£7,240,000 Required To Fill State Loan

Press, Volume XC, Issue 27395, 7 July 1954, Page 13

£7,240,000 Required To Fill State Loan

(New Zealand Press Association)

WELLINGTON, July 6. With time getting “desperately short” before the closing date, the £30,000,000 national development loan still requires more than £7,000,000 in subscriptions if it is to be filled. The loan will close on Thursday. The Prime Minister (Mr Holland) announced tonight that subscriptions up to 3 p.m. totalled £22,760,000 from 8001 applications. From the close of business on Monday till mid-afternoon today more than £1,000,000 was received, he said. “Compared with previous results that is a decided improvement, but there is still a long way to go and time is getting desperately short,” he added.

If a truly public-spirited effort were made from one end of the country to the other, he felt the gap might be bridged between now and Thursday. “I don’t want this loan to fail,” the Prime Minister said. “I don’t want it said that New Zealand was not able to meet its responsibilities in an hour of need, but more than that I do not want to have to- curtail any

of our works programme because we have not the finance to carry it out as we hoped.”

Mr Holland is expected to have almost final loan figures available when he broadcasts the results on Thursday evening. Appealing to women to use their influence to help to fill the loan, which was “dragging its feet a little,” the Minister of Social Welfare (Mrs G. H. Ross) said tonight in a broadcast address: “Men are a bit slow sometimes—they have been very slow over the loan. I wonder if we can impress on them that this is an urgent matter, that development works which concern the comfort of our homes as well as our national expansion are involved in the loan?” Mrs Ross said that nearly 17,000 contributed to the two loans last year, which totalled £30,000,000. This year there were fewer than half this number.

“There are more than 1,000,000 adult New Zealanders, and most of them /are doing very well indeed,” she said. “But there are not many of them in this loan,”