A WIDE NET

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22070, 28 September 1933, Page 8

A WIDE NET

The Leader of the Opposition has spread an unusually wide net on this occasion in the terms of the vote of want of confidence witli which he marks the beginning of every session of Parliament. He would seem to have taken the headings of the notes which he prepared for his speeches during the recess and strung them rather incoherently together to form the counts in his indictment of the Government in his amendment to the Addrcss-in-Reply. Some of these counts have done duty for Mr Holland in the past, and it may be conjectured that they will reappear in want of confidence motions which, in accordance with his practice, will yet be proposed by him. Those upon which he himself chiefly relied in his speech yesterday were the paradox, an admitted paradox, of the prevalence of distress in a land which produces goods in abundance and the policy of exchange inflation. Mr Holland claimed that people who wanted work should be able tp secure it at a fair remuneration, and alleged that it was owing to a bankruptcy of statesmanship and to a lack of capacity for organisation that they were unable to secure employment on these terms. If we were to accept his argument as sound, we should have to conclude that there

was a serious dearth of real statesmanship throughout the world, for the paradox that is observed in New Zealand has presented itself in many countries and has in none of them, as was reasonably said by the Minister of Health, who replied to Mr Holland, been more satisfactorily treated than it has been in this Dominion. Labour Governments in other dominions have certainly been less successful than the Coalition Government has been in New Zealand in grappling with a situation that has been entirely unprecedented. Mr Holland was considerate enough to confide his own specific to the House. It is to print double the number of bank notes that is at present in circulation. How long this inflated issue would remain in circulation is a question which Mr Holland is not concerned to answer. Nor, perhaps, does he reflect that in the long run the cure prescribed by him might have effects that would be more serious than the disease for which he offers a remedy. We have ourselves not supported the artificial depreciation of the country’s currency, but the alternative, which Mr Holland advocated, of the payment of a guaranteed price to farmers—and not to farmers only,, because his party’s programme goes far beyond that—is attended with the danger that the country would be saddled with financial commitments that would at least strain its capacity to the utmost limits. Fortunately there is substantial reason to believe that the Dominion is beginning to shake herself free from the coils of the depression, and a factor of considerable moment in the restoration of her prosperity will be the national policy which Mr Holland bo vigorously attacks.