mines, points out that the tax of one halfpenny per ton on all coal sold, for the relief of the families of miners killed or injured, is insufficient for the purpose. It yields about £3OOO a year, and this is not large enough to allow of widows drawing upon it for the maintenance of themselves through life and of their children to the age of self-dependence. The “Star’s” idea is that the tax on coal for the purpose must be increased. This, no doubt will be passed on to the consumer, but the public are not likely to resent being called upon to pay an amount that would really be very trifling when it reinembers the severe and unnatural toil of the coalhewer and the terrible risks that he runs every day of his life. Taking the Kaitangata fund as a datum point, it seems that a sum of something like £20,000 will be required to provide allowances for the widows and children and aged dependents of the Huntlv victims. The public, generous as it is, has a great many other calls upon its warm-hearted-ness, and the present spasmodic and haphazard fashion of raising funds for the accidents that occur occasionally is unfair and unbusinesslike. The point raised by the “Lyttelton Times’’ and its Otago contemporary merits earnest consideration by the Government.