PRIMARY AND SECONDARY INDUSTRIES.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21920, 4 April 1933, Page 8

PRIMARY AND SECONDARY INDUSTRIES.

TO THE EDITOR. x Sib,—lf your correspondent, R. Walker, imagines that the average citizen and the primary producer in particular will be misled by figures bordering on twenty years old he will be sadly mistaken, it the primary producer reads his newspaper regularly he is generally pretty well abreast of the times. R. Walker twits your correspondent Advocate 33 with not knowing ’ what he writes about, but that failing can be more aptly applied to himself. He says that the secondary industries in New Zealand turn out goods equal in quality to the imported article, but omits to say at double the price. He also says these industries have been established many years and again omits to mention that after all these years there is still no secondary industry capable of standing on its own feet, not even the woollen manufacturers, who have the raw material right at their doors. New Zealand is a country which lives on its exports, and the writer has yet to learn ot any of our secondary industries competing successfully outside their own highly-pro-tected market. They bring no fresh capital into the country, which is all-import-ant under existing conditions, while the primary producer, through stress of circumstances, has had to appeal for assistance to save himself, and through him the country, from bankruptcy. Let the times be ever so good the consuming public has to pay the cost of keeping our uneconomic secondary industries afloat. I fail to> see where our primary producer and the New Zealand manufacturer have very much m common. I am only expressing my own opinion when I suggest that the primary producer is standing in his own lignt when he buys New Zealand-made goods in preference to goods made in good old Britain, the country that put us on the map and keeps us there. I now ask you as a favour to publish statistics, not twenty years old, but the latest figures tabled by the Minister of Lands in the House of Representatives last October, and published in the columns of your paper on the 24th of that month, 1J32.

Consumed locally. Exported. Wool .. .. 3 per cent. 97 per cent. Butter .... 23 per cent. 77 percent. Cheese .. .. 6 percent. 94 per cent. Mutton 49 percent. 51 percent. Lamb .. .. 7 per cent. 93 per cent. Other meats 77 per cent. 23 percent. —I am, etc., Interested.