ART UNION EVIL.

Taranaki Daily News, 12 June 1926, Page 2

ART UNION EVIL.

STATE LOTTERY SUGGESTED SYSTEM OF PREMIUM BONDS, Wholesale condemnation of the “orgy of so-called art unions,” conducted in New Zealand recently, was uttered by the president of the Taranaki Chamber of Commerce (Mr. Gordon Fraser) at the annual meeting of the chamber on Thursday, and Mr. Fraser suggested that the gambling spirit of the people, which could not be entirely suppressed, might be harnessed for the good of the State. “A question that is exercising thei minds of the commercial community is the orgy of so-called art unions,” said Mr. Fraser. “The Prime Minister haa rightly condemned them in no uncertain terms. His colleague, the Minister in Charge, insists that they must not be cash gambles, that each holder of a permit must wait hie turn of the gold nuggets. What an empty farce. No one but the Minister pretends that the gold nuggets are anything but a mockery, and 99 per cent, of the participants do not know or care what is the object to be; benefited. The schoolboys club their sixpences, the workers their half-crowns, others their pounds, and pitch them into the poo] indifferent as to whether half goes in advertising and other expenses and nearly the other half in some more or less sporting object. Their eyes are; all glued on the little fraction left for prizes, and they take odds that al confirmed welsher would blush to lay.” “Wiping out the art unions is not the remedy,” he said, This is only the symptom showing on the surface. The) instinct to gamble is in the human race. In a new country like New Zealand it is to be expected as an inheritance from our ancestors who risked their all on the chance of big rewards on the other side of the world. It is but enterprise in a diseased form. Keeping back the wave by talk is as useless today as Canute found it. We must employ the methods of the hydro electrio engineer, and turn this stream to economic uses. “To my mind a great part of this floating capital can be trapped by premium bonds on the Continental system, sold on easy instalments, half of the interest being raffled for in big prizes at fairly frequent intervals. We would not only make this idle money an active' producing agent, but would encourage thrift in those who to-day consider thd best provision for a rainy day is to bet as to whether it will come.”