LABOUR AND THE FARMER

Hokitika Guardian, 30 June 1928, Page 1

LABOUR AND THE FARMER

(Cliristeh itrcli ‘ ’Press. ’’)

It is difficult to say’ which is the more interesting—Labour’s desire to

save the man on tlie land, or its growing reverence Tor Richard John Redden. At Hastings Mr Holland seems to have devoted practically the whole of his speech to the. tilings the Government has not done for the farmers and Labour is sighing to j do. He inegan, as burning patriots usually begin, with tiie state of tlie. National Debt. Tlie Liberals, be said, in fifteen years had increased it by twenty millions, but Reform, in the same time, bad increased it by eighty’ millions; “exclusive,” lie was careful to add, “of war loans.” Only delicacy, wo are sure, and his sense of fairness, kept him from saying also that while the Liberals were in power the number of men who died of wounds and disease in war was a few hundred, while the Reform Party in the same period sent 18,000 to their deaths.

The National Debt has increased during the Reform Party’s period of office, and increased independently of war’loans. It has increased precisely as the private citizen’s debts would increase—over and above his hospital expenses—if a motor car ran over him and put him to bed for six months. The difference is that in the case,of the country disaster overtook not only New Zealand but the whole economic structure on which its fortunes depend, and intelligent people will not think any hotter of a Party that has to make capital out of its country’s worst calamity. But Mr Holland is chiefly’ interesting when lie asks farmers to believe that Labour would lift or lighten their mortgages, and while ending or reducing unemployment ease their burden of taxation. Labour could achieve some of these things y its leaders would start to-morrow telling the rank and hie. tile truth—that the farmer can he saved only if his costs can lie reduced and his production increased ; that costs can not he reduced while Labour demands high wages whether there is high or low production ; that there must he no more strikes: that indolence and waste must cease; that land-nationalisation is a good deal deader that Julius Caesar;

Tlie fact of the matter of course is that Mr Holland does not know much about farmers, or care much about them except, as poliliea) material. No one who had even begun to understand their standpoint would have 1 old them, as in effect he did. that their troubles were the result of their freehold tenure. Mr Holland chose to put the blame for the freehold upon the Reform Party. Actually the responsibility for the choice is with the farmers themselves. It was the one big issue before the country in 1911 when the Reform Party fought its successful light at the polls, and it was the almost complete unanimity of the farmers upon the freehold tenure which gave tlie Reform Party its first victory. Although it has not brought security and prosperity to every farmer, there is hot one farmer in a hundred who would abandon it in favour of any system of. State leasehold, even if it were sweetened by that “usebolcT” scheme which the Labour Party adopted as one of its platform planks three years ago.

And although it is easy for Mr Holland nr any glib talker to make capital out of the farmers’ mortgages, there is not a farmer in the country who would not prefer a mortgagee to a landlord; and many of them have tided both: Everybody knows also, and ninny knew in 1910, that all the trafficking in farms that has been talcing place since the boom lias been dotriine-ntal to the country’s prosperity. but Mr Holland knows that no Goveriiment and no conceivable legislation could have prevented it. No Government could have persuaded Parliament nine years ago. or persuaded any Parliament the Dominion has ever had, to pass legislation cm powering it to say to a tanner tlistt

1 lie must not sell, or to another farmer that he must not buy, except with its express permission. Air Holland is always obvious tout it is a little surprising that he should have been so clumsy. He ought to know, and if he does not the fact that lie was talking to farmers should have reminded him, that it is “in vain (that) tlie net is spread in the sight of any bird.”