The Government and Secondary Industries.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 19146, 1 November 1927, Page 8

The Government and Secondary Industries.

The Prime Minister's. address at the opening of the Wellington Pageant of Industries on Tuesday night was followed by a further address on Saturday night by the Minister for Industries and Commerce. In each case the speaker emphasised the importance of secondary industries in the most definite and 'generous terms —using, inj deed, almost the same words—and ; words, it is hardly necessary to add, to ; which every intelligent student of poli- | tics and economics would at once subj scribe. Anyone, therefore, who says I that the Government is not sympaI thetic to secondary industries is either j malicious or stupid, as everyone is who j says the same of ourselves. But Mr McLeod said also, as he had to, and as everyone must who knows and trades in the truth, that "farming is our "greatest industry," and that if the Dominion is to advance during its second seventy years as it has done during its first, it will have to rescue some of the self-reliance and determination which were '\the chief assets of " the early settlers." That of course is as true of primary industries al of secondary, and was meant to apply to both. But it has a particular bearing on the demand of secondary industries for more assistance from the Govern- | ment, and on the complaint so often made with that demand that New Zea-land-made articles are boycotted in the New Zealand market. We have ourselves discussed this complaint so often that we should find it difficult, if that were necessary, to say anything new about it; but it is not necessary. The truth of the matter is just as the Minister put it, and it is such a simple and obvious truth that nothing is to be gained by dressing it up in strange words. If the public do not buy New Zealand goods, they believe that they get a better article from overseas; and if this belief is foolish, it is for the makers of the New Zealand article to

end it. The consumer's sole desire is to get value for his money, and it is not merely a fallacy, but preposterous nonsense, to say that he would not as soon get a New Zealand bargain as a foreign one. At the beginning of our . manufacturing history there may have been some shyness, not justified in fact, about buying a local product, but that stage has long been passed. If the public of New Zealand are still shy of New Zealand goods —some they already much prefer to the imported article—there is a reason which has nothing whatever to do with local prejudice per sc, and which it is the business of the producer to discover and remove. Goods may be cheap, and yet not good value; they may be good value, but not adapted to the consumer's special cir- | cumstances or needs; they may be reasonably priced, and serviceable, but lacking in taste or style; and they may, finally, be as good as the foreign article in every way and yet not be as widely known. But whatever keeps them out of the consumers possession it is not prejudice or, as the manufacturer too often declares, lack of patriotism. Consumers indeed resent, and are beginning to resent more and more strongly, the suggestion that they are traitors to New Zealand when they buy a pair of English boots, and they are also getting tired of being told that when they do so they are impoverishing New Zealand by sending their money out of the country. Local industry will flourish only when it delivers the goods that ihe public want, at a price they can pay, and makes their existence and qualities known by intelligent and continuous publicity.