DOMINION FUNDS OVERSEAS

Southland Times, Issue 23548, 30 June 1938, Page 6

DOMINION FUNDS OVERSEAS

“PEOPLE CONSUMING STERLING VALUE”

MR LEE ADMITS LACK OF CONTROL OVER PRICES

(From Our Parliamentary Reporter)

WELLINGTON, June 29. “The theory of the Opposition is that if prices fall then the people of New Zealand must be sacrificed on the altar of orthodox finance,” said the Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Housing (Mr J. A. Lee) during the debate on the Imprest Supply Bill in the House of Representatives today. “The Opposition has no policy except that negative threat to the people’s welfare,’’ Mr Lee added, “and I know what the answer of the people of New Zealand will be.” Discussing the references of the Leader of the Opposition (the Hon. Adam Hamilton) to the decline in New Zealand’s funds overseas, Mr Lee said the Leader of the Opposition was concerned because the people of New Zealand were consuming the sterling value of some of the assets that had accumulated overseas in the years when New Zealand had starved while those assets had remained idle. “We were up to our necks in butter,” Mr Lee continued, “but we could not afford to put butter on our bread. It was the same with wool. The crime of this Government is that it is enabling goods to the value of those sterling assets to be consumed in New Zealand. The Leader of the Opposition lives in a mental fog of a kind that I thought no longer existed here. He believes that every nation is to get wealthy by exporting more than it imports and that it does not matter if the people of every nation rot so long as the orthodox financiers achieve a cash balance abroad.”

Mr Hamilton had spent £420,000 in constructing a golf course in Auckland, Mr Lee went on, yet he complained when the Government appropriated money for improving the hydro-electric system, for irrigating land and increasing its productivity and for reading and housing. The Opposition did not want the country well developed. It wanted a profit system that would all the time benefit a minority and was moved by a desire for revenge on the people of New Zealand for turning it out of office at the last election. “We hear a lot about inflation,” Mr Lee said, “but this Government is one of the first in the world that has adopted a constructive policy to prevent inflation. We say that the important thing about our unit of currency is that it should always measure the same quantity of goods in New Zealand. We have no control over world or London prices." Mr Hamilton: Hear! Hear! “We have nevertheless, by intelligent marketing curbed the capacity of speculators,” added Mr Lee, “and have been able to obtain a better price for our produce than would have been possible under the old system.”