FARMERS AND THE CIVIL SERVICE

Hokitika Guardian, 18 December 1929, Page 3

FARMERS AND THE CIVIL SERVICE

ATTITUDE RESENTED. ‘ TTNCH A KIT ABLE AND AGGRESSIVE.” AUCKLAND, Dec. 16. “It is hard to realise the reasons for the uncharitable and aggressive attitude of the Fanners’ Union generally toward the Civil Service salary question,” says the Auckland Telegraph Economic Committee in a statement made in reply to remarks passed recently at a meeting of the Opotiki Farmers’ Union. “In regard to the Post and Telegraph Department, in particular, we cannot realise why the Farmers’ Union is so hostile to the idea that message hoys, some of them young men, should he paid more than £57 per annum. Then there are postmen who draw from £95 to £240 for performing a labourer's task; and skilled telegraphists, working highly technical telegraph and wireless machines, drawing from £l5O to £295, all of whom have to pass a stiff efficiency examination before they get to the maximum after ten to fourteen years’ service. Surely ■from a purely economic point of view, tiiev all deserve an increase in salary.

; “The farmer, as a primary producer is doing remarkably well at the expense of. the Dominion community—£4oo,ooo p-er annum for the Department of Agriculture to teach and help him ; £140,000 for grading and storing produce from the land; £400,00 subsidy for the wheat-growers; £22,500 by way of shipping subsidy to carry his produce to the European markets; 010,000 for free rail carriage of lime £115,000, reduced freights on rail carriage of fertilisers; or a grand total of £1,077,500. This seems a generous sum taken from the public purse with which to foster the interest of the primary producers. “The above figures should be informative to many, and, we hope, to the Farmers’ Union delegates.' We all realise that the man on the land has every right to. expect reasonable assistance from the Government, but farmers should adopt a fairer and more charitable attitude to those who help and serve them and who are not so fortunate as themselves.

“The present depression in the farming world is not due to the Civil Service expenditure, but to the financial fact of over-capitalisation. During the boom periods the capitals of farms were inflated enormously by speculation, due to the rapid rise in the price of farm produce. When depression came and its concomitant deflation, or the fall in the price of farm produce, •farmers in very many cases were trying to earn sufficient profit to pay an ordinary rate of dividend' on ,a..capital value twice or three times as large a,s that before the boom set in, and to do this they tried to keep prices higher by means of ‘controls,’ which only recoiled upon themselves with disastrous results. “Farmers must now realise that the days of high prices have passed, and that the future tendency is for prices to fall still further. High prices of wool and butter will only stimulate the use of artifical substitutes, such as rayon and margarine. . “The immediate results of the Public Service Expenditure Adjustment Act, 1922, did not assist the small farmer at all. This Act and the similar Arbitration Act only reduced the Civil Service spending power and drove the wage-earners into the toils of financial institutions in order to save their homes, etc., and this all tended to keep the rates of interest high, with the conconitnnt slackening demand for all but bare necessities, with resultant

slump conditions. Over-immigration further accentuated matters, because the Dominion was not properly organised to absorb such large numbers of immigrants.

“There is no denying the fact that inflation with, high interest rates have reduced many a farmer to a state of rural slavery from which he see little hope of emancipation unless lie walks off and sacrifices his all to the banks or moneylenders. “From the widely published quotations of the Farmers’ Union one would suspect them of being paragons of all the financial and business virtues. The very fact of their isolateion and comparative immobilnty would preclude tin's, however. If any members of the Farmers Union want tangible evidence of their financial ignorance and lack of business acumen, we desire to remind them of the Whakatane Freezing Works, the Otaihape Freezing Works, the Admiral Codrington shipping venture, and many others of which they are no doubt painfully aware.”