WHAT OF GUARANTEED PRICES?

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Issue 33, 23 February 1937, Page 4

WHAT OF GUARANTEED PRICES?

.We are all prepared to credit our Prime Minister and hia colleagues with the best of good intentions, but with many of us there is a quite uneasy feeling prompted by the old proverb as to the road that is paved with such intentions. This cacnnot but be the case when we come to look back on the long row of good intentions which' the Labour Party presented to the electors and note how fulfilment has run almost entirely in the one direction, and that, too, in the direction where most votes lie. We cannot also but note with some misgiving the ease with which Ministers shift their ground when faced with uncomfortable questions, to which, if they give answer at all, it is in equivocal language. The latest instance of this is to be found in what the Prime Minister is to-day reported to have said at Dunedin in xeply to a query as to ' whether the Government intended taking over the marketing of wool in the same way as dairy produce. That reply is well worthy of study as a s.am.ple of ■saying a lot without really saying anything — what some of Mr. Savage's fellow Labourites would doubtless characterise in a National Prime Minister as ,rside-stepping. " In it all, at any rate, there is no definite commitment to be discovered, and it leaves the door nicely ajar for adopting whatevej course political interests may later on dictate. Mr. Savage was perhaps a little more definite when a few days earilier he spoke at Christchurch, for he then did give some intimation that the Government had no present thought of taking over either meat or wool unless these products fell to prices that left no margin of profit to the producers. At the same time, liowever, be quite honestly indicated that the Government was not losing sight of its ultimate design of "socialising all means of production," along, of course, with those of distribution and exchange. One does not caxe to speak of shilly-shallying with regard to a Government which, in some relations, has shown itself very determined and decisive in carrying out its declared policy. On this question of guaranteed prices, however, it does not seem to know its own mind from day to day and adopts all sorts of shifts in the saddle. In the manifesto which Mr. Savage issued before the election he said very definitely that a Labour Government within a year of office would "p'hy guaranteed prices for ALL primary production, these prices • . . to be based on the average return to farmers over a period of, sa.y, the past eight to ten years." Now he tells us, or at any rate would leadjis to understand, that the Government means to step in, as it has done with the dairymen, only where current prices are so low as to spell loss to the producers. This, of course, is all very well for the primary producers* whose votes, which placed him in power, he naturally wishes to retain. But, on the other hand, it provides a rather poor look-out for the main body of taxpayers — every Dick, Tom and Harry, Nelly, Nance and Salily of the community — who have to make good the losses. For them, as has been said before, it is a case of "heads you win and tails we lose." The prospect just now is that, though the dairymen are by no means satisfied with the guaranteed price the Government is paying them, there will still be a serious loss incurred on the preseht season's State venture, that is unless mafket prices take a very decided upward swing, as. they may do at Coronation time and as a result of the British Government 's rearmament expenditure. We are, of course, hearing sanguine reports as to what Mr. Nash is doing in London in the way of trade negotiations with the British Government, but that is not going to help us very much so far as butter and cheese prices are concerned, and to-day the cold figures tell l>adly against him. Two or three weeks ago there were some signs that the Government, as by this stage of the season it should be doing, were reducing its overdraft on its dairy industry account with the Reserve Bank. For the week ending 15th February, however, it went up again by no less than a cool half-million to something over £6|-million, a pretty fair indication of the stagnation that has fallen on the marketing of New Zealand butter. . — \