SHIPPING CRISIS.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 76, Issue 174, 26 July 1933, Page 10

SHIPPING CRISIS.

Speaking at the annual meeting of tho Nitrate Producers’ Steamship Company, Limited, Sir John Latta said: “We cannot possibly blink the fact that an eminently dangerous situation has overtaken British shipping supremacy, both from within and without, and demands the most scrupulous analysis in tho national interest; first from within, against the adoption of too pr< cipitate protective measures; secondly, to guard against sacrificing that incalculably great hsset which has never failed us in the past —our heritage a> an island people, gifted with the sea sense, and possessing traditions and experience in ship management unsurpassed by any other country. It has hitherto withstood every form of attack. The present paralysis is due in a measure to improvidence and to misjudgment of the trend of affairs, and those most guilty arc crying loudest. The over-building of tonnage, chiefly on tho part of inexperienced foreigners, has created such an overwhelming supply of vessels, in excess of any reasonable demand for them, as has meantime lifted the issue outside the sphere of economic competition. Therefore, until the complex commercial potentialities at stake can be more accurately gauged, I think wo should stand to our guns a little longer. Foreign subsidypayers are becoming alive to the fact that their shipowners are making as heavy, if not heavier, losses than we without a scintilla of evidence that their lavish uneconomic expenditure is advancing their cause in the slightest. I feel they will soon appreciate that they are unwittingly ruining themselves in exhausting the life of vessels for which a sufficiency of permanent, trade is never likely to develop. It would be unwise to counter foreign subsidies, tho risk being too great of simply developing a political fight between Governments, on the basis of tho survival of tho fittest', the commercial factor, which is our nest egg, disappearing altogether.”