TOWARDS SOCIALISATION?

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23931, 5 October 1939, Page 8

TOWARDS SOCIALISATION?

The question likely to be provoked in most minds by the discussion on the Marketing Bill, introduced in the House of Representatives on Tuesday evening, will not relate so much to the Government's proposals for the immediate acquisition of all the products of New Zealand primary industry as to that part of its intention which has remained

concealed. The Minister of Marketing, in explaining the purposes of the Bill, used candour only to the degree that suited his and the Government's case. He indicated that the Government had contracted to purchase in the Dominion, for resale to the British Government, all products, of whatever variety, required in the United Kingdom for the maintenance of war supplies. To that extent the changes in name of the Primary Products Marketing Department and the Dairy Produce Export Division to the Marketing Department and the Export Division respectively are at once intelligible. But what are the implications of these far-reaching extensions of the powers taken under the original legislation? To what extent is the Government using an opportunity created by an emergency situation to further a policy carefully nurtured and developed by it over a period of years? These are questions that demand elucidation. Yet it can be said without hesitation that no satisfactory answer was given by any member of the Government when they were put by members of the Opposition on Tuesday evening. There was a time when the Minister of Marketing went out of his way to satisfy the reasonable requirements of questioners in debate. But since his recent return from Great Britain a noticeable change has come over his debating method —a change that may or may not be due to the atmosphere of uncertainty in which he now moves as Minister directing the important related departments of Finance and Marketing. The suspicion excited by discussion of the Bill is that, under the guise of a war measure intended to secure that the Government shall be in a position to sell direct •to the Imperial, authorities all the butter, cheese, meat and wool—and possibly pelts—normally exported from this country, the Labour Party is in effect giving permanent form to its policy of socialisation. So much is implied, not only by the contents of the Bill itself, but even more strongly by the evasive attitude of the Minister to the searching questions asked from the Opposition benches. When Mr Nash was defining the powers of the Marketing Department in respect of certain purchases Mr Kyle inquired whether such powers were to be taken for the duration of the war. The Minister's retort was that they would be effective for all time. Later in the debate he was asked if he were serious in suggesting that the arrangement mentioned would be permanent, to which he gave the astonishing reply that he had not said so! Mr Nash was again invited to give a straight answer 1 to the question, and again evasion was employed as a means of escape from temporary embarrassment. " Neither the hopes nor desires of the Minister will determine what will be done," he said. "The decision is entirely with the House." Mr Fraser sought to cover a difficult situation by appealing for "co-operation," and by expressing the hope that, "important as details were, they would not be allowed to obscure the main issue." Is not the obscuring of the main issue precisely the aim of the Government? The Acting Prime Minister suggests that the whole position will have to be reviewed as soon as possible after the end of the war. But that is still less than satisfactory. When the long view is taken, it must appear that a protracted war will mean an extension of the life of Parliament, necessarily for the avoidance of a general election during the war period, and that therefore the present party will be in power when the question of review is again raised. Any expectation that, in such circumstances, the State will willingly relax the control which is now being taken as an essential war measure, must rest on optimism rather than on the logic of experience. It is within the power of the Minister to allay the suspicions inevitably aroused by the tenor of the discussion of the Bill at its earliest stage. Failing that, it is,a not unreasonable assumption that the Government is without scruple in using the war emergency as a pretext for giving permanence to what should be no more than a temporary enlargement of its control of industry.