INCREASED PURCHASING POWER?

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Issue 138, 28 June 1937, Page 6

INCREASED PURCHASING POWER?

The Minister of Lands, the Hon. F. Langstone, last week ^ visited his own electorate for the purpose of opening the ( Winter Show at Taumarunui and took the opportunity of j yegaling his audience with a series of quite impressive figures desigued to show how greatly the prosperity of the country had been advanced, unemployment decreased and the purchaaing power of the people increased since our Labour Govern- ! ment took office. The first thjng he told them was that during the last financial year, ended 31st March last, the number of "factories" in the country had increased by 266. Now, most of us, the good fplk of Taumarunui among the rest no ^ doubt, think of a factory as a big building buzzing with mechanical energy and enaploying a very considerable number of hands, However, when we turn to the Factories Acr, as amended last year, we find a factory defined as being "any building, office or place in which one or more persons } are exnployed in any handicraft or in preparing or ngaaiufacturing goods for trade or sale." Thus the ejcistence of 266 „ new factories might mean employment for just the same i number of hands. Though it is, of course, not suggested here that such is actually the case, it will be seen that citing the number of new factories has no real significance as incidentally implying the institution of ne,» avenues of employment of any appreciable volume. Mr. Langstone then went on to point out that the Public Works Department was employing 9000 more men than a year earlier, the Railways Department 3300 more, and the Post and Telegraph Department 1000 more, thus giving an aggregate increase of 13,300 in the number of hands employed in these three State Departments. Now turning to the Official Statistician's figure we find that during the year the number of men on the unemployment register had been reduced by only 15,570. Thus, without taking into consideration the increased thousands still on the sustenance register, we have only some 2240, who during that long year have found fresh or renewed employment in any services other than those of the State, which only goes to confirm what has been said before as to the miserable slowness with which the unemployed are being reabsorbed into the productive and really ' ' remunerative industries apd services of the country. For we have to remember, so far as public works are concerned, that none of them will for years make any adequate return, while, according to those well qualified to judge, a very large proportion of them will never make any such return. As to the railways everyone knows, or by this time should know, that they are a heavily loging concern that costs the taxpayers well over a million a year to make up the deficiency in meeting interest on cost of construction. Yet Mr. Langstone asked his Taumarunui friends to see in all this the means his Government was using for "increasing the purchasing power of the people." As a matter of fact, whatever increase in purchasing power may have been conferred in one direction has been taken away in another, so that as a community we are in this respect no better off, probably in the mass a gOod deal worse off than we were twelve months earlier, when, so the Statistician's figures show, unemployment was being reduced at a much more rapid rate, Nor did Mr. Langstone think it prudent to mention that in the meantime every- £ in which he expressed this incrdaged purchasing power has itslef * lost a good few shillings of its purchasing power, as every housewife knows to her sorrow. Mr. Langstone poiuted also ,and with something like pride, to the fact that the "purchasing power of the people" had beep further increased by the addition of 17,000 names to the pensions lists involving a distribution of an extra £2-jnillion, which has, of course, to be found by increased taxation. The logical inference from this is that in the Minister 's mind, all that is required is to put a few rnoye thousands on the pensions and sugtenance lists and then ail would go merrily — until perhaps the taxpayers were taxed out of existence, an end which jiever seems to enter the calculations of either this Minister or any of his colleagues, though before the election they acknowledged that taxation had already about reached its bearable limit.