THE WEST COAST

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXIV, 6 January 1931, Page 3

THE WEST COAST

NO INDICATION OF PARTICULAR PROSPERITY

CHRISTCHURCH BUSINESS MAN'S IMPRESSIONS {By Telegraph—Special to “The Mail”) CHRISTCHURCH, sth January. No indication of particular prosperity on the West Coast was found to-day by a Christchurch business man who has commercial connections on the Coast. It was a fact that the fall in totalise tor investments over there at the Christmas and New Year race meetings compared with last season was less than many meetings elsewhere, and that at the Reefton meeting an increase was recorded. “However, these figures do not to me show that the West Coast at the present time is in a more prosperous condition than other parts of New Zealand, or that it is likely to come out of the economic stringency this year better than other provinces,” he said. “There is considerable activity on the West Coast at present in small goldmining enterprises, and to a lesser extent in small scale coal mining,” he went on. “At the same time it does not seem to me that the Coast needs to be regarded as in a better and more prosperous condition than any other part of the country. Not that I want to appear pessimistic about the Coast. I see no reason to expect that it will be any worse off, if no better than the rest of New Zealand in the hard times ahead, but the Coast is regularly depressed and inflated by turns, and totalisat-or figures are no guide. Ideas about the Coast are apt to be deceptive. It is an isolated community and in its ways much different from other communities in this country. A few weeks of prosperity will put the people up in the clouds, and a few weeks of depression will put them down in the dumps. Of course the Coast depends largely on its coal mining and timber industry for its prosperity, and I cannot expect the Coast to escape feeling a. slump which is bound to hit the Coast sooner or later. For instance if every householder in Christchurch this winter were to economise even comparatively little in the consumption of coal the effect on the mines would be far from negligible.” The decreased use of phosphates as fertilisers by farmers was another matter given as an instance of how a general depression affected coal mining. In the last few years farmers have been using phosphates in considerable quantity and it was customary for the boats which brought the phosphates from the Islands when they finished up on the West Coast to coal at Westport in readiness for the return run to the Islands, or elsewhere. Now that farmers could not afford to use so much phosphate naturally the freight business had suffered. In one recent month orders for' over 30,000 tons of phosphate were cancelled. This meant that the four ships which would have been needed to transport this amount of phosphate, and would have coaled at Westport, had not been run, and the Coast had lost some thousands of tons of bunker orders as a result.