DOUGLAS SYSTEM

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LX, Issue 18257, 28 November 1933, Page 9

DOUGLAS SYSTEM

A SYDNEY ATTACK “AS VERSATILE AS LANG PLAN” SYDNEY, Nov. 17. “The Douglas credit system is a hoax that has been exploded for years in countries where it was first introduced, ’ said the Minister for Local Government, Air. Spooner, in a speech at Hyde State Electoral Conference of the U.A.P. “It was introduced to Australia just after tlie war, and revived two years ago. The reason for its continued existence is that few people have thought of it with sufficient seriousness to explode the most palpable inaccuracies imaginable.” Mr. Spooner said the policy of the movement was to obscure the minds of the people who would be interested. Any subject, any doctrine, was brought within range of' its teachings. It had become as versatile as the Lang plan. The main object of its leaders, he said, appeared to be an attempt to inflame the, minds of the people against the present financial system. None of the recognised leaders of finance, commerce, or economic thought had approved the system, which was so full of obvious pot-holes that the leaders of the movement were obliged to preserve public interest by all manner of dissertations, discarding from time to lime those that did not attract attention. They went to great lengths to prove that no inflationary step was intended, hut Major Douglas himself had asserted that the credits issued would he convertible into notes upon demand. “The Douglas system.” added tiic Minister, “is a highly complicated, quaintly-camouflaged paradox, originating from a mechanical brain and calculated to produce chaos. It consists of strange contradictions, opposed to all experience, and all sense of practicability, hopeless jumbles of meaningless phrases, unintelligible to the average man in the street, and ridiculous to those who can sense imperfectly the intention that lies behind them.”