THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES TUESDAY, AUGUST 30, 1927. ELECTION PROMISES.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20190, 30 August 1927, Page 8

THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES TUESDAY, AUGUST 30, 1927. ELECTION PROMISES.

The appeal which the Premier of New South Wales is making to the electors in the campaign which is now in progress suggests that he is prepared to put all his Labour predecessors in the shade in his offers of inducements that may bring him support. If he can win a majority of the seats in the new Parliament something like the Millennium is to descend upon the workers of New South Wales. In his tour of the electorates Mr Lang is spreading a broad trail of alluring promises in the hope that, despite the split within the Labour Party, he may secure the bulk of the industrial vote. Ho announces schemes for increased benefits on a

munificent scale. He does not pause to suggest the source from which the funds necessary to provide them may be derived. The benefits he promises are generally of, a kind of which the cost must be borne by industry. But industry in New South Wales is no horn of plenty capable of meeting any demands that may be made upon it. It is already carrying a burden the magnitude of which is represented on its behalf as distinctly oppressive. An example in point is furnished in the Broken Hill Proprietary, which is confronted with the prospect of having to close down, this being due, the chairman of directors explained at the annual meeting, to the effects of State legislation such as that governing workers’ compensation, child endowment, and the 44 hour week, in conjunction with overseas competition. The president of the New South Wales Chamber of Manufacturers, referring at the annual meeting last week to the burden imposed on industry by recent legislation, said that Mr Lang’s promise to extend the child endowment scheme was fraught with the likelihood of increasing by £20,000,000 the cost that has to be met by the people of the State. Such a demand, he declared, must result in the closing of factories or their removal to other places where saner views prevailed. If the Lang Government should be retained in office and should set about the fulfilment of its promises of increased benefits to those for whose votes it is now so assiduously angling, there can hardly be any doubt what- the result will be. Industry must be handicapped and hampered to such an extent that industrial progress will be seriously checked. It will be a very doubtful advantage that the workers of New South Wales will gain if an outcome of Mr Lang’s reckless election pledges will be a grave restriction of their opportunities of employment. By promising too much the Lang Government is in danger of cutting the ground from under its own feet in the matter of obtaining the funds whereby its grandiose schemes may be financed. Unfortunately, those to whom it is particularly addressing itself have been brought up largely in the belief that industry, upon which they are dependent for their livelihood, can survive almost any pressure.