MORTGAGE FINANCE.

Thames Star, Volume LXV, Issue 19363, 21 March 1935, Page 4

MORTGAGE FINANCE.

ADJUSTMENT BILL The Equity Question. PLEA FOR FARMERS. MR. SAMUEL’S REMARKS. The announcement by the Minister for Finance, Mr. Coates, that the section of the Rural Mortgagors Final Adjustment Bill, providing for the allocation of up to 20 per cent, equity to the farmer at the end of five years, was to be redrafted, was referred to with regret in the House of Representatives on Tuesday night by Mr. A. M. Samuel (Independent, Thames), who said that the provision was the only helpful one in the Bill and it was the only one he himself would have supported. “If a farmer is to be subjected to five years of budgetary control, he is surely entitled to some reward at the end of that period,” said Mr. Samuel. “Once you knock out the 20 per cent, equity provision the main column of the Bill’s structuro is broken away, and the whole thing falls to the ground.” It was amazing, said Mr. Samuel, that members of a Government should allow all these indignities of budgetary control to be placed on a farmer’s shoulders and yet, when it came to the vital principle of assisting him they should baulk. Whichever way it goes the Government was going to be in trouble. The promise of reward held out by members of the Government was to disappear and there was nothing left. Had he been with the Minister this would have been the one fence ho should have felt it his duty to jump with him.

Mr. Samuel said there was only one way to help the farmer to-day, and that was to guarantee his prices. The farmer was the only man in the community who did not have a fixed price for his produce. Ho thought the Government could have achieved all it was going to with the present legislation by widening the scope of the Mortgagors Adjustment Act.