OTHER PAPERS’ OPINIONS.

Putaruru Press, Volume VII, Issue 274, 7 February 1929, Page 4

OTHER PAPERS’ OPINIONS.

INTER-EMPIRE TRADE. Inter-Empire trade problems are fast accumulating and apparently but little is being done to solve them. Sir Benjamin Morgan, after another and recent visit to Australia and New Zealand, has compared the British Empire trade to an inverted pyramid. The only way to place it upon its base, he says, is to make Britain the main market for Dominion produce. Then he suggests that Britain should assist the Dominions in maintaining their high standard of living, and instanced the competition of the Mediterranean dried fruits, produced by low-priced labour, with the Australian article produced under comparatively high-cost conditions. But Mr. Baldwin has said again and again that whatever the present Government’s views on safeguarding may be, there will be no duties or other imposts or conditions placed on imported foodstuffs to make them dearer than they are. Most difficult and vexatious problems, then, are arising day by day, not only in the trade - relations between Great Britain and the Dominions, but between the ’’Dominions themselves, and they grow bigger and bigger with the passage of tbfne, generating unfriendliness and restricting trade expansion. As to Great Britain itself Sir Benjamin must know, for Mr. Baldwin has said so over and over again, that the present Government will place no duties

on imports of food. Whatever the present Government may promise to do in the matter of safeguarding, the Dominion’s producers cannot look for protection through the Customs against foreign competitors in the wheat, meat, dairy produce and fresh fruit markets of Great Britain. Besides, who are they to insist upon the exclusion of the foreigner from those markets, when they do their best and —in the case of exports of New Zealand butter to Australia and Australian wheat to New Zealand—succeed in destroying each other’s export trades. British husbandry is admittedly in a deplorable condition, but it can look for no protection from the present Conservative Government and would expect none from a liberal or Labofir Government against competition in its domestic markets from foreign countries and the Dominions. To tax the foreigner selling foodstuffs in the British markets, to restore the pyramid to its base, seems the only effective way to give effect to Sir Benjamin Morgan’s views, and that the Baldwin Government has definitely said it will not do. —Wellington Post.