Unemployment Policy

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 105, 28 January 1935, Page 11

Unemployment Policy

Sir, —In your leading columns in Friday’s issue you commend and defend the Unemployment Board policy, in, (1) preserving the fund, and showing satisfactory (from the purely economic view) balances, and (2J “It would be a mistake to hamper recovery by making relief too attractive.” As this latter theme has, from the beginning, been a fundamental premise of board policy, I propose to prove it to be in effect: (1) UnChristian (i.e., devoid of any moral sanction), and (2) contrary to true political economy (i.e., natural law). UnChristian because the primary duty of Government ii\matters pertaining to preservation of the life of the State is above all else to foster and preserve good, sound, healthy family life. As the fount and source of social and economic life is the family, any impediment of or encroachment on its wellbeing is an impediment of and encroachment upon the wellbeing •of the people's social and economic life. The economic life being secondary—-that is, designed to serve the family and social life — the Unemployment Board’s policy clearly reverses this natural order. In effect, it sacrifies the wellbeing of unemployed family life to the economic expedient of preserving a cash balance, maintaining a “standard wage” which has no defined existence, and ostensibly preserving morale by enforcing miserable, home conditions, Contrary to true political economy because Nature herself decrees that the family precedes the State. Ot:r present Government (i.e., common authority) is allowing a subsidiary State department, the Unemployment Board, to use a community-created fund for the purpose of improving or adding value to private property, without a proviso for a just and equitable return to the community of a khare in the profits arising therefrom. —I am, etc., d. McLaughlin. [This letter has been abridged.]

Sir, —I was very interested in Mr. Bromley’s reply to Mr. McLaughlin’s letter of protest against the compulsion of married unemployed men into Public Works camps. To my mind the objections were clearly stated, and the principles used were fundamentally Christian. Whether New Zealand agrees or not, whether in future our actions are to be as completely out of touch with our past as we can make them, at least we cannot alter the fact that what civilisation we have was built and inspired by Christianity. ' Now the fundamental Christian concept of society js that it is built up of family units, which are sacred, . which society must serve, and whose rights are inviolable. That anybody except for grave emergency purposes should force the head of a family to live separate from his little society is to a Christian the height of social injustice and impertinence. In materialistic socialist States where euthanasia, birth control, economic serfdom are the rule, such a deed might be taken by a cowed population as in the nature of things. But the New Zealand Government is not socialist, though it seems to have learnt the lessons of interference well enough. At any rate all Mr. Bromley can appeal to is the Unemployment Act. Has he heard of an unjust law? Has he heard of a just law applied in justly? I wonder will there ever be a Government in New Zealand which, instead of making a poor man's life more miserable in order to relieve bis distress, will consider the other alternative and take from he who hath to give to he who hath not.— 1 am, etc., T. P. WESTFIELD. Petone, January 24.