IMPERIAL PREFERENCE

Waipa Post, Volume XXIV, Issue 1418, 20 October 1923, Page 4

IMPERIAL PREFERENCE

"UP to a point at least," says the Otago Daily Times, "the Home Government is manifesting in a practical way its desire to fall in with the wishes of the representatives of other parts of the Empire in respect of an extended application of the principle of Imperial preference. Mr Bruce's speech at the Economic Conference, in which he dealt with the whole question from the point of view of the Dominions or, to be strictly correct, from an Australian point of view, seems to have embodied proposals of a comprehensive nature in consonance with his argument that the keynote of every question to be considered by ;the Conference is the establishment of markets for the Dominions.

. . . In the meantime, however, the Dominions will not go empty-handed away. Their dried fruits, if they export any, will be accorded the preference which some of them would like to see extended to their meat and dairy produce. . . There is a further proposal, of no doubt quite a favourable kind, by the British Government in respect to Empire-grown tobacco. The representatives of the Dominions seem to have expressed a good deal of appreciation of the Home Government's proposals and Mr Massey is credited with having predicted that considerable benefit would accrue to the fruit-growing industry in New Zealand. Taken in their full range, from New Zealand to Australia, from the West Indies to South Africa, possibly these preferential proposals will be of some value to the trade of the Empire at large, but they are to be regarded at most as merely touching the fringe of the whole question at issue, and they represent a measure of preference that is in no way comparable with that which has been advocated. In the •words of the W)estminstejr Gazette "the Government's proposals are a very pale ghost of the scheme which Mr Bruce outlined." While these proposals are evidently designed to afford concessions which shall operate as innocuously as possible, the acceptance by the Government of the principle involved in them is clearly regarded as of first-class significance. The real question of preference will come to the forefront when the Home Government proposes, if it has any intention of so doing, to impose duties on food products—meat, dairy produce, wheat and other necessaries of life—coming from foreign countries, in order that the Dominions may reap a preferential benefit."