The Stratford Evening Post WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 1922. THE LABOR PARTY.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXVII, Issue 77, 25 November 1922, Page 4

The Stratford Evening Post WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 1922. THE LABOR PARTY.

In the recently-issued manifesto of the Labor Party there was a paragraph proposing an Unemployed Workers’ Bill, which guarantees to all those willing to w r ork the right to work at standard rates of wages, or failing the provision of work, adequate maintenance. This proposal will, no doubt, ho made the fullest use of hy the Labor Party to convince the workers of New Zealand that if the Labor Party is put into power the country will at once become a workers’ Paradise. The fact will he ignored that every Government naturally seeks to reduce unemployment to the lowest possible percentage of the country’s population, mainly on humanitarian grounds, but also because the aim of every Government is to see the country prospering, its industries in full swing, and the taxable revenue of the country thereby made buoyant. In New' Zealand the unemployment situation during the past winter was met by a very large expenditure on public works, and much more satisfactorily than w r ould have been the case under the Labor Party's propostion of enforced employment such as prevails in Queensland, or “adequate maintenance,” which moans a system of doles. In England the doles system has been exploited with very grave and deleterious effects. It has cost the taxpayers millions of pounds, added to the cost of commodities, and lias been abused in numerous instances hy men and women who have deliberately loafed on the generosity of fife State. The British Trades Union Congress took up the question of uueraploymont at its meeting in September, and in spite of much rhetorical condemnation of the Government, it endorsed in the main the lines of the late Government’s own unemployed policy; which was to nurse oack foreign markets by a programme of peace, reconciliation, and revision in Europe: to lessen the stream of unemployment hy "timing ’ public works to absorb some portion of it, t and to provide an effec'ivc, fum ;h not a pauperism system of maintenance for those still left workless, chiefly at the cost of the’national scheme of unemployment insurance. Upon that policy, taken over from the Government, only two important modifications arc grafted, and one of these bears similarity to Mr Holland's proposal for New Zealand. ‘Tt is,” says a London paper* “the idea of the. old Right of Work Bill—that the. State should launch out into manufacturing business, and, with the unemployed to man its factories, should set about making necessary commodities at lower prices* as one of the chief speakers put it. than those which rule in the market. The ispeeches delivered showed that this idea still captures the imagination of organised Labor to a far greater degree than might have he‘en Inferred from the resolution. Yet what a will-o’-the-wisp? Wlip ever knew a State factory which, whatever its other virtues, excelled. in cheapness? And what chance can it have of doing so, if its primary obligation is to absorb unemployed—that is, the workers from whom, other things being equal, efficient industry derives least help? But if it produces its goods at higher prices than other concerns, who will buy them? Evidently no one; unless they are cheapened artificially at some third party's expense. And who is that third party to be? Evidently the taxpayer. And wlro is the taxpayer? 'Why, the other industries, which are just keeping their heads above water, and in proportion as they are more heavily burdened will come to have more unemployed! ’ The whole plan is a vicious circle; so Incapable of rational defence, that it is really pathetic to see it thus blindly clung to.”