UNEMPLOYMENT

Southland Times, Issue 21848, 27 October 1932, Page 6

UNEMPLOYMENT

BOARD CONDEMNED mr McDougall’s comments USELESS WORK (From Our Parliamentary Reporter). Wellington, October 26. Dealing with unemployment in the course of his financial debate speech in the House of Representatives this evening, Mr D. McDougall suggested that the Government should subsidize men in the work they were accustomed to rather than send them out to useless work in the country. He blamed the Unemployment Board for advancing the shillings of charwomen to wealthy companies under scheme 10. The House had been told by' the Member for Invercargill that men in the south were doing useful work. Mr McDougall said he agreed that some of the work was useful, but a great deal of it was useless and nothing would break a man’s spirit more quickly than to ask him to do something that was useless. “I don’t blame these men if they put their coats on and place their feet on banjos and look around,” he said. Was it fair to ask a boy who had always worked in a shop to go out in the dead of winter and clean out flooded drains. Would it not be better to subsidize the boy behind the counter and let him stay where he would be of some use. The Member for Invercargill was on the committee that sent these boys out to clean out ditches for farmers who very often were too lazy to clean them out for themselves. Continuing, Mr McDougall said that the Unemployment Board had lent £BOOO to help build a hotel in Napier. They had taken the shillings of the working man and charwoman to build a hotel that no working man would dare put his nose in. “Will this hotel lift up the working man?” he asked. “If I know anything about hotels, they degrade the working man and if the workers would realize that, many of them would be better off. The Acting-Minister of Employment has lent this money and I’ve no doubt that when we take a vote on the liquor question he will be on the water wagon with the Member for Lyttelton, shouting: ‘Strike out the top line.’ ” Scheme No. 10 was the worst that the country had had, Mr McDougall said, and if the Government continued in the way they had taken they were riding for a fall. “They will go right over the tail as sure as they are alive,” he said. “I came in here to support the Government but they do wrong and I’ll expose them.” When Mr McDougall had resumed his seat, Mr Hargest rose to a point of order and said that he was not a member of the Invercargill Unemployment Committee and had not been one for over 18 months.