UNEMPLOYMENT

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23517, 4 June 1938, Page 16

UNEMPLOYMENT

COMPILATION OF RETURNS PRESENT METHOD DEFENDED POSITION ALMOST NORMAL (Ter United Press Association) AUCKLAND, June 3. The Government’s unemployment policy and the present method of compiling the unemployment statistics were defended in detail by the Minister of Labour (Mr H. T. Armstrong) in a pre-sessional address at Otahuhu to-night. The Minister was enthusiastically received by an audience which filled the hall. He had been accused ,by the Leader of the Opposition and by certain newspapers of “ rigging ” the unemployment figures, Mr Armstrong said. He took the expression to mean that he was trying to make out that unemployment was less serious than it really was. When he had finished he would leave it to the audience to decide who had been the real “ riggers.” Mr Hamilton had said, the Minister continued that everybody who was paid wholly or partly out of the Unemployment Fund should be shown as “ unemployed.” If an industry was subsidised out of the fund or if moneys were used to pay half the wages of local body employees so that the local body could pay the other half all the workers concerned were to be “ unemployed.” If Mr Hamilton wanted the figures compiled in that way why had his party not made them so in the months immediately before Labour was returned to power? “We say that we show as unemployed everyone who is registered and who is not receiving full-time employment at award rates of wages,” Mr Armstrong said. “If we are not to do this, why should not “ unemployed ” include all public works employees, railway servants, civil servants and all who are paid out of the public funds? Our opponents want to know exactly what work the men are doing. We have given all that information, including a published statement which was made available to the newspapers but which they did not see fit to publish.” The works carried on _ with the aid of the fund, the Minister said, included roads, railway deviations, land development, forestry, repairing flood damage and river erosion, ’improving recreation grounds and school grounds, and putting towns in order where the local authorities needed help to do so. New Zealand to-day was about back to normal so far as unemployment was concerned. According to the census figures the average number of unemployed over a long period had been about 10,000. The present number of physically fit unemployed was now not so large as that. Last September they amounted to about 1 per cent, of the total population, or 3.6 per cent, of the adult population, excluding boys and youths. This was one of the lowest figures in the world. Comparing conditions in New Zealand with those in Australia, Mr Armstrong said that when he visited Sydney there were 100,000 unemployed men there. He had also seen in Adelaide men waiting in queues with sugar bags to collect rations valued at 5s 8d a week. Figures lately supplied to Mr W. E. Parry by the New South Wales Minister of Labour showed that a single unemployed man there got only rations valued at 15s a fortnight, whereas in New Zealand he got 40s in money, a married man with one child got 38s, compared with 78s m New Zealand, and other rates corresponded. ■