King Country Chronicle. Friday, November 5, 1937. FARM LABOUR.

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXXI, Issue 4565, 5 November 1937, Page 4

King Country Chronicle. Friday, November 5, 1937. FARM LABOUR.

A denial of the existence of any serious farm labour shortage has been given by the Minister of Labour, the Hon. H. T. Armstrong, in the House of Representatives this week. Such irresponsible statements as this only make the Government ridiculous. If, as is the case if newspaper reports and other avenues of information are to be believed, the remainder of the Dominion is suffering from as great a disability as is this district, then the industry of farming is faced with a more serious shortage of labour than has occurred for many years." There cannot be the slightest doubt that Mr. Armstrong must have full information of this shortage, and yet in Parliament he denies that it exists! Certainly he later qualified the statement with the plea that there had always been a shortage of labour during the milking season, but the matter goes far deeper than this. There exists, even apart from seasonal demands, a shortage that is but the natural result of the Government's legislation and enactments. Mr. Armstrong held that the Government has gone further than any other to meet the position, in that it has offered to subsidise the wages of inexperienced young men during a period of training. It has certainly gone further than other Governments in providing relief works at rates of pay higher than the Government considers the experienced farm worker is entitled to receive—for in both the small farm schemes and the gang system of ragwort control, to name but two instances, the men receive standard rates of pay on work for which the wages are found from the unemployment fund, and which are largely designed to reduce the number of men on sustenance. There cannot be the slightest doubt that it is better for these men to be employed usefully, than for them to spend their time in idleness, but as the rates of pay and conditions are more attractive than the Government sets for the farm worker it is little wonder that the ranks of the farm labourer are depleted. Public works can also be classed with perfect truth as semirelief jobs, and to them also many farm labourers have gravitated. It is this position, along with that of making conditions and prospects more attractive to the farm labourer, that Mr. Armstrong has to tackle; the subsidising of young men's wages can only be a palliative. The shortage of farm labour is but a phase of an unbalanced economy, temporarily propped up by high overseas prices for our produce.