The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET, AUCKLAND MONDAY, MARCH 18, 1929 THE HARDEST TASK

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 615, 18 March 1929, Page 8

The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET, AUCKLAND MONDAY, MARCH 18, 1929 THE HARDEST TASK

CLOSE on a thousand unemployed men still beg for work in Auckland and the best that a department of State can do for them is to “place” about seventy-five in temporary occupation each week. This has been the prevailing condition for a long time now, and what is true of Auckland is more or less applicable to the other industrial centres, the only difference being the extent of unemployment in proportion to population. Even Dunedin, for example, with all its financial solidity and characteristic wisdom in the practice of long-sighted thrift, has been clamouring to politicians for some kind of unemployemnt relief for about four hundred idle men. It so happens, however, that Auckland suffers most because it has the greatest number oi inhabitants and is, moreover, the most comfortable and probably the most attractive place in which to be idle. The Minister of Public Works merely looked in at Auckland during the week-end, but he was here long enough to learn that unemployment demanded practical attention. Indeed, Mi. Ransom frankly confessed that the unemployment problem was his hardest task. It is to be hoped that the harassed administrator may also realise that among the several thousands of unemployed throughout the Dominion the hardest task hundreds of them have had for months past has been that of hopelessly looking for work. And the Government ought to reflect on the fact that the provision of charitable aid for the unemployed has become to hospital boards “a nightmare.” There may he some consolation to political administrators in the fact that the problem of unemployment is baffling greater men of their kind in other lands. The subject has become the question of first importance in British polities. Ministers and members of the House of Commons devoted the whole of the first week of their current session to a debate on unemployment. Like the New Zealand Parliament last year the British legislators did nothing more than talk about the problem. The Government made it clear that it had no special remedy in sight other than the present system of industrial transfers from district to district and the policy of safeguarding such industries as are depressed by severe foreigu competition. Unfortunately the transference of unemployed industrialists from one locality to another has yielded very disappointing results, while the promise of Tariff Protection for industries is dependent upon the Government securing the favour of the national electorate at the forthcoming general election. It should be noted with interest in this country, where the same argument often has been employed by bewildered administrators, that the British Government’s plea that it was the duty of critics and everybody else concerned to devise a constructive programme of unemployment relief instead of assailing the Administration for failure to solve the problem, received very little sympathy outside Conservative circles. A great multitude of people in Great Britain still believe that it is the duty of a government to govern its country and to devise means of solving its problems, whether its opponents help it to do so or not, or make way for another government with more initiative. This belief should not be ignored by the United Government in New Zealand for the simple reason that if it fails to perform the hardest task before it the country will soon lose faith in the new Administration. 4 Another argument in Great Britain that might well he applied to the politics of this country is the contention that the excessive charge of maintaining the unemployed in relief works or by charitable aid on an abnormal scale should be taken off the shoulders of local bodies and transferred to the national exchequer. Two remedies are required urgently in New Zealand. One is to place men on essential public works and on the clear understanding that any man who does not earn his pay will receive no pampering or extravagant sympathy, and the 'other should be the devising of legislative measures for increasingindustrial production and for the promotion of manufacturingindustries as the best means of quickly absorbing the unemployed on skilled labour. There soon will be no political excuse for unemployment in this country. Indeed, the Government talks loudest about the substance of prosperity and the brightness of the economic outlook. It should stop talking and silently get to work on its hardest task.