ON THE ROCKS.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXIV, Issue 809, 8 July 1933, Page 29 (Supplement)

ON THE ROCKS.

Wrong Course Deliberately Taken. PROVIDING FOR OURSELVES.

(Written for the "Star” by

E. J. HOWARD, M.P.

The fact is that the well placed people in this Dominion will not face up to realities. They will pay their relief tax. give to collections and pray that the Lord will provide, but when you tell them that New Zealand could provide the needs of the New Zealand people they simply reply that I want to be a Robinson Crusoe. But I don’t. I want to follow the idea of the Swiss family Robinson, if you like, that is. the New Zealand family to provide their own needs and an exportable surplus to pay our debts But the people on fixed incomes want to make foreigners pay the highest price for our goods and then they want to buy imports from Japanese and coolie countries. That means that the rank and file of New Zealand people must come down to the coolie standard if they accept that philosophy. We are sailing a charted sea. Every rock is known. We have deliberately sailed right on to the rocks. From the Napoleonic wars until about 1900 prices dropped and dropped just as they are doing now. The same causes, the same effects. Books and books and more books; articles and newspaper correspondence galore poured out a few years back to prove the immorality of a suggested go-slow policy on the part of the workers of the world. Now we find an international conference actually discussing it as an international policy. What's wrong with the world? Can a Christian pray for a bounti-, ful harvest if he knows that seed planting has been deliberately restricted? It seems like poking fun at Providence. We are driving farmers off 100-acre farms and putting amateur farmers on ten-acre farms. In Japan 75 per cent of the farmers farm less than two acres; 35 per cent farm less than one acre. And we expect a ten-acre section to keep a family where a hundred acres bankrupt them. Then we are going back to our gloomy old friend of a hundred years ago, Malthus. Restrict the birth-rate, say some very decent but wrong minded people. The love of race is departing from us. India is adding 2,500,000 every vear to her population. She has 340.000,000 to start with. China, with her 465,000,000 is adding 3,000,000 annually. Japan, with her 63,000,000, is adding 900,000 annually. These three countries are adding 7,000.000 .people to the population of the world every year, or 350,000,000 every 50 years. Japan’s birth-rate has increased from 25 to 34 per thousand in 40 years. New Zealand’s birth-rate has fallen from 44 per thousand to 18.42 during the same 40 years. That ought to give thinking people in New Zealand an uneasy feeling. Malthus said, in effect, that population would outrun the food supply. But since that reverend gentleman died we have made wonderful progress, because to-day the world is destroying good foodstuff because it cannot be sold. When Malthus was writing his famous article the work of the world was being done by man power. One man working one day of eight hours can produce one-tenth of one horsepower. We have turbines being driven by water producing 300,000 horsepower for electricity supply. That is in eight hours those turbines produce 3,000.000 times as much as one man working eight hours. But as the turbines will work twenty-four hours per day they generate 9,000,0000 times as much as the human working eight hours. When* Waitaki is finished we shall add considerably to that output. Then trains, trams, motor-cars, flying ships and a million other things have been invented and operated since Malthus died. All sorts of articles are being written to prove that Russia is doing things wrongly, because she has gone off the beaten track; because she is developing her great national resources. Take that part with the peculiar name of Dnieprostroi. The work she has done there is said to have cost £82,000,000. A staggering job when compared with, say, Arapuni. They created an inland sea almost, of fresh water, harnessed for electricity and irrigation and traffic. Why, the Port Christchurch scheme is like the bite of a mosquito compared with that scheme. We cannot visualise the job. There is nothing here to compare with it. Pictures fail us. And yet w r e dare to question the big things being done in that vast country. Dr Koo said that one-acre farms were the rule in China. With machinery, he said, one man could work 100 acres, but the other 99 would be unemployed. Are we coming to that? Is the machine going to do the job and one individual scoop the pool? Up at Lake Coleridge, one watch engineer, with a couple of oilers, switches on or off power for trains, trams, cookers and lights, machinery in the dairy, factory, or the sewing machine in the home. A matter of touching the button and there we are. In 1901 our dairy herd gave an average return of 1271 b of butterfat per cow. In 1930 that had risen to 2201 b per cow. Every 101 b rise, even at sixpence per lb, meant £360,000 more income from the same work. The average for America is 1801 b per cow. So that 25 cows brought up to a 3021 b average would be as profitable as 875 cows on a 164 average, says an American professor in a dairyman’s paper. It doesn’t look as if any big changes are coming as a result of the Economic Conference. Perhaps we could legrope our big chiefs for a few years and induce them to glance over New Zealand and to realise the possibilities of this country. In a past article I advocated the damming of ITawea and Wanaka. I pointed out that the water could be used under control to irrigate thousands of acres of land. It would also unwater the greatest tail-race in the world. The article was headed “ Gold in Plenty.” Letters followed that article saying that I was dreaming; that there was no gold in Central Otago; that it was part of Vogel’s dream, and so on. Now we read of men getting gold out by the spoonful in parts that “ experts ” had said were barren of gold. And still the big river goes laughing and gurgling to the coast, covering the precious metal. And still the land wants irrigating. The world is moving along lines that will eventually work towards a Viet ter understanding in the long run Like a sailing ship going around the Cape to get to England: She points her head south although she wants to go north, to clear an obstacle and to get into the set of the sea. What an old sailor would term circular sailing. So we

have to have a large dash of nationalism before we can have internationalism. No one likes their poor relations to visit them, but we paper the best bedroom and cover the furniture with, new chintz for our relations who are doing well for themselves. There will be a large welcome on every mat of every country in the world when New Zealand can say, “ Look, we are not dependent on any of you, but we are willing to swap anything we have over for things we want from you. Come, neighbour, you cannot starve us, so trade if you want to, and if you don't want to, well come and see our wonders and welcome.” Speed the day.