NEW ZEALAND'S LABOUR LAWS

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVIII, Issue 14746, 31 July 1911, Page 9

NEW ZEALAND'S LABOUR LAWS

A SOCIALIST CRITICISM.

[fbom otje own cohrespondp.nt.J London, June 23. Mb. Charles E. Russell, an American social investigator, went to New Zealand and Australia some time ago, and has returned full of disappointment with the conditions resulting from . State interference. He admits that- Governments in both countries have tackled social questions with some determination, but complains that they .have confined their activities to fields which are not already held and dominated by great financial corporations. "Combinations of capital both in New Zealand and Australia," be told an audience in the Rand School of Social Science at New York, "have got such a grip on the .Government that the publicly-owned industries are not allowed to compete with them." .New Zealand, lie points out, does not have to fight a railroad trust or a telephone trust, or an insurance monopoly, and yet these good effects are overbalanced in other directions, so that the working man is no better off in the long run. "Mr. Russell is particularly severe on the New Zealand Government for giving in on the question of the ownership cf° working men's ' houses. "The people who got the houses began to complain that the scheme embraced retention of the title by the Government. \ They wanted to gamble oh the unearned increment. Tin Government shilly-shallied, and, finally, weaklv gave in that the renters of the houses' could buy them. . . . Thus the people are brought right back to landlordism again." And, in any case, Mr. Russell points out, the number of Governmen houses in a city like Wellington, where all the other houses are rented at twice as much, is insignificant. "Now," he asks, Why is there not enough coal produced from the Government 0 coalfields to make it cheap all over the. land, and; relieve the people of a great burden? New Zealand is cursed with a coal trust. It is- because- the Government does not dare offend the tremendous power the coal trust has made itself. There is a .steamship trust so powerful that a New Zealander once told me that if bis life were at stake he would much prefer to take his chances with our own Standard Oil Trust. These aggregations are so powerful that nothing is done against them. They are the biggest contributors to the campaign fund. Ihe Government operates a fire insurance company—a little. >t But not enough to offend the capitalists." , - n The total result, according to Mr. Russell, is that wages are going up regularly, but the cost of living much faster, and poverty is increasing rapidly.