The Press Friday, June 2, 1922. Mr Massey at Invercargill.

Press, Volume LVIII, Issue 17470, 2 June 1922, Page 6

The Press Friday, June 2, 1922. Mr Massey at Invercargill.

The speech delivered by the Prime Minister at Invercargill last night was a plain and straightforward acount of the position of the Dominion and of the way in which it is being met by the Government Mr Massey struck a fctrongly optimistic note at Feilding, and this note reappears in his Invercargill speech. A good many people harre spoken and written during the past six months as if Mr Massey was not fully alive to the necessity for reducing expenditure and taxation, though why what was obvious to them should not be rather more obvious to the man who receives fuller information than other people concerning the financial and commercial conditions of the country it is not easy to see. The Prime Minister makes no attempt to disguise the fact that the expenditure exceeded the revenue in the past financial year, but he points out that a surplus could have been shown if he had not resolved to build up a coal reserve, or if he had not granted those useful rebates on land-tax and income-tax which so seriously annoyed the Liberals and Socialists. The result of the year's transactions was, when all the circumstances are considered, not unsatisfactory, the more fio because the last quarter showed that the process of reducing expenditure is already in effective operation. The current year is likely to prove as much more difficult from the Treasury point of (view as it will be easier from the point of view of the general public. The cost of living is falling, there are signs of better prices for our export products, and the movement is generally back towards normal health. But the effect of improved commercial conditions will not, in some important respects, be felt in the Treasury until next year. Although, for instance, trade and business may greatly improve, the receipts from income-tax will be very much smaller than they were for the past year, since the tax will be levied upon the incomes of the leanest of the years. The economies already arranged will save the country nearly four millions a year, but as he is aiming to reduce taxation as soon as possible, the Prime Minister holds that the effecting of economies must be one of the most important of the Government's concerns for some time to come. On no subject, perhaps, have the Government's enemies expended so much energy as on the policy of repatriation and soldier settlement, which they have recklessly misrepresented in the hope of inducing the returned soldiers to vote against the Government at the general election. The Prime Minister repeated last night the facts and figures concerning his Government's policy in this matter—no country in the world can be compared with New Zealand in point of liberality in financing the ex-service men—and he emphasised the fact that the hard times which embarrassed many soldier settlers embarrassed also many experienced farmers. We have always 'suspected—indeed, there is little room for doubt — that the vigour, amounting in some rases to violence, with which the Government's enemies haive attacked the soldier settlement policy, was inspired by an anxiety to offset the plain fact that the Government faced the work of repatriation in a generous and courageous spirit.