FINANCIAL DIFFICULTIES

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23401, 18 July 1939, Page 8

FINANCIAL DIFFICULTIES

Mbmbers of the Government have attained a high degree of proficiency in the practice crisply described by the Americans as "passing the buck." When things go wrong they cannot move quickly enough to fasten the blame on to somebody else. At the moment, the Prime Minister and Mr. J. A. Lee have so far forgotten their reputed differences as to raise a strident duct in this key. Mr. Savage says the Dominion's present difficulties are due to the activities of those "unpatriotic persons" who transferred their money from the country immediately before the last election ; Mr. Lee blames everything on to the machinations of "financial gangsters." Partisan supporters of the Government may regard all this as a delightfully simple argument that solves everything and supports the legend of infallibility built up by their political idols. Perhaps it is timely to recall that during the discussions in Parliament on the present Government's first major legislative proposal, the Reserve Bank Amendment Bill, the Prime Minister, Mr. Nash and others claimed that powers were being taken to give the State absolute control over finance and to put a stop for all time to the activities of moneyed interests that "played pitch-and toss with the welfare of society." Now there is an attempt to blame those same anonymous financiers whose wings were to have been permanently clipped. Were the powers taken by the Government in 1936 insufficient or were they inexpertly applied? The true position, of course, was placed on record by Mr. Nash when he said the main cause of present difficulties was overimportation. For that reason, talk of "New Zealand's fight against a dictatorship of finance" can serve no useful- purpose, whether it is issued by party propagandists in the Dominion or by misinformed newspapers in England. Mr. Nash has enough troubles without having to answer charges of his inability to control the sinister activities of , apocryphal financial groupa..