NATIONAL LOAN

Northern Advocate, 7 June 1933, Page 5

NATIONAL LOAN

DEPUTATION’S PROPOSAL OUTSTANDING- EFFECTS. OPINION OF MR COATES. (Special to “Northern Advocate.”) • AUCKLAND, This Day. .Several points arising out of the national financial plan submitted to him yesterday were discussed by the Ft. Hon. .T. G. Coates in an interview last night.

He said that the Dominion’s economic position was bound up with the prices for primary products at Homo. When they rose our difficulties would be solved, and meanwhile further liabilities would only add to our troubles, unless the deputation’s proposals were connected with self-supporting projects. The probable result of u £10,000,000 loan would bo a birth of artificial prosperity, and afterwards it would be worked off. The reference to a Currency Board was not understood, but if a note issue Avere intended, that was straight inflation in the worst form. To make unemployment pay too high would only increase the numbers engaged in less productive work, and unemployment finance would break down under its own weight. Regarding advances to local bodies, it was generally held they had borrowed too much already. The export bonuses of a penny per pound would cost £0,500,000. The producers wore already receiving £3,500,000 through high exchange.

SOUTHERN COMMENTS,”

“POLICY OF DESPAIR.”

(Special to “Northern Advocate.”)

DUNEDIN, This Day,

Under the caption, “A Policy of Despair,” the “Otago Daily Times” comments as follows in an editorial on the deputation which waited on Mr Coates in Auckland;

“It seems to have been a very dejected and pessimistic deputation that waited on the acting Prime Minister at Auckland with what the Mayor of that city described as a considered scheme for dealing with the economic problems. While the belief is being expressed in other parts of the Dominion that the prospects for trade and industry are definitely improving—a belief which reflects that expressed in a recent cable message from the United Kingdom—the Mayor of Auckland drew an exceedingly dismal picture or the hopelessness and distress that are, as he says, manifesting themselves. People in Auckland who read the doleful story which their Mayor told the acting Prime Minister are in danger of being confirmed in a spirit of helplessness and apprehension. “It will not contribute in the slightest to the dissipation of a psychology 'that is distinctly harmful in the present circumstances, nor, on the otherhand, will the grandiose scheme of borrowing-cum-inflation which the deputation submitted for the Government’s consideration commend itself as either sound or practicable. The acting Prime Minister did not encourage the deputation to. imagine that there was any possibility of the Government securing an early session of Parliament to sanction an immediate borrowing programme of a heroic order, nor of its giving favourable consideration in any case to the scheme which Avas brought before it. The country has not reached a condition in which a policy of despair is iccessary, nor - are circumstances such as to warrant the atmosphere of gloom that apparently persists in Auckland.”