ROUND ABOUT

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 2, Issue 195, 5 August 1940, Page 5

ROUND ABOUT

(By Aitchel)

What an amazing picc'e of news is the announcement of the Mortgages

Extension Emergency Regulations, 1940, and the Debtor Emergency Regulations. Possibly if I were a debtor I would be laughing like the devil. If I owed not any man, neither was I owed, I could regard the business with complete equanimity. Unfortunately I am a creditor and it looks

very much as though there will be yet another bad debt wiped off the slate in New Zealand. The news of the gazetting of these breath-taking regulations lias only just come through and I am writing this while the old blood still runs hot. Another reason is that I have to write it now and cannot leave it until Monday morning because the compositor man is apt to get a bit impatient. . I advance those statements because I am going to criticise the Government's latest brainwave and due allowance will have to be made for the possibility of the chappies responsible for the gazetting thinking up ah excuse for the idea. . In Effect. "The chief difference between. thes> regulations and the ones they supersade," said Mr Mason, "is that the - new, regulations do not in any way require c mortgagor to show that his difficulty is due to war conditions." That, in effect, means that a debtor says: "I can't pay my bill." The creditor asks: "Why not?" and the answer allowed under the regulations would be standardised at: "Mind your own business!"'/ Truly a wonderful state of affairs. But what stands out as most probable is a total dislocation and disruption, of the commer-i cial world. (My couple of thou.- '■ sand won't affect it). How cam retail firms pay their debts to the distributors if they them- - selves are not paid? As I saidl my view may be loose and probably by the time that this ap* pears in print some Minister will have released the key to the whole problem. But at the present time it reminds one very much of that nursery rhyme about the old woman and the pig and stick and so on. You may remember it. * The old woman (I wonder why they picked on an old one?) had purchased an obstinate pig at tlic market and was endeavouring to reach the homestead on the rise..before twilight turned into the enveloping clarkness of. night. She was a wee bit afraid of her husband, who had been thrice a widower through wife-beating/ and liked to sup at (> p.m. to the tick. (Summer Time). Its Application. The Tamwo r th-Berkslii re cross was; no steeplechaser and baulked at the first hurdle : —-a stile. Coaxing was of no avail so the even-tempered female invoked the services- of fine Fido, pleading with the dog to bits the pig. and thus assist him on the onward and upward arc. Fido liltecl pigs, however, having grown up with them, and he \vas liaving none of that. So the woman reached for a waddy and beseeched the stick to strike the dog. Thus, she hoped, the/ dog could be made to bite the pig> and she had calculated that that " would result in the pig clearing the fence. The stick, it seems, was a Trades' Unionist, and he had knocked off, for the day so there wrfs nothing doing there. > The woman was not daunted. True to form, she had another bright idea. Using her. cigarette lighter (that was in the days before restrictions) she soon had s fire going. Well, you know how the story goes. "Fire, fire! Burn stick. Stick. won't hit dog; dog won't bite pig; pig won't get over the stile and Til get an awful walloping from my old man!" Who Will be the Husband? That, quotation is enough for aa illustration of the latest regulations* application—as I see it at the moment. The way I figure it out, the Government will prove to have the: role of the old woman The walloping will come later. The part that is going to be sa screamingly funny is when the coughing-up process starts after the war. In the meantime there is a glorious satisfaction in the. happy knowledge that the standardised answer referred to above can, after the fashion of Viscount Halifax's reply to Hit- . ler, be 'flung in the Government's teeth' when we receive our Income Tax demands. Why not?