PARLIAMENT

Waikato Independent, Volume XXIII, Issue 3075, 26 June 1923, Page 5

PARLIAMENT

ADDRESS-IN-REPLY DEBATE FINANCIAL STATEMENT NEXT WEEK. The Addrcss-in-Peply debate will probably occupy all the week. The large number of amendments moved is a complication that will probably tend to extend the time occupied by debate. So far the debate has been rather uninteresting, and it is quite probable that it. may fizzle out in a, few days, when the real work of the session will be put in hand. It is hoped that the Financial Statement will be presented at the beginning of next week. Mr Massey states that the readjustment of ministerial portfolios has been completed, and he will probably make a statement as to the arrangement today.

NEGLECT OP THE COUNTRY

MR- EYE’S CRITICISM

In the House of Representatives on Friday night, speaking on the Address-in-Reply debate, Air F. Lye (Waikato) said we should go in for a satisfactory system of immigration. Dealing with soldier settlement he said that in many cases the soldiers had been put on the hill tops and barren places, 'That was so at the Te Miro settlement, near Cambridge. The vendors of that block at £IO,OOO had come down on to the flat, and had bought first-class dairying land. It was the Reform Government that had driven the people to the towns. People in the baekblocks were penalised, and had little chance of social enjoyment. In towns schools had been built at considerable expense, while the country schools were neglect; - ed. He had seen a country school of packing cases and. jam boxes, with a coating of rubberoid hanging in strips, and sacks nailed behind the children to keep tin 1 weather off. In regard to the moratorium, the Government had not said what it, was going to do. It was all very well for the Government to say, “Produce more,” but why was not production put into the hands of the people? What the mortgagee needed was a long term of credit to replace the short term of credit. He saw no reasonable argument against an Agricultural Bank. He complained of the conditions in the second-class in the railways and he urged a reduction in railway freights. Speaking of the skim milk factory, he said the Cambridge farmers had built a factory at a cost of £.128,000, and. last month he had paid £(IS away for a “dyad horse.” If a reasonable reduction were made in the railway freights the industry might be made to pay.