CONDITIONS IN 1932

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LIX, Issue 17918, 24 October 1932, Page 10

CONDITIONS IN 1932

; COMMERCIAL SURVEY EFFECTS ON GOVERNMENT AND i BUSINESS j ' Economic conditions during the past year and the differing viewpoints of the Government and business people on certain topics are discussed briefly in ■the report of the executive to be presented at the annual conference of the Associated Chambers of Commerce in Dunedin next week. The exchange pool regulations issued 10 months ago by o)der-in J Couueil are the subject of special comment. “The last year,” the report states, “has revealed beyond any doubt the necessity for the work of this association. The burden and restrictions upon business—irksome as they were in previous years—have become intolerable in the third year of tlf.o depression, and the work of resisting further encroachment on the liberty to trade and additional ‘burdens on trading in the interests, not alone of business people, (but of our Dominion and people as a whole, has become one requiring never-ceasing vigilance and public enlightenment for the 'preservation of freedom to do the business by I -which we all live. II STRAIN ON GOVERNMENT “The strain of the economic situation has been felt by government, both national and local, which have tried to protect their decreasing revenues, and antecedent and current obligations, at the expense of private enterprise in trade, industry, and commerce and the professions, without apparent regard for the fact that it is only by the results of encouragement to prosperous trading that any governments can continue to live. “The two reports of the National Expenditure Commission have now confirmed t'hc attitude which this association lias for several years taken up on the quetsion of the burden of public expenditure, and the efforts it has made to resist and reduce this imposition on the business of the Dominion. These reports justify and necessitate our continuance to urge these reforms. DIVERGING VIEWS “The apparently cynical indifference on the part of the Government to the effects on individual commercial business of the exchange pool regulations issued by Ordor-in-’Couneil last Christmas Eve, for the purpose of providing i the Treasury and local bodies with a short way out of their own overseas monetary dittieulblcs, indicate what would happen had the commercial 'community no organisation for its protection. Therefore, it seems that there is a real danger in this Dominion (which has accumulated the highest debt per capita of its population in the world) of a divergence, ■which might became an antagonism, between the view of those responsible for government, that their method in the short | view of upholding the credit and prestige of the State must be carried out at all costs, and the view ot' those responsible for the business of the community that the cost and burden of government must be strictly proportionate to what the resources of the Dominion can afford, and business can bear.

“It might well become the high 'function of this association,” the report states, “to prevent,.the incipient antagonism from growing, and to discover a via media along which both can travel in future toward the common end of the general good.”