Readers Write

Northern Advocate, 31 July 1939, Page 6

Readers Write

[Readers are invited. to send letters for publication in this Column, A letter should be written in ink an one side of the paper, and must bear the name of the writer, not necessarily for publication, but as a guarantee of good faith.l I | After lending “Old Farmer's” letter i in a recent "Advocate" upon farmers’ j problems, I am more than ever convinced that farmers j , FARMERS' (or at least some of [ PROBLEMS, them) arc themselves our biggest problem. I | will prove this. In Mr Massey's day, i when buttorfat was somewhere in the I vicinity of 2/ per lb in England, de- | putations of farmers waited upon Mr Massey. He told them they were “whiners and croakers.” In Mr Coates' day, even while costs were so gloriously low, even when the cost of living was so delightfully cheap, i these same farmers harassed Mr I Coates at every opportunity. I did I so myself.

And now these same “Old Farm-

ers" are howling out for the low costs, low etc., etc.," which made revolutionaries of these farmers not so long ago, and which drove them into the arms of the Labour Party and its guaranteed price. Today the .same old procedure is being enacted all over again, of a leader of a farmers’ organisation, who is not a dairyfarmer, boldly claiming, on behalf of us dairyfarmers, the abolition of the fixed price system, while farmers’ meetings, dairy company chairmen, etc., are up in arms at the very suggestion of abolishing the guaranteed price.

“Old Farmer” expects the Government to sell Australian wheat in this country for 9d per bushel, and at the

same time give our own wheatfarmers 5/9 per bushel. Does this dniryfarmer wish to ruin another

section of our farmers?

And so the old story goes on. Despite the £2,000,000 they receive this season from the Reserve Bank, despite the millions sterling written off their mortgages, despite the Government offering to pay three-quar-ters of their wages bill on farm improvement work, they still listen to these agitators at the head of the farmers’ organisations.—“NEW ZEALAND FIRST”