PRICE OF FERTILISERS

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 60, Issue 4235, 24 January 1940, Page 11

PRICE OF FERTILISERS

SOME INTERESTING INFORMATION. CAUSE OF THE RISE IN PRICES. Mr C. E. Macmillan, a former Minister of the Crown, writing to the Bay of Plenty Times, enters into a controversy regarding the price of fertilisers, and some of the statements will be of considerable interest to farmers in this part of the province. Apparently Mr A. E. Robinson, well known in Farmers’ Union affairs, had referred to the subject in an earlier issue, and Mr Macmillan writes to the Editor as follows: Sir, —Mr Robinson now shifts his general ground, and instead of calling the fertiliser agreement “purely nonsensical” turns round and says it has a familiar ring. I don’t doubt it has to him; he probably assisted in the drafting of it, the whole object of which was to recompense those who kept the price of super to the farmer at £5 15s per ton. When the dairy farmers of the Waikato secured a controlling interest in the Challenge works, and reduced the price to £4 12s 6d, the whole weight of the officials of the Auckland Farmers’ Union was behind their president in joining in with his president to force the Challenge Company into liquidation by selling at £4 2s 6d per ton, a ruinous price then. This must be so because they all subsequently supported the same gentleman in his endeavour to secure the Hauraki by-election when Mr Hall, 0., died. They said, in effect: “We, your admirers, in consideration for forcing the farmers to pay the highest price in the world for superphosphate, will reward you with a seat in Parliament, where you will be in a position to perhaps restore the price to £5 155.”

The reduction of superphosphate from £4 12s 6d —the price it went to after the price war—to the present price of £3 16s net, is entirely the work of myself and colleagues. Mr Robinson, being angry, snaps at me in several directions, and in every instance his false teeth are easily evaded. He talks of my influencing two dairy companies from giving an adverse vote to granting an English firm a butter and cheese grading store license. He knows that the granting of these licenses is the sole prerogative of the Minister of Agriculture. I had only to sign the license and it was granted. My attitude was that it was a matter that affected dairy suppliers in the Auckland Province, and they should judge its merits, and that as the annual meetings of suppliers would be held in the then near future I would abide by their decisions, and so stated in a circular to every interested dairy company asking them to take a vote. I gave a resume of the application, and the claim of the applicants that this license, if granted, would reduce freezing charges on dairy produce by £26,000 per annum. This was indisputable.

Mr Robinson is stupid in trying to make a snap at me when he says I influenced dairy companies to vote in favour of granting an additional license.

The vote was adverse, the license was not granted, but the suppliers were able to secure a concession in charges equal to £6OOO on the weight of produce that year and following years.

As Mr Robinson is trying to show that my policy was to support the meat trust’s works in New Zealand against the interests of New Zealandowned works, why does he not tell your readers what happened when I forced Swifts to part with the controlling interests they held in a large South Island freezing works? How their attorney appealed to the U.S.A. Government, and Uncle Sam asked me to grant an interview to his Con-sul-General. This I did and he asked to be allowed to study our legislation before making his report. I made the services of the Director General of Agriculture and the Solicitor General available to him.

After studying the Consul-General’s report Uncle Sam paid me the compliment of saying that I,had succeeded in drafting legislation that could and did control the meat trusts where he had failed.

Mr Robinson says that I gave protection worth £1,000,000 a year to wheat growers in order to receive a protection worth £lOOO a year to lemon growers. He knows this is untrue, as the wheat duties were already in being and the lemon grower was meeting with unrestricted competition from Italy, Australia and California.

The first protection given the lemon grower was worth considerably more than £l,OOO per year, and when I was able later on to secure the entry of New Zealand apples into the U.S.A., a condition was that New Zealand would not import fruit from any country with the Mediterranean fruit fly. This shut out Italy and Australia, and Californian lemons are only allowed in in restricted quantities during the New Zealand off season for lemons. Mr Robinson has a further snap at me in the Agricultural Emergency Powers Act. Why does he not tell your readers that this is the most democratic act in the statutes of this or any other country, in that a clause in it provides that anything done under regulations made under this Act has to be submitted to Parliament for approval or otherwise at the next session.

All the ridiculous statements made by Mr Robinson and his friends about the loading the sliding scale of wheat duties has put upon the price of bread, have been disproved time and time again by a comparison of the price in Australian centres with New Zealand centres. The Auckland Farmers’ Union has never succeeded in obtaining the support of a single consumers’ organisation in its attempt to bankrupt all the wheat growers in New Zealand. On the contrary, the supporters of the Labour Government, representing as they do the huge majority of consumers, consider it very low down for one section of farmers to try to ruin another section, and hold such a section in disgust and beneath contempt.