RURAL CREDITS

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 19845, 20 May 1927, Page 9

RURAL CREDITS

FARMERS’ FINANCE MR POLSON REPLIES TO MINISTER Mr W. J. Polson has made the following statement in reply to the remarks of the Minister of Finance on the matter of Rural Credits. “While anxious to give the Govern- ’ ment all the credit it deserves in providing such farmers’ finance as it has provided I cannot pass over Mr Downie Stewart’s reply to my remarks re Rural Credits in silence. “I am conscious that many members of the Government and party are most anxious to help primary producers to face the existing crisis but speaking soberly I do not think Mr Downie Stewart has been one of these. He as Minister in charge must bear the responsibility for the outrageous emasculation of the Rural Credits Commission’s report last year. He suggests in his reply to me that I am beginning to have doubts of the scheme which I myself recommended. The Minister’s Attitude “My doubts are not of the scheme but of the Minister’s own attitude. I almost wonder he did not take the responsibility of keeping it off the Statute Book altogether instead of creating a pale ghost to give the illur sion of Government sympathy and support. If it is true, as it is asserted by many representative farmers, and as I believe it is, that 50 per cent, of the small producers of this country intend to vote Labour at the next election, Mr Downie Stewart will have a heavy share of tho responsibility. His reply to myself, who am purely disinterested in an attempt to help the Government do the right thing, is an illustration of his tactics and is nl-in-formed and misleading.

“ ‘lt would be a new development in high finance if the Department was to borrow £500,000,’ says Mr Stewart, ‘and then borrow on the borrowed money,’ and he proceeds to sneer at myself. But boiled down that is in effect the object for which the £500,000 was lent, and for which the Commission recommended it, interest free for ten years. It is the means to further borrowings through bonds issues. “A Tight Rope” “When Mr Seddon established the Advances to Settlers Department he advertised the fact. Other countries do the same. But Mr Stewart did not even inform the farmers’ unions, as he declares he did, and what in any case would be the use of informing the farmers’ unions if no money is to be available except £500,000 until months have elapsed, in such circumstances as now oppress the farming community Mr Stewart knows that even under the meagre Act passed by the Government last year it is still doubtful whether what I suggest cannot be done. In any case the purpose of the loan is to provide tho bridge between the borrower and the bondholder in order to overcome tho very delay under discussion, and the Government’s legislation has turned it into a tight rope along which only the healthiest can proceed, one at a time.

“It is true that a few applications have been transferred from the Advances branch to Rural Credits. But this will have to stop at once because the Government’s £500,000 will be all absorbed, and there will be nothing to go on with.

“There is nothing to prevent bonds being sold against mortgages which are not yet lodged in the safe, with the usual safeguards. It is done abroad. But the Department cannot push the scheme because it has not got the money; it cannot get the money until it sells the bonds; and it eannot sell th a bonds until it pushes the scheme. ‘/‘That is not a deadlock, says Mr that is merely an illustration of intelligent legislation in propitiation of the farmer, Truly—Quern Deus vult perdere demmentat priu,® ”