THREAT BY MINISTER

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 78, 1 May 1943, Page 5

THREAT BY MINISTER

PRODUCTION COUNCILS ATTITUDE TO THE PRESS Oamaru, April 28. A further appeal to those production councils at present “defying” the request to exclude the press from their meetings was made by the Hon. J. G. Barclay, Minister of Agriculture and Marketing, when interviewed at Oamaru. “The National Council and myself have power to make all our correspondence with production councils confidential, but this we do not want to do, if members of those councils will only co-operate with us and hand out to the press that which is necessary to stimulate production,” said the Minister. “In future, where councils continue to defy us, they will receive only correspondence that is marked confidential. Those councils that then allow the information marked confidential to go through the press will probably have to be dealt with by other means. Already on various occasions certain councils have over-stepped the mark in regard to the letting out of correspondence which they should have treated as confidential. The last thing the National Council or myself wish to do is to take any extreme measures at the present time, and we would far rather h» r e the co-opera-tion of the councils, to which I think we are justly entitled.”