RELIEF REGULATIONS

Evening Post, Volume CXIII, Issue 30, 5 February 1932, Page 5

RELIEF REGULATIONS

PARTIAL STATEMENTS

NEED FOR PUBLICITY

The opinion was expressed to-day by a gentleman who has taken a good deal of interest in relief work that the regulations which perhaps fitted the initial stages of the depression are now completely out of date, and should be revised to save the men annoyance and to avoid waste in the distribution of what money is available for relief work. It was known as a fact by nearly all the relief workers, he said, that the east-iron rules of the Unemployment Board were being broken daily in order to meet the situation, and he went so far as to say that some of the country's laws were being openly defied, by the contravention of important legislation, in order to make the pinching shoe fit. "The effect of providing the extra money, and the consequent reversion to the two, three, and four-day classification," he said, "will make it impossible for the local bodies to employ all the men at present employed, so that the difficulty which confronted tha .committee an* the Labour Department when the alteration waa proposed has not been overcome by the mere fact of. the allocation being increased-con-siderably, and it is still plain that the money granted for this purpose is insufficient by some £1200 to £1500.t0 employ everybody, even if the local bodies could place the men at the longer hours. If we are going to have men working the longer hours that go -with. the old classification, we cannot employ the same number of men. The newproposal was evidently made to employ all the men under the relay system. Under a I}, 2, 2s, 3, and 3j classification, relays could have been, adopted and all the men in Wellingtoa could have been employed, and any increase in the number of unemployed could have been covered, without the provision of more tools. »

LAST IN" ABE WORST OFF. "Many men who were the first t» feel the depression and were amongst the first to receive relief under the No. 5 Scheme have been receiving relief ever since, at a considerable cost to the country. There are now hundreds of men who were either reluctant to register at an unemployment bureau in the_ first place, or who had resources of their own, whose resources have no-w been exhausted, and who now find it imperative1 to register. These are men' who,.during the course of the depression, have been paying their levies regularly and assisting the unemployment fund, and they are now being refused work because the Unemployment Committee now says, 'We must maintain the two, three, and four-day basis at all costs,' while all representations made to the Government have been along these lines. It must be remembered that these men, who had evidently made more provision for themselves than tnose forced immediately into relief work, or had perhaps been so much" more valuable to their employers that they were not dispensed with " until much later, are the ones who will now; be driven to the Charitable Aid Board, because they are unable to obtain any relief from the unemployment fund to which hitherto they had regularly contributed, and from which they are entitled to some relief, though apparently they are not to become beneficiaries. ' This is a contradiction of the oftenmade statement that thrift will not be penalised. There is a distinct call fop more frankness regarding what is being done in. the relief of unemployment. It seems to be the rule that no inf ormatioa whatever is to be given on any subject by any Government Department, and it seemsto me that this is much more so than it was formerly. To the average citizen the position-is as inscrutable as that in China, and when a reply is grudgingly extracted from the Departments it is as inarticulate as the national voice of China itself, because it almost invariably means nothing sufficiently definite to act upon.

PBANK STATEMENT NEEDED. "There is far too great a tendency; on the part of Government Departments to leave the dissemination of their views and actions to private citizens who have voluntarily attempted, to make the slippery ends of present-day problems and the tangled departmental coil meet. There are too many things to-day which can no longer bfe test served by silence, and if the alternative is to be second-hand departmental information, then a store of trouble is being laid up for the future. In my opinion, a _ frank statement of the country's indebtedness and prospects, and a clear and thorough forecast of what the Government intends to do to meet the case, would unite thousands of people who to-day are at variance. This applies to all the country's problems, but to none more than to unemIployment. If there is no money witlijwhich to allay the unemployment posi'j tion, then too much is being spent on it now—and, by the way, a great deal too much on private amusement —but if it is possible to raise funds for that pur- | pose, then provision should be made for I longer periods, so that local bodies and (others may lay their plans accordingly. The cast-iron allocation of so much each week is only tinkering with the provision of employment, while a six months' programme would make it possible for the engineers concerned ti» lay out works, the shortage of which is to-day one of the greatest obstacles to the unemployment committees. I fail to see why the Government does not appoint a publicity officer, as is done in Great Britain,- who would have free access to all sources of informstion, and could give it succinctly to all interested persons, leaving the smaller details to boards and committees to supply. Fresh problems are constantly arising in this work, to which the replies given by one Department or State body are so much influenced by, the fear of what may happen in connection with some other body that they are colourlessly futile." '