SOCIALISATION OBJECTIVE

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23154, 28 September 1938, Page 14

SOCIALISATION OBJECTIVE

To reconcile the party's official objective, socialisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange, with any toleration of the freehold tenure of land is a problem for Labour candidates. The Minister of Agriculture, Mr. Lee Martin, has had to face a number of questions on the point. He told a gathering at Tuakau that wholesale socialisation was not in the platform, but was merely something to work toward, and he did not think he would live to see it. Everyone will be ready to wish Mr. Lee Martin long life for . personal reasons, but here is an added motive for it. So far as socialisation would affect the land—which is first among the means of production—farmers generally would wish that the Minister could live forever if his survival were really to mark the span of the freehold tenure. Actually, Mr. Lee Martin has unconsciously revealed a situation of which the primary producer should take careful note. Implicit in it is this possibility, that socialisation of the land never will be in the platform of lhe Labour Party, but a campaign of attrition will be carried on with that the ultimate objective. Of course, all members of the Government are not so discreet, as when the Minister of Lands said the farmer wanted the freehold of the land in order to gamble in it. The plain fact is the Labour Party is afraid to face the logical conclusion of its socialisation objective when applied to the land question. It went to the electorate boldly once" advocating the usehold tenure, a term never very clearly defined. Once was enough. After the voter, especially the farmer, had Bhown what he thought of usehold, it disappeared. Nothing definite has been put in its place, but the farmer would do well to remember that socialisation of the land remains an objective, to bo worked toward, and, by inference, to be .attained gradually