NONESSENTIAL IMPORTS.

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 7, Issue 356, 1 March 1918, Page 2

NONESSENTIAL IMPORTS.

We are glad to see thai ihe Auckland Chamber of Commerce is drawing the attention of the Government in plain terms to the injurious effect upon commerce of allowing the space in cargo ships to be taken up by the conveyance ot articles not of essential use, to

the exclusion of goods the country cannot do without. In a letter from the President, Mr Robert Burns, to the Prime Minister it was stated that one ship that recently arrived from New York carried to New Zealand nearly one thousand motor-cars, occupying the space of ten thousand tons measurement.

We have more than once during the last two years strongly commented upon the slackness of the National Government in permitting the country to be flooded with American motor-cars while absolutely essential articles were shut out owing to lack of shipping space. Agricultural machinery of vital necessity to the continued production of the country has been left in the warehouses of the United States because it was excluded by the shipping owners in their preference for motor-cars.

On the same day as Mr Burns in Auckland addressed his remonstrance to the Government, the Minister for Finance, replying in Wellington to a deputation which had asked that agricultural and pastoral associations should be relieved from payment of the Amusement Tax, said that it

would be difficult for him to give up any source of income, as if the war lasted to the end of the year we should have to find seven millions annually to pay the interest on our loans. Now, no one knows better than Sir Joseph Ward that the sole and only means we have of meeting this liability is from the excess of our exports over our imports. He is also probably quite aware that we cannot even keep up, much less increase, our exports unless we can obtain manures at a price at which it is possible to apply it to the land profitably. We have ten thousand tons of motor-cars for which we have to send out of the country probably not less than a quarter of a million in hard cash, with a further corollary of at least a hundred thousand a year for their up-keep and running expenses. What might we not have done with ten thousand tons of phosphatlc rock ?