"BLACK DAY FOE NEW ZEALAND."

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 73, 23 September 1930, Page 7

"BLACK DAY FOE NEW ZEALAND."

"It will be a black day in New Zealand if any unemployment insurance is passed," says Mr. Spencer. "Itmeans setting up a new Government Department employing an army of officers to carry out the work, and every year the benefits would be increased and the cost to the country would be a heavy annual tax. In a young country like New Zealand where the conditions totally differ from Great Britain, unemployment insurance would be a blight and a curse to the workers and to the country. It would cripple industry, pauperise the1 workers, destroy all independence, initiative, and self-reliance, would create less respect' to employers, and would gradually create a nation of beggars and inefficient loafers demanding it as their right to be fed. We have to live in a competitive world. Competition, if fair, is the mainspring of industrial employment. "New Zealand has unlimited' resources of undeveloped country requiring thousands of workers building roads, and bridges, planting , trees, breaking in virgin land, ploughing, fencing, sowing, and hundreds of other jobs waiting to be done, but this work of developing the country will never be done if we introduce the insurance dole. v

'.'Another aspect in unemployment is the ever-changing flow of industry, the fluctuations of commerce, new ■ inventions, superseding old and established businesses, the change of fashions, the change,of seasons, the growing and increasing amount of recreation, which all effect changes in the demand for labour and all render it impossible,to have an even and regular scheme of employment. The weather, storms, droughts, .all have their, effect on labour, seed time and harvest all cause irregularity "in the use of labour.

"In.New Zealand, on tlie main point —the expansion of our secondary industries —we need a new policy. As a new tpuntry full of possibilities, we seem to £> more to handicap'our productive industries, more to dry up the well springs'of employment, and less to entourage wage-paying enterprises. Let us get busy and encourage the growth and development of new industries and improve the economical working of the present ones." . ' ' .