GOVERNMENT DEFENDED

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LX, Issue 18252, 22 November 1933, Page 11

GOVERNMENT DEFENDED

TJHEMPLOYffIteiIT feELIEF \ v r _, FAR-REACHING SCHEME CLERGYMAN’S COMMENT * (Per Press Association.) AUCKLAND, this day. “The influence of Christian people should be strongly against the spirit of intolerance, bitterness, and censoriousness,” said the Rev. E. S. Patchett, in his address at the opening of the Auckland Methodist Synod. “No one in close touch with the undercurrents of public life to-day can fail to note the extravagant and bitter criticism that everywhere ns being 'bandied from lip to lip. In many instances the motives of men are impugned without any justification. These are ways in which good citizens are unintentionally lending themselves to the forces undermining the social structure.” Much had been made of the failure of. the Government adequately to provide for the unemployed, yet in this period of emergency the Government had carried through a most farreaching and beneficial scheme of relief work. The method of carrying it out might be open to criticism, but Sly the motive was beyond quesThe Government did not take easy way of inflation and borrowing, but the difficult and unpopular wav of special taxation. It was easy to declaim against the inadequacy ot relief pay, and the churches themselves had used their influence to have it increased, but there was another side to the question. The people who suffered in silence must far outnumber those suffering from unemployment, and need of relief from taxation was, in many cases, as, urgent as the need for higher relief pay.