The Dominion MONDAY, JUNE 26, 1944. THE PERIL OF SLACKNESS

Dominion, Volume 37, Issue 230, 26 June 1944, Page 4

The Dominion MONDAY, JUNE 26, 1944. THE PERIL OF SLACKNESS

A timely warning, couched in simple and therefore telling lan-i guage, of the danger of permitting slackness to creep into our wartime! effort, was contained in the address delivered at the annual meeting of the Bank of New Zealand bv the chairman of the board of directors (Mr. A. T. Donnelly). “If we hold a national and personal examination of our wartime conscience,” he said, “we will find that as the war has gone away from us, in some degree we have relaxed.” This is undeniably true. Whereas two years or so ago there was a disposition by the great majority of the community to set aside considerations of sectional advantage, minor hardship and petty bicker-1 ing so as to get on with vital jobs in the face of a very real, direct peril to this Dominion, the position has undergone a marked change. By small degrees, individuals and groups have slipped into an attitude of complacency toward the war situation. This has not only robbed the community effort of some of its vigour and purposefulness, but —what is worse—it has encouraged a form of restiveness and advantage-seeking that is at variance with our professed aims and intentions as a belligerent country. We are still in the fight—and the fight is not over. Nor is it bv any means won. That is the point of Mr. Donnelly’s warning, and yet, as he says, “political, class and trade disputes, dormant in 1942, have flamed up again”—in the economic sphere there is to be seen attempt after attempt to break free from the nation’s anchor-cable of stabilization. In spite of the lip-service given by everyone to elementary principles of restraint in spending in a time of money inflation, there continues to be shown in many directions an inclination —indeed, almost a determination—to be extravagant in personal as well as groqp spending. The Bank of New Zealand chairman added: For many in this country money has been quickly and easily earned, particularly by the young. Taxation has blunted thrift, and people are heard, to say: “What does it matter? The Minister of Finance pays all or most of it.” Plainly this careless selfishness and irresponsibility springs from a failure to appreciate that our journey to peace and post-war security is far from being over, and will yet call for great effort. Actually ,_ in the economic sense, that journey may only have begun, and a period of extreme difficulty may lie ahead. One of the leading economists in Britain has predicted that the first few years after the war may be the most dangerous of all because those considerations which ensure national discipline will then have.been removed, and restraints formerly willingly accepted will appear unduly irksome. Today in New Zealand is being witnessed an early phase of. that development, and one which will lead swiftly to a perilous national condition if it remains uncorrected. The paradoxical position is that the contributing causes of national slackness—-the increasingly sheltered position of this country in relation to Pacific hostilities, and the apparently favourable trend of the war situation in general—should properly be regarded as the principal incentive to a continuation and betterment of the combined productive effort which is now New Zealand’s premier war task. In Mr. Donnellys words: “Wars are won or lost at the end. Many a war has been lost by softness, overconfidence, laziness, or bv the lack of the courage or determination to stick it out. This war must not be lost that way.” It will not be lost; but New Zealand must not fail to keep her full weight in the struggle, right to the end.