Our Staggering Debt

Maoriland Worker, Volume 12, Issue 293, 11 October 1922, Page 4

Our Staggering Debt

Our wise and psrpicacious statesmen have at last stumbled upon the tact that the usurers have got us by the throat. The latest to discover this Jβ Sir Thomas Mackenzie the LiberalTory politician, who, along with tho leaders of £iberalism and Toryism, must share ' the responsibility. According to him our natioua.i and municipal debt % £238,000,000 land our registered mortgages £210,000,000; also tliat loans will have to be renewed, PROBABLY AT A HIGHER RATE OF NTEREST. About '30 years afcu Seddon won power on a platform, the second plank, of which, read: "NO MORE PUBLIC BORROWING.". Thereafter, until he died,. he borrowed a*bout' two million &-nnu|&-lly. Then came Sir Joseph Ward, "who borrowed at roughly, twics Seddon's pace. All the time they' were borrowing, Massey predicted the nvix of the country and promised that If he were borrowing would oefus*.. Hβ

got £here flnally, ten yea? 3 ago,- and during his. tenure £120,000,000 hiave ■betin ladded to the public debt, and since 1914 £120,000,000 'to mortgages. Between the lot of them they've just? about put New Zealand into the pawnshop, for the debt is now. almost equal to the value of all the property ta the country.' Well, what will they do about it? Nothing, but keep'on borrowing—and reduce wages to pay thei interest.