LESSONS OF UNEMPLOYMENT

Hokitika Guardian, 2 June 1928, Page 1

LESSONS OF UNEMPLOYMENT

FRUITS OF STATE INTERFERENCE

(TAXPAYER.)

May 30th., 1928.

It would be a poor soul indeed that did not sympathise sincerely with the halo man in distress unable to find honest work. Even Browning, who so rarely is intelligible save to the elect, lays open the consolations of labour foiall of us to read. He writes:—

Get leave to work In this world—’tis tno best you get at all

Tlife leaders of the Labour Party, however, have not set out in the right way to secure the consummation of their ideals in this respect. At their meeting in the Queen’s Theatre in Wellington on Sunday evening they concentrated tlieir attack upon the Government, scarcely offering a suggestion as to how the evil of unemployment might he alleviated, and numbers of their audience must have carried away the impression that they had been attending an election rally with the sore troubles of the workers thrown in as a fillip to the proceedings. , Mr A. Cook, who presided at the meeting, declared that the policy of the Government seemed to he to get as many as possible unemployed in order to re-engage them at the last moment at starvation wages. Mr J. Roberts stated that the Government’s.action in reducing the wages of the unemployed was simply a lever to reduce the wages of all workers, and, finally, Mr R. t'emple insisted that the Government had striven to create a permanent army of unemployed. It is perfectly safe to. ,say , that not one of these gentlemen believed what he asked the audience to believe. It is equally safe to say that not a dozen members of the audience were persuaded that the Prime Minister and his colleagues were deliberately inflicting cruel hardships upon children, women and men in order that the standard rate of wages might he reduced. Ministers of the Crown are no more capable of barbarity of that kind than arc the leaders of the Labour Party. That the Government has committed errors of omission and commission in the administration of the affairs of the Dominion, however, must he admitted by every frank observer, and that some of these errors have gravely aggravated the unemployed difficulty is a fact easily deduced. The Government’s persistent interference with private enterprise, for instance,, has closed many avenues of unemployment and prevented the expansion of many others. The very retention of the Board of Trade Act on the Statute Book, for years after any legitimate excuse for its existence had disappeared, may well have kept millions of capital out of the country. The Government’s attempt to maKo the State railways “ pay” by keeping motor competition off the roads ; its subsidising this industry and that industry at the expense of other industries; its unfair competition with private enterprises that had served the community satisfactorily for years, and its inequitable system of levying, the income tax, all have. operated against tlie interests and welfare of the workers in particular, as every obstacle to national development along sound and comprehensive lines must do.

Blit tlie leaders of the Labour Party so far from sharing this view would go even further than the Government has gone in “ socializing ” the means of production, transport and exchange. In his policy speech at Greymouth on Monday evening, Air Holland, the leader of the Labour Opposition, announced that when the party had the opportunity it would establish a State Bank, with the sole right of note issiid ; would make fire and accident insurance a State monopoly j would establish a basic wage and an increased family allowance; and would hold fast to all the socialistic measures previous Governments had conceded. A programme of this description is bound to appeal to numbers of people, who, having no

knowledge of economics, nor of the teachings of history, imagine the arrival of the millennium .may be hastened by the suppression of the individual, and the exaltation of the State, the surest way of reaching the most disastrous form of despotism. The time has 'arrived for the public to be taking serious heed., . .., . ~.» ,