THE MEAT POOL

Otago Daily Times, Issue 18625, 5 August 1922, Page 4

THE MEAT POOL

MR MASSEY’S SPEECH. (Fhom Ouh Own Coeeespondent.) LONDON, June 20. Empire Production and Export, the journal of the British Empire Producers’ organisation, reprints practically in full Mr Massey’s speech on the ocasion of the second reading of the Now Zealand Meat Export Control Bill. “Mr Massey’s speech has the two British qualities of four-square strength and fair play,” is the editorial comment. “He takes an uncompromising stand upon the facts of the case, and overcomes prejudice not by the tricks of persuasion, but by sheer conviction : and he circumscribes the activities of the body he proposes to set up by very definite limits, in order to ensure that no legitimate existing rights shall be infringed. He succeeds in shelving that even the middleman, against whom this legislation may appear to be directed, will certainly be better, and probably more profitably, employed in increasing the volume of Empire trade, than in devoting his braing and his energy to a system of artificial and uneconomic control. Mr Massey takes exception to the word “Pool,” though he accepts it for lack of a better name; and the ver” title of the Bill in which his proposals are embodied needs clear understanding. It is called th e Meat Export Control Bill. Control, in the sense of an official freezing-up of all free-running private enterprise, which the war taught us in this country to associate with the word, there is certainly none in Mr Massey’s plans, and such control as is exercised is by the trade upon itself. This organisation .consisting entirely of producers, nothing "could be more abhorrent to its principles than the paralysing of enterprise by State control; but in the case of Mr Massey’s scheme the Government is fulfilling its proper functions, and never in any part of the Premier’s speech is there any evidence of an intention to exceed them. The scheme proposes, in short, to provide the machinery and the financial assistance _ whereby the industry can control the, direction of the sale of its own products,”