THE MORTGAGE ADJUSTMENT ACT

Southland Times, Issue 23649, 26 October 1938, Page 9

THE MORTGAGE ADJUSTMENT ACT

To the Editor Sir,—ln a lettei you recently published for Leslie D. Mackay, he stated that I appeared to wish, to make one party a scapegoat for another. In this Mr Mackay is quite wrong. I would, have every party or individual answer for his own sins. As for the benefits the fanners have received from the 25 per cent, exchange, one must remember that a great number of persons and companies who are not farmers shared in these benefits. Also one must re-member-that there is between the American factory and the New Zealand farm an item of “added costs” (of which freight charges are one of the least) of just about 180 per cent. If Mr Mackay can stop a gap of 180 per cent with an exchange of 25 per cent, he is a financier of considerable ability. However, I do not know much about these things, and it does not help a great deal to reflect that Mt Mackay knows less. I wrote you in the first place, sir, hoping to draw public attention to a shocking!" unjust Act of Parliament that bears cruelly on some of our finest citizens. We have heard the present called a humanitarian Government as if that were the greatest virtue a Government could have, but it appears to me that a good Government’s first duty should be to hand out justice to the people—not largess or charity. If a Government frames unjust laws it is a bad Government, and nothing that can be said about it, and no other thing that it can do will ever make it anything other than a bad Government. Mr Savage’s Government framed and enforced the Mortgagors Rehabilitation Act. In this measure there may be expediency but there is not one grain of justice. That the people of this country have returned Mr Savage’s party to office only goes to prove that they are willing to accept the soft and pleasant things of this life for today, regardless of the fact that no nation or civilization can endure that is founded on unjust laws. Probably we will never attain to perfect justice in this world, but that is no reason why we should not continually strive towards it. Nothing can excuse the retrograde step away from even the barest elements of justice that was taken when the Act referred to was placed on the Statute Book.—Yours, etc., _ D.C. October 24,1938.