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Hokitika Guardian, 21 December 1921, Page 2

Tut: drop in prices for dairy produce is making its piosenc-e felt, particularly among the farmers of the North Island. There, boom times led to wild speculation in land, and many of the settlers now find themselves nursing highly priced land, the produce from which is not yielding return enough to meet interest and expenses. As an exchange points out, during the past five or six years, owing partly to the high prices paid by the Imperial Government for our produce and partly to the extreme optimism fostered among the farmers by interested parties land values ascended, and notwithstanding repeated warning from responsible people, prices continued to ascend. Dairy farmers wore assured that butter and cheese would bring very high prices, and many of the factories were advised to refuse offers equal to 2s to 2s Id. per ]b. for huttor-fat. The dried-milk h|usiness, too. was to enrich the farmer and tho latter, animated bv these glowing prospects, threw discretion to the winds and bought dairying land at high prices, piling up mortgage upon tnortgae. Tho big prospects have not materialised; on the contrary, both butter and cheese, have weakened and the market continues! dull;. It has shown something of a slump at Home this week, so the position becomes more acute still. The experience the farmers are going through is a phase which invariably follows a boom. The unwary are caught in the end, for someone has to pay the piper. Land speculation is too often the worst kind of a gamble, once the boom starts, because landed companies and their agents have a wa v of passing on properties which brings costly experience to the person who dabbles on outside—and interested —advice. This has been the case particularly in the North Island where the drop in prices is being felt most keenly. The Government is being asked to appoint a commission to review mortgages deemed to he too high, and to curtail rates of interest, to enable the farmers to carrv on. This is an

unusual position and if given effect to, will create a peculiar state of affairs Government interference in these matte] s is only likely to make the position more and more difficult. Tho situation will have to he faced in a business like way, and no doubt mortgagee and mortgagor will find a way out without dislocating the credit of tho country, as a com mission as suggested might easily do. In tin* last two years, during which | periinl the present Administration has had free scope for the exhibition of such talents as it possesses, and unfettered opportunities of carrying out its men policy, it lias become increasingly obvious that the Ministry has no talents and no policy. Those who wish to escape this conclusion remarks a contemporary, have to emulate the ostrich. Tho “New Zealand Herald,” the leading newspaper in the Dominion espousing the Reform side in politics, having no taste for the colossal task of defending the indefensible lias very sensibly liont its energies in recent months to an endeavour to make the Ministry live up to its pledges and to reform its regime of waste and muddle. In an editorial article, the Auckland journal gives a oategorical rehearsal of the Government’s failures and blunders. It. tels us that “the public accounts are going from had to worse all the time” ; that "all the evidence is against the assumption” that Mr Massey has “any wellconsidered plan for reducing ilio national expenditure” ; that “The Prime Minister has appeared in the deplorable role of defending a duty on children’s hoots” ; that the Government has neglected land settlement; that there is no adequate public works policy, and no policy guiding immigration. Those tilings are true, of course—only too painfully true—and if the Government were able it would doubtless make some effort to conciliate its own supporters by removing their just causes of complaint. But it obviously is not able. The party of Reform, when in Opposition, had the comparatively easy task of the destructive critic, and sufficient'

imagination to impute all sorts of dreadful and scandalous things against the other side. But faced with tho task of construction it has failed so utterly that its principal journalistic supporter vies with its political opponents in condemnation of its ineptitude. The remedy, of course, is to replace Mr Massey and his colleagues by Ministers of a bigger calibre. Such men evidently cannot he found in the Reform Party.