IMPORT RESTRICTIONS

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 84, Issue 85, 12 April 1940, Page 4

IMPORT RESTRICTIONS

licences to be issued for the fourth half-year are more restrictive of imports. In short, the position is becoming definitely worse, not better. When it is remembered that New Zealand has only recently passed through several most favourable export seasons, it must be borne in upon every open mind that the regime of Mt. Nash as Minister of Finance has been a complete and absolute failure. On his own admission to the Easter Conference of the Labour Party, the people of the Dominion have overspent tc. Ihe extent of £28,000,000 in four years. This, however, is an admixture of truth and falsehood. It is not so much the people of New Zealand who have overspent to the extent of £28,000,000, but rather that the Government has overspent to that extent. The people of the Dominion have been induced to spend by the prodigal policy which the Government has pursued. Mi-. Nash lias intimated that the Government entertained hopes of an increased production resulting from its policy, but, he would be more explicit if he were to detail the number of road construction jobs, for instance, which have been completed and then subsequent road deviations have made such road completions redundant and useless. The difficulty has been to get the Government to see that spending money is not enough: it must undertake the task of making certain' that the money is spent on projects which will be helpful to New Zealand. The spending- of colossal sums of money per acre in levelling ground, the construct ion of golf courses, as in the ease of one Auckland course which ran away with a quarter of a million of public money, the providing of human statues for months on end over the gates of Cook’s Gardens. the paying of recumbent overcoated figures supported by Jong-handled shovels in front, and grass sods at back, on the Wanganui municipal golf course, has provided a short, solution of the unemployed problem. It has paid the unemployed concerned, but it has also demoralised them. The Government has failed lamentably all over the country to secure an adequate return for the public money which it has spent, as witness the unemployed relief job in the South Island whereat Mr. Semple discharged the workers because their tallies of work were intolerably low. Air. Semple, it must be said to his credit, has never intentionally befriended a shirker. His discharge of the men from the relief work was typical of the man. His action, nevertheless, proved beyond cavil that the Government of which he is a member has failed in the function of management, and the cost of this mismanagement is the absence of that increase in production which the Government hoped for, and that absence of increased production has necessitated continuance of the restrictive activity of the Government, which is designed for the purpose of lowering the standard of living in New Zealand.