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Hokitika Guardian, 29 April 1933, Page 4

The necessity r r esteVishir.% equilibrium '<~»f price;: levels and to establish rej lacemeut of value ns the criterion of what should be asked for frpm the cm'rainier for the produce which he w.t.: .attempting to consume,

was seated by the Minister of Agriculture m tne Home of Uominous when moving tiio second reading of the Agricultural Marketing Bill. ‘ They had to task themselves an at the love. was Co be; was it to to determined by the lowest cost of production of the most favourably placed pioducens, wherever tiiev might be? That was the solution of tne nineteenth century; it \\Us the gospel associated with the greatly renowned names connected with the. Manchester school. When the House r.f Commons abandoned that it also abondened the complementary doctrine of the absolute freedom of the movement of goods. It was no longer the national policy to buy all over the world in the cheapest market, because they could not afford it. 'The Government intended to' ensure that British agriculture should continue to thrive, and if possible to flourish. Other countries might say that Britain should no. longer be the workshop of the world; they might lock her out of their factories, but they would turn her into the fields, and the rest of the world might well consider what would happen if the skill and inventive genius which the' British people had shown in the past were flung back into the ancient industry of agriculture in which this country was second to none, but which it had temporarily neglected for half a century. It might he taken for- granted that the barriers which other countries had set up against their trade would not ho swept away ill th© future, as some of our economists .'and politicians were anxious k> persuade the country would he the case. In dealing with the conditions of the twentieth century Britain would have, to work out something verv much nearer to the provisions of this bill than to the ideal world which was worked out by nine-teenth-century economists.