INTEREST SHOWN IN ELECTION

Southland Times, Issue 23634, 8 October 1938, Page 6

INTEREST SHOWN IN ELECTION

Australian Eyes On New Zealand FLIGHT OF CAPITAL REPORTED MR A. S. RUSSELL RETURNS FROM COMMONWEALTH In Australia keen interest is being shown in New Zealand politics and in the General Election, according to Mr A. S. Russell, who returned to Invercargill this week from a holiday of several months in Australia. During his tour, he said, he had learned in many quarters of the flight of capital from New Zealand and had been told that big numbers of people had already left the Dominion with their capital to settle in Australia. “People in New South Wales are not altogether sympathetic with us about our political situation and appear to think that we will deserve anything that happens to us,” he said. “They have had experience of Labour Governments and are not anxious to repeat the experiment. At the moment they are taking more interest in our politics than in their own.” During his visit to Sydney, Mr Russell said, he had met several financiers who had assured him that there had been a definite flight of capital from New Zealand since the Labour (Government had been in power. One man on whom a great deal of reliance could be placed estimated that £6,000,000 of New Zealand capital had left the Dominion in the last two years and he had given good reasons for fixing his estimate at that figure. ■ A number of cases of companies and private individuals sending big sums of money from New Zealand to Australia or Great Britain had been quoted to him, continued Mr Russell, and he had met several New Zealand business men and farmers on the journey to Sydney who stated quite openly that they had left New Zealand for good and were taking with them all their capital. The number of New Zealanders who were leaving the Dominion . provided an even more serious question, said Mr Russell. There were said I to bei 35,000 New Zealanders living in Australia and most of them had left the Dominion in recent years. Unfortunately for this country, they were generally a desirable type of settler and their loss would be felt in New Zealand. . •