THE GOVERNMENT AND UNEMPLOYMENT.

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Issue 158, 22 July 1937, Page 4

THE GOVERNMENT AND UNEMPLOYMENT.

When Labour leaders and Labour candidates were wooing votes for the general eleetion of November, 1935, the early abolition of unemployment was made a foremost plank in the party platforxn. The electors were led to understand that, if Labour could only get eontrol of the country' s affairs, unemployment would disappear like winter snows from the mountain tops under the beneficent rays of spring sunshine. There was to be congenial and remunerative work for everybody willing to undertake it. That was the tale that was told and with sueh good effect that Labour "romped home" at the polls. A Labour Government has now been in assured power — and exercising it to the f ullest limit so far as concerns mere wordy legislation and its enforcement — for nearly twenty months, more than balf the term for wkich its parliamentary supporters were elected, the party having repudiated the four years term for which legislation was passed by the previous Government. How far do we find the rosy promises of 1935 on the way to fulfilment? While the number of names appearing on the "relief work" register has been, we may say, substantially reduced, this has been in no small measure due to the transfer of a goodly proportion of them to the "sustenance" register; — a not very hopeful-looking shuffle. Of those who have actually found full-time employment at standard rates of pay by far the larger proportion — somewhere between nineteen and twenty thousand of them, we are told — have been placed on public works. Of these works, those employing the greatest numhers-^-South Island railways and the like — have been condemned by competent investigators as being not only unwanted, but as likely, when in operation, to result in heavy losses that will have to be made good by increased taxation. Nor are these railways being huilt out of the "costless credit" of which we heard so much, but partly out of revenue extracted from the taxpayers — all the people of the country — but mostly out of borrowed money which will go still further to ipcrease our already heavy public debt and on which interest will have to Be paid as in the had old days of yore. That is one phantasy gone. Even after the present Government took office we were told of well organised schemes to be laid out for providing 'work for workless men, but these have as yet not made their appearance. It was not, indeed, until the winter was well upon us that any movement in this direction was made, and, then, what form does it take ? An appeal to local authorities to enter upon undertakings to be heavily suhsidised out of the Employment Promotion Fund. It is a little bit difficult to see in this recourse anything very much different from that taken by the previous Government in the depth of the worldwide depression. Surely this is a rather humili'ating confession to have to make in the midst of a revived prosperity, for which — if we are to listen to Ministers and other Labour spokesmen — we are entirely indebted to the change in the colour of our Government. Then we come to perhaps the most curious phase of all. In connection with some, if not most, of these local undertakings it has been stipulated that the subsidy will be forthcoming only if the use of labour-saving machinery is abjured and the work done hy hand with the help only of the archaic pick, shovel and wheelbarrow, so that employment will he found for a greater number of men. What most people will ask is how this squares with the Hon. Robert Semple's lurid condemnations of the use of just these very same methods by a previous Government and his expenditure of more than half-a-million in the purchase of up-to-date machinery — a great deal of it American — to lighten the toil of his own highly privileged army engaged on State enterprises. It is admitted that the condition thus imposed on local bodies means a very considerable addition to this cost of the works undertaken and to the time taken to complete them. That means that, according to the gospel as preached hy Mr. Semple, a sinful waste of public money is being perpetrated. That money, too, it has to be remembered, is not of the fairy-wand kind but has been and is still being extracted by special taxation from the whole community, the wage-earners of the country being in the aggregate among the chief contribntors. Ihere is, of course, no intention to take exception to the local . works that are being put in hand here and elsewhere. All that is suggested is that the Government which has posed so much as a wonder-worker would seem, when the pinch eomes, to he, even under greatly more favourable conditiona, no more resourceful than that which went before it and had to contend with a long period of universal adversity.