The Northern Advocate Daily “NORTHLAND FIRST" SATURDAY, JULY 15, 1939. A Threat or a Promise?

Northern Advocate, 15 July 1939, Page 6

The Northern Advocate Daily “NORTHLAND FIRST"

SATURDAY, JULY 15, 1939. A Threat or a Promise?

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MR SAVAGE’S offer yesterday to abandon the guaranteed price, if farmers insist that they do not want it, is open to different interpretations. Read in one light, it appears to be simply an attempt to intimidate the farmer. Mr Savage knows as well as anyone else that if the guaranteed price were withdrawn in the present state of market uncertainty, many farmers could hardly survive. Their troubles, however, would be due less to the inadequacy of overseas prices than to the rise in their own costs since the present Government took office. In the last few days, the price in London has risen to the level of the New Zealand guarantee, and even a shade over it; but for a long period before that the market had been poor, and the Government was losing heavily, so much so that there is now a deficit in the dairy account variously estimated at from £1,300,000 to £2,000,000. The farmers, in effect, are being subsidised to this amount from the general funds.

The position of Mr Savage must be particularly trying. Throughout the week representative farmers from all parts of the Dominion have been conferring in Wellington, and their discussions have left no room for doubt about the intensity of farmers’ feelings on the present economic situation. They emphatically endorsed the demand of the Dairy Conference for nothing less than the guaranteed price recommended by last year’s Government-appointed Advisory Committee, the recommendations of which were not accepted by Mr Nash. In this uncomfortable situation, Mr Savage is without the moral and practical support of his principal assistant. Were Mr Nash in New Zealand, he could be depended on, as the architect of the guaranteed price structure, to supplement Mr Savage’s remarks with the usual persuasive arguments which he presents with such mastery. But Mr Nash is still in London. It would, perhaps, be intriguing to Mr Nash to read Mr Savage’s statement that “if the dairy-farmers think they can do better under the old system, it will be the duty of the Government to devise ways and means of meeting them.” Such an offer, on the face of it, implies a retreat in disorder from one of the essential principles of the Government’s Socialistic programme. Whether accepted or not (and under prevailing conditions its acceptance is a practical impossibility), it is an admission than an attempt to socialise a great industry by what is virtually a'commandeer of farm; produce has not been the unmixed blessing prophesied by its authors.