The Butter Quota

Northland Age, Volume 2, Issue 44, 4 August 1933, Page 9

The Butter Quota

“What is wanted so badly in this crisis is capacity, sagacity and courage—or rather, capacity, sanity and courage, in tackling this question of the restriction of our butter exports to Britain. We ought to endeavour to create a

healthy public interest in the real factors governing the position so that we can see things as they really are rather than in the light that those who wish to obscure the real issues would like us to. We are living in a different world to that of our fathers, and our current advisers and rulers are endeavouring to run the game on the experience of our grandfathers,” declared Mr. Grounds, a member of the Dairy Control Board, in a stirring speech to the suppliers of the Kaikohe Dairy Factory at the Company’s annual meeting last Saturday on the proposed restriction of our butter exports to Britain.

“During the past six months I have regarded the proposed restriction of our butter exports to Britain as one of the most vital questions ever faced by this country,” said Mr. Grounds. “It is amazing to me that any member of a Government whose members recently were calling on the farmer to produce more and still produce more should now be coquetting with the suggestion of restriction which is going to involve the paralysis of New Zealand’s dairy industry, if not the Dominion’s economic life. New Zealand is a most ideally situated country for dairying, and to restrict the production of what nature has most advantageously provided us for is neither the best policy by which to serve ourselves or the world generally. How can we who have been pursuing a policy of closer development of our farm lands and concentrating on an expansion of land settlement, how can we contemplate any suggestion of a restriction of the products of those lands?

A pamphlet was issued by a responsible Minister of the Crown some months ago in which the question w r as raised of a butter quota or a free market. It was most inopportune. When the representatives of the Dairy Board visited Australia to discuss the question with that country’s representatives they found a tendency there to slide over the position of a definite refusal to consider restriction. But after full and complete consideration with ourselves they finally decided the matter upon a question of principle that it was not a sound principle to accept it.