MONETARY INQUIRY

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21717, 5 February 1934, Page 8

MONETARY INQUIRY

The personnel of the select committee which will inquire into the monetary system, and presumably weigh, suggestions made for reform of it, has been announced. It is expected to begin its labours almost immediately. In making these facts 'public the Prime Minister recalled that a sessional select committer had recommended the Government to take such action, and added that the decision so to do had been consequent on this advice. Whatever doubts there may be about the practical value of the forthcoming proceedings, the motives of the Government in setting it up are easy to discover.- A refusal to act would have been the signal for renewed and intensified clamour of a kind with which the public is already sufficiently familiar. As to the probable outcome of the inquiry, a unanimous finding is impossible from the very outset. The committee is so constituted, that while various views will be amply ventilated before it and by it, nothing on which its members could all agree could imaginably be produced, with or without the expert assistance the Government proposes to obtain. What report on financial questions, for instance, could be signed W. Downie Stewart and H. M. Rushworth? Yet, so long as there is to be a select committee of the Houso to deal with monetary policy, how could either be left off it? In fact, unanimity on such a subject is almost impossible of attainment in any circumstances. The Macmillan Committee, whose report is so often quoted—or certain passages are—was a much more nearly judicial body, consisting of 14 members. Yet to that report were added four addenda—one with a reservation four reservations and one memorandum of dissent. This last was by Lord Bradbury, who did not sign the report. In the light of such an example, how can there be any clear cut finding from a body on which widely diverging views are necessarily represented, because it is a Parliamentary Committee ? "Whether the Government hopes for anything from the inquiry only the Government can say; but if the country expects any true light or guidance it is extremely likely to be disappointed.