The Daily News MONDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 1935. BASIC NEEDS.

Taranaki Daily News, 25 November 1935, Page 4

The Daily News

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 1935. BASIC NEEDS.

OFFICES: NEW PLYMOUTH. Currie Street. STRATFORD, Broadway. HAWERA. High Street.

Producers, wage-earners, traders —in short, the great majority of the electors — are likely to agree that stability is the Dominion’s chief basic need. In two days’ time they will be called upon to choose the class of representative to whom they will entrust the duty of complying with that need. If the choice is ill-consid-ered or influenced unduly by local or personal influences rather than by a consideration of the national good, it is the electors themselves who will have to pay the price of their misjudgment or folly. They are asked to support a Government pledged to do its best to ensure stability, which claims that its efforts 'during the past four years have had but that end in view and that the ideal is within reasonable distance of attainment. When the National Government was formed it had first to improvise some means of providing the bare necessities of life to a large number of those who were idle involuntarily, and to save the primary industries from collapse. That stage passed, it was necessary to erect on the foundations left possible by the changed economic position throughout the world the means whereby the Dominion’s productive and industrial mechanism might function successfully under the new conditions. The' direction of the efforts made for that purpose may not please some electors, others consider the pace adopted has been too slow—or too fast—but the Government claims that the efforts have resulted in much progress towards recovery and that the third stage in that progress has now been reached. It is that the application of the means provided is now a more important factor than more legislative effort, except to overcome weaknesses and anomalies discovered as expei'ience develops. Ministers claim that if the Government is enabled to continue in the course it has chosen after much consideration, tempered by the responsibility of having to

reduce promises to actual performance, all sections of the community will be assured that their endeavours to accommodate progress to new conditions will not be suddenly overturned through a change in Government policy brought about by credulous hopes that rash and disastrous theories are really proven means whereby recovery can be reached. The Ministry appeals, therefore, to the stable elements in the electorates for their full support at the polls. It points to the systematic efforts now being made to develop the natural resources of the Dominion and instances the efforts made to improve the quality of and preserve the oversea markets for the primary products of New Zealand. The search for oil, and gold, the development of the iron and steel industry and the resuscitation of the flax industry are all matters in which the Government is assisting private enterprise with the resources of the State, but it is doing so without any “monetary reform” or any other ill-defined political programme. The progress made towards recovery has been the result chiefly of a general revival of confidence in all sections of the community, and enterprise is once more raising its head. If that confidence is to be disturbed by a new and untried policy enforced by a party that—if one of the exponents of its policy is to be believed—will not hesitate to use the bludgeon as well as persuasion, then that confidence and enterprise is almost certain to be halted and the Dominion slip back into depression that is more dispiriting than ever. It is for the stable elements in the community to prevent that catastrophe by supporting with alb their strength the National Government pledged to a policy not for the benefit of sectional interests or to the 'overturn of the existing economic order, but one that will ensure stability, a truce from experimental legislation and aid in the general progress of recovery. If that support is not forthcoming the effect of instability will have to be shared by those who have been lethargic in the performance of their duties as citizens.