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Hokitika Guardian, 25 July 1933, Page 4

■Sin John Latter, speaking at the annual meeting of the Nitrate Producers Steamship Company Ltd., said: “We cannot possibly blink the fact that •an eminently dangerous situation has overtaken British shipping supremacy, both from within and without, and demands the most scrupulous analysis in the national interest; first, from within, against the adoption of too precipitate protective measures; secondly, to guard against sacrificing that incalculably groat asset which

lias never failed us in the past-—our heritage as an island people, gifted with the sea sense, and possessing traditions and experience in ship management unsurpassed by any /other country. It has hitherto withstood every form of attack. The present paralysis is due in a measure to improvidence and to misjudgmont of the trend of affairs, and those most guilty are crying loudest. The overbuilding of tonnage, chiefly on the part of inexperienced foreigner!?, lias created such an oveiwhelming supply of vessels, in excess of any reasonable demand for them, as has meantime lifted the issue outside the sphere of economic; competition. Therefore, until the complex commercial potentialities at stake can he more accurately gauged, T think we should stand to our guns a little longer. Foreign subsidypayers are becoming alive to the fact that their shipowners are making as heavy, if not heavier, losses than we, without a scintilla of evidence that their lavish uneconomic expenditure is advancing their cause jn the slightest. I feel they will soon appreciate that they are unwittingly • ruining themselves in exhausting the life of vessels for which a sufficiency of permanent trade is never likely to develop. It would he unwise to counter foreign subsidies, the risk henna too great of simply developing •« political fhrht between Governments, on the - basis of the survival of the - fittest, the commercial factor which is our meet egg, disappearing altogether.”