LOCAL AND GENERAL

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXV, Issue 3369, 24 September 1931, Page 4

LOCAL AND GENERAL

The internal roading work throughout the Galatea Estate is now practically completed. It has taken some months to carry out this work as in some places construction proved exceedingly difficult. The length of roading to be constructed is about 30 miles altogether.

Recently a New York restaurant startled its patrons by announcing: “All you want to eat for 60 cents” (about 3s). The idea was spread until now nearly a score of restaurants are using the plan and report a 20 percent increase in profits. A survey reveals that only 10 per cent, of the customers thoroughly over-eat themselves, the remainder not eating more than they ordinarily would.

A Hastings land agent has expressed the view that land on or about the fringes of the borough will not decline at all in value, the reason for his opinion being based on his observations of a new tendency which may be taken as a sign of the times. That tendency, he says, is for workers in offices and shops to take up small holdings to farm as a sideline, and to-day this is extraordinarily noticeable. Such people are'not giving up their usual employment, but are farming a few acres as a supplementary source of income. There was also a keen demand for dairy farms near Hastings, said the agent, and a fair demand for larger holdings suitable for sheep farming and cattle raising where the value was assured. Speculating was dead in regard to such land The agent further expressed the opinion that prices for larger areas of land would not be to the taste of the market until they became more or less stabilised at prices 25 per cent, below pre-slump prices.

Dr. E. Marsden, head of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, in a speech at Wellington stressed the need for co-operation between all sections of industry. “Believe me,” he said, “I don’t think this is a crisis we can muddle through. We have to make up our minds as to whether in the next ten years we are going to be content with a low standard of living, or whether we aie going to ‘pull together’ to get a better standard of living. I think that is the position, nothing more or less. There is a necessity for long-term planning. We have to be looking ahead. I think that is the real reason why we are in the slump to-day when we ought not to be. We have been too fortunate perhaps, and yet it is that which gives one ray of hope. What hope have we unless we begin to think and work? In some of our industries we have a lot of slack to take up. You can juggle with finance as much as you like, but the only way out is to get everybody producing and making real wealth.”