THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS SATURDAY, MAY 30, 1931. FARMERS AND RELIEF WORK.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20886, 30 May 1931, Page 10

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS SATURDAY, MAY 30, 1931. FARMERS AND RELIEF WORK.

The position of the farmer in relation to unemployment relief work has been under discussion for some time. At the outset there was complaint that substantial farmers, who had no moral claim to share in what was primarily work provided for men without any other resource, were being employed on country relief work. The result was an official ruling to cover No. 5 unemployment scheme was given. It was to the effect that men occupying more than 25 acres or milking more than six cows should not be employed under the scheme. That given effect, immediately stopped the original complaint, but it has aroused continuous sustained protests against this virtual slamming of the relief door in the face of necessitous farmers, and, on what is said to be the common interpretation of the ruling, of farmers' sons who have commonly been employed at home without the official status of wage-labourers. The position has been made quite clear by at least two statements of policy. Speaking on behalf of the Unemployment Board, Mr. G. Finn said some time ago that it had not been set up to deal with farmers. "These people," he proceeded, "have some means of livelihood. The No. 5 scheme is for placing unemployed workers with local bodies, and- these men have nothing but their labour to sell. . . . The way in which we

are helping the farmers is through the No. 4 scheme, which offers cheap labour for the improvement of their holdings." That is a clear statement, leaving it quite definite that the board has nothing to offer the farmer whose need is not cheap labour, nor any labour, but ready cash for pressing necessities. The Minister clinched the matter a day or two later when he said the primary function of the board, according to the Act, was "to endeavour to provide employment for the unemployed wage-earner. . . . A man

who lives and works on his farm cannot be regarded as unemployed, however serious his financial position may be. He has a home, and the farm will surely provide a certain amount of food. Such farmers are outside the scope of the Unemployment Act." The position has thus been defined beyond misunderstanding. The farmer's activities are supposed to be circumscribed by the boundaries of his farm, and unless he can take advantage of No. 4 scheme—in which case he is not necessitous in the common understanding of the term—the Unemployment Act has nothing for him. It does not seem to have occurred to the authorities administering the Act that the farmer is not only being denied relief, he is actually being deprived of supplementary resources of which he has availed himself freely in the past. What has been the practice of hundreds, indeed thousands, of farmers in days gone by when they needed money which their farms did not yield? They have taken small road contracts. Since road work is the chief if not the only fprm of unemployment relief in the counties —they have few recreation reserves to develop—the farmer's old resort has been taken away from him. In addition, he is denied any chance of working on wages. That is not the whole story. The work a man could once do in the intervals of pioneering a holding seems to be disappearing entirely. Once he could do bush felling, take fencing contracts, work in timber camps, in the North try his hand at gumdigging, and last, but not least, work on the roads. This is no fanciful story. Many a successful farmer, who established himself firmly on the land, turned to some, or all, of those occupations to help him in the early stages. The course of development has made them disappear one by one. The bush has been cut and burned, the timber camps have shifted beyond the reach of the farmer, fencing contracts are few and far between, gumdigging is no longer the casual occupation it used to be. Road work remained until the unemployment schemes came to change its nature, and now the farmer has been shut out of it by official ruling. The enterprise and resource once counted as a leadins virtue aro no longer wanted

apparently. A very serious possibility arises when the official rulings arc examined. It is obvious that there is no practical relief for the fanner so long as he remains on his property. If he abandons it, seeks a centre of population and registers as unemployed, then he becomes the equal of "the unemployed wageearner." Fortunately, in spite of all that has been said loosely about farmers walking off the land, there are thousands ready if necessary to endure real and prolonged hardship while they cling to the holdings that have become part of their life. If it were not so, a period of special emergency like the present might indeed witness an exodus from the farm such as has been described in the past out of the fertile imaginations of people with a case to make. The tenacity of the farming population is greater than would permit that to happen. Yet, if anything were calculated to break that spirit it is the existing conditions under which the farmer is liable to pay a levy for the relief of those whose means of livelihood have gone, yet may not obtain any benefit no matter how completely his means of livelihood may have failed him temporarily. The Minister says "ho

has a home, and the farm will surely provide a certain amount of food." True, bub he has nob organised charity just round the corner to fall back upon if his needs become desperate. The position arises, of course, because the Unemployment Act is so crude in conception and construction. It has operated up to the present only for the relief of unemployment, using both terms in the narrowest possible sense of the words. All it has done to attack the causes of the problem is negligible, and as officially interpreted, it recognises the wageworker as the only man who faces domestic and financial problems hecause of economic depression. He has to be considered, and, so far as possible, provided for, certainly; but the concentration on him and on his needs explains, and to a great extent justifies, the continued complaints from the rural worker about the unequal distribution of relief.