THE SPUR OF COMPULSION

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23669, 29 November 1938, Page 8

THE SPUR OF COMPULSION

A correspondent whose letter appears in this issue takes the strongest exception to the decision of the Government, announced by the Minister of Public Works and amplified by the Minister of Labour, to deny employment on public works to men whose training fits them for employment on farms or in freezing works during the press of seasonal activities. Our correspondent, it is to be assumed, is something of a doctrinaire, for he sees in the pronouncements of Messrs Semple and Armstrong evidence of a movement away from true Socialism in the direction of industrial conscription. Why, he asks, should a worker be threatened with penalities if he refuses to forsake one calling for another to which ,he is not attracted? The worker, he argues, should have an absolutely free choice in the matter of how he shall be occupied. But when he submits that the course which he opposes, and which he describes as an attempt to conscript labour, might be justifiable "in wartime or under conditions of extreme urgency," he comes very near —albeit unwittingly—to the heart of the matter. None knows better than the present Government that the maintenance of the farming industry and those industries which are dependent on farm production is a matter of extreme urgency. It was never more urgent than at the moment, when the Government, having committed itself to the colossal task of financing social security, is relying on increased production to provide the means which alone can bring universal pensions and free health services into the realm of practical politics. The Government realises that to maintain production at existing levels is not sufficient, since the basis of social security finance—so far as it is publicly understood at all—is that production should continue to expand, for many years to come, at the rate which has characterised past development. That that premise may, itself prove a costly inaccuracy is scarcely germane to the question at issue. The point is that production is how tending to decline rather than to expand, and it must be the Government's first duty, in the national interest, not only to check that tendency so far as it can do so but also to use every means in its power to aid the country's producers in the all-important task of creating wealth against the heavy needs of the immediate future. A falling production threatens to impair the basis of social security from the very beginning of the scheme, and it should not be difficult to relate that fact to the steps it is proposed to take to release seasonal workers from State employment at times when their services must be of greater value elsewhere.