UNEMPLOYMENT CAMPS.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LIV, Issue 148, 24 May 1934, Page 6

UNEMPLOYMENT CAMPS.

(To the Editor.) Sir, —The report of the address delivered by Hon. A. Hamilton (Minister of Employment) to the Lunch Club this week stated that lie would ask the Church to continue to tender advice in their own sphere. I take it that lie meant to convey that ho resented the recent remarks of Rev. H. L. Richards, the superintendent minister of the Cuba Street Methodist Church, but a resolution passed by the Methodist Conference of New Zealand in Wellington shows that Mr Richards’s transgression in this direction was not very serious. A conference resolution, as recorded on page 70 of the minutes, requested that a pronouncement on unemployment be made available to our people through the connexional paper the Methodist Times.

The pronouncement is set out under nine different headings and the following aro three of these: — 1. We suggest that relief pay should be adequate to meet the needs of life, food, clothes and rent aud, if it is found necessary, taxes should be increased on a graduated scale to meet the added expenditure. 2. We urge that sustenance payments be adequate to family needs. 3. That while ns a church we are opposed to the system of compulsory camps for married men we are of the opinion that should it be necessary for married men with families to go into camps they should he guaranteed at least a living wage regardless of weather conditions.—l am, etc., A. H. FISHER. May 23, 1934.