The Sun 42 Wyndham Street, Auckland, N.Z. TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 1927. THE BLIGHT OF UNEMPLOYMENT

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 202, 15 November 1927, Page 8

The Sun 42 Wyndham Street, Auckland, N.Z. TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 1927. THE BLIGHT OF UNEMPLOYMENT

UNEMPLOYMENT is more rife in British countries to-day than in any other country. With the exception of Canada, where a great wheat harvest worth more in value than the world aggregate of gold production has provided a busy year with pleasant prospects for a virile nation, the blight of unemployment lies heavily on industry and enterprise throughout the British Empire. Whether the cause of the evil must be attributable to the aftermath of ruinous war or partly to bad politics and the traditional British policy of muddling through in distress, the result is plain enough and is a fact to be deplored. In view of Great Britain’s exceptional difficulties, including her colossal war debt, depreciated industries and the chronic trouble of surplus population, the number of British unemployed—over a million able-bodied persons —is really not as serious a proportion as the numbers of unemployed in Australia and New Zealand', where the economic reasons for unemployment are much less formidable. Though the position is disgracefully had in this country, conditions are much worse in Australia. Every State in the Commonwealth suffers from this summer blight of unemployment. Even at the height of emergency relief measures in Victoria the registrations of unemployment numbered five thousand. The total of unemployed in New South Wales, which virtually means Sydney, the attractive State rendezvous of easy billet hunters and recipients of Government assistance, is more than twice as great, involving a daily exercise of bad temper and ugly demonstration. South Australia is in the throes of railway service retrenchment, while all the other States also have their quotas' of unemployed, though in each of them the blight of idleness is much less severe. So far, throughout Australia, as in New Zealand, the political remedy for unemployment has been State grants and municipal “drives” for emergency relief funds. Though the intention has been good, the expenditure of the money has proved again that such measures of unemployment relief are merely superficial palliatives and not remedies. Since most of the public money is spent on'relief works in and about the largest centres of population, hundreds of discontented workers in the country places flock to town and join the thousands of unemployed in a clamour for relief. And politicians continue to draw salaries up to £>l,ooo a year, blissfully confident that they have solved an embarrassing problem, more blissfully ignorant, apparently, that they have done nothing at all toward effecting a permanent cure for a menacing industrial disease. . • Then, on the top of the miserable folly, a statesman from England, known as “the Empire’s managing director,” attends a State banquet at Brisbane and, in the purring eloquence of political ambassadors, urges Australia to secure a larger population and thus make a good home market. Meanwhile, while great, talkers are at their best over walnuts and wine, thousands of unemployed men and women, in undeveloped Dominions, have to besiege the doorsteps of statesmen’s residences begging for an opportunity to earn their living. It is a sorry spectacle of political ineptitude.