Starting New Industries

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 608, 9 March 1929, Page 8

Starting New Industries

Import Factories Instead of Goods

A SCIENTIFIC safeguarding tariff serves the purpose of not only affording proper shelter for established industries, increasing their output and.reducing the cost of production, but also of bringing new industries into the country and opening up new avenues for the employment of local labour and consumption of local materials. But new industries, like new infants, need nurture and shelter if they are to grow up strong and productive. Every new industry started means another wealtli producer for New Zealand.

QUR Plunket system for raising better and bonnier babies is an ideal one, which is now receiving worldwide admiration and acceptance, for it not only means reducing the infantile death-rate to a minimum, but it builds up better future citizens, mentally and physically, who will make better producers in years to come. To provide useful employment for our future citizens, and permanent work for our many skilled workers now out of employment, it is essential that we must cease import-

ing goods which we can make ourselves, and by this means increase year by year the production of new wealth without which New Zealand cannot go ahead. Not only is it necessary that our existing industries should be expanded to their utmost capacity and efficiency, but the need for establishing new industries becomes more apparent with the appearance of each official return of vital statistics and trade figures. A STATIONARY POPULATION

It must have come as a shock to thinking citizens to learn that our population last year Increased by only 16,000. That means that the country Is practically at a standstill, and stagnation means that New Zealand is dropping back if other coun-

In other countries where the tariff has been sufficiently high to foster local manufactures and shut out imports, the problem of unemployment ceases to be acute, and there is an inrush of capital for industrial purposes. Capital is cosmopolitan and international, ever seeking new fields for safe and profitable investment. Australia is beginning now to benefit by the steady raising of its tariff walls, and many prominent firms from Britain, America, and the Continent have opened branch factories there, employing Australian workers and fabricating local raw materials. Canada has been even more thorough in her protective policy, with the result that the United States now has over £1,000,000,000 invested there —not in national, State, or local loans, nor very largely in mortgages or bonds. The bulk of that huge sum is invested in industrial plants and developments employing Canadians and using Canadian materials. From an insignificant manufacturing country, our sister Dominion is now producing for herself, and where her exports of manufactured goods were negligible a few years before the war, last year they amounted to £73,300,000. Canada is not only settling her lands with a steady flow of migrants, but with these she is absorbing an almost equal number of skilled workers for her industrial development. She has learned the wisdom of importing industries instead of industrial products. SECURITY FIRST We have already a handful of overseas firms with industrial branches here, producing soap, candles, cigarettes, and building up motor-cars. We can do with as many more as can be induced to migrate; but while a merely revenue tariff enables them to dump their goods here from a distance, they are quite: content to ship us the goods and let us pay the duty. The one infallible way of persuading them to start here is to offer the shelter of an effective tariff, which will secure the safeguarding of their capital when it is invested here for founding the new industries the country needs. P.A.

tries are forging ahead. Our already heavy burden of national debt is steadily increasing, and although we [ are able to renew loans falling due at | flattering rates of conversion, the in- j cubus is still there, and the exhaust- j ing drain on industry of excessive j taxation cannot be relieved without increasing the number of taxpayers to share tUe bill. With double the j population, the indebtedness per head I would be halved, and the load of j taxation reduced correspondingly. HOW SAFEGUARDING HELPS