TO IMPROVE CONDITIONS

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXII, Issue 18661, 22 March 1935, Page 2

TO IMPROVE CONDITIONS

(To the Editor of the. Herald.) Sir, —May I, through your courtesy, supply the only reasonable answer to Mr. Tilleard Natusch's letter in your issue of March 16 last, asking an opinion from any reader as to how the increasing malnutrition of children in New Zealand can be stopped? The answer is simple and definite. Reduce the cost of living and increase production of staple foods. To achieve, this end it would be necessary to abolish the exchange and sales tax, reduce overhead costs for both farmer and businessman, by reducing the rates and taxes on land and commercial undertakings. The businessman would be. largely helped by the abolishing ot exchange and sales tax, the farmer by low rates, low prices for fertilisers which are too high, also by the considerable lowering of his own living expenses, kept up again by the exchange rate. Wire, staples, machinery, etc., are too high. New Zealand can supply almost unlimited quantities of the chief foods. The farmer of the average holding could almost double his production, helped if possible by unemployed labor now working on the roads, this labor, or rather the wives and children, to he paid first by an abundance of meat, butter, milk, and bread, the latter as low in cost, at any.rate, as the retail price in England, No increasing of the currency will help us at all; rather, it will finally raise the cost of living again. It is not purchasing power we want. If you issue two pounds for one, you still have only one pound left of true buying value. What wo want is organised production and distribution at a low rate. The: exchange is of little benefit to the farmer, and has definitely and rigidly put up the backs of the farmers' lenders in the Old Country—hence the levy, etc. Our leaders do not know how to turn iu fare of England's threatened levy. Now, sir, if we went to the Home leaders, not with our caps in hand but as the sous and daughters of Britain, ready to do away with all barriers against the Motherland at one sweep, a gesture broad and strong and highly practical, it would be possible to raise a tide of feeling in England, to give us preference over all or before all Dominions. The time is overripe for such a move. Reverse much of the hasty legislation of recent years, anil start organising the. country from the top to the bottom on the above lines, and you will have a nation without equal in the Pacific before much time has passed.

The answer to .Mr. Xatuseh. sir. is: Cheap production, cheap distributionhence good living for all iu town and tountrv. Thanking you for your space, etc., * IT. F. HURFORD. Matawai,