ROMANCE OF ENTERPRISE AND INDUSTRY

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 2, 24 March 1927, Page 8 (Supplement)

ROMANCE OF ENTERPRISE AND INDUSTRY

Auckland has proved that man does not live by the plough alone. The extensive range of its provincial secondary industries employs one-third of the Dominion’s industrial population. And yet, in reality, enterprise only touches the edge of the Avide field of opportunity.

■ FFICIAL recorders for the State disclose with unprejudiced emphasis that, in point of numbers, Auckland claims and easily holds the premier position. It has four hundred more factories than Wellington, six hundred more than Canterbury, and twice as many as the aggregated establishments in Otago and Southland. That comparison leaps from the mass of figures tabulated by the Government Statistician, So it really is not necessary at all for Aucklanders to boast provocatively of the industrial strength of their province and, boasting, cast a stone in the ' pool of parochialism and cause its noisome waters • to run across all the provinces from the outer boundaries of Auckland to distant Invercargill. The truth of the position is as plain as the peaks of Rangitoto. It may be observed as a feature of special interest that the tally of secondary industrial workers in this province to-day is almost equal to that of the whole of New Zealand thirty years ago. The present number is about 27,000 out of the Dominion’s total of 81,000. Auckland’s manufacturing and industrial establishments pay well over £5,000,000 a year in wages. value of materials used in these secondary industries is close on £ 15,000,000 a year. The gross value of products, according to the latest available official returns, is over £28,000,000 annually, while the value created by manufacturing operations is

nearly £12,000,000 a year. These are relatively impressive returns which show that while dairy cattle are indubitably the best workers in the province, a great deal of useful and excellent manufacturing work is being done by industrialists.

The position of the secondary industries is pleasing, but it does not justify a mood of complacency* There is need for a drastic change in industrial methods and organisa tiort. Too many of the 1,300 manufacturing establishments In this district, as throughout Now Zealand, are work ing on a tinkering or patchwork scale. Many of them are excellently equipped and organised, but others cannot even pretend to ■ have attained anything like a first-class standard of efficiency. Specialisation is crude, and there is a lamentable overload of overhead charges. There are too many administrative industrialists seeking a thousand pounds a year without taking their coats off. Years ago there were those who would have it that manufactures would never flourish in this country, that New Zealand was essentially a land for primary production, that its workers should themselves , . will roducing from the land, export what they produced and import all, if not most, of what they required in the of manufactured articles.

AN AMAZING RECORD !

Thp- growth of secondary industries, particularly in the last two gives flat contradiction to this theory. One wonders what ornffpr of twenty years ago thought when he looked a few months 1 back into the stalls at the Winter Show, or, more recently still, into the snop windows of Auckland during “Made In New Zealand Week.” Steam engines, railway locomotives, motor-car bodies, farm implements, bricks, tiles, sashings, doors, coppers, stoves, boots, blankets, rugs, shawls, men s suits, woollen underclothing, saddlery and harness, flour, cakes, biscuits, groceries, canned goods, preserved fruits, jams, sauces, confectionery, glass bottles —all these things, and a hundred more, “made in New Zealand” from New Zealand materials. This was the answer to those who had said that New Zealand could not manufacture her own requirements. The cry of “can’t do it” was also raised years ago in the great Commonwealth across the Tasman, whose manufacturing wealth is now so immense that its rise from humble beginnings is one of the greatest romances in industrialism. Australian manufac 4 ' ’*ers were backed by a sane protection, by a tariff * iich prevented the unfair competition of cheap labour oversea goods, but which was not designed to shut out those goods altogether and thus grant Australian manufacturers a monopoly to enable them to exploit the public. It was framed so as to permit of Australian-made goods being dold in the open market, after the payment of a fair profit to the manufacturer and a fair wage to Hie employee, on equal terms with imported goods. A patriotic people responded to a sane appeal. They made work for Australian people by buying Australian goods in preference to oversea goods. Brifisli and other oversea manufacturers started factories and workshops in the Commonweakn, making their goods on the spot from locally raised materials. So stupendous has been the , growth of her manufactures that their annual value amounts to hundreds of millions of pounds and there is no bound to their expansion.

A Wide Field of Golden Opportunity

The proper encouragement of manufactures may produce a relatively similar position in New Zealand. But a real protection is not one which shuts

out oversea goods by prohibited imposts and fattens the manufacturer by allowing him, oy this blasting

of opposition, to extort unfair profits from New Zealand consumers. That may oe a good thing

(for a very short while and until the bubble is pricked) to the manufacturer, but it is a very bad thing for the people and the country, because it

means production for a stinted demand and shrivels

the purchasing power of the workers’ wages. There may be a just pride in the progress of New Zealand’s secondary industries so far, and a great hope for their continued and greater growth

Harbour Development The record of harbour development in the past eight years might, be described fairly as an amazing story of enterprise. Since January 1, 1919, the progressive administrators have spent close on one million and a-half pounds sterling on many notable improvements. The schedule of works at Auckland and Manukau Harbours speaks for itself. Here is the official list: Prince’s Wharf and Equipment £609,000 Eastern Reclamations and Deflector .. 302,000 Western Reclamations and Wharves .. 193,000 Central Wharf and Equipment ♦ 156,000 Quarry Plant, Launches, Pile Drivers, •» Cranes, Sundry Machinery 57,000 Low Level Landing, King’s Wharf,.Gates and Fences 24,000 Onehunga Wharf and Equipment .. .. 72,000 Sundry Works, Wharves, Sheds, Signal Stations, Dredging, etc 85,000 £1,498,000 This expenditure does not —except in the case of Prince’s Wharf and Onehunga Wharf—represent total capital expenditure on these works, but is merely a statement of the expenditure from January 1, 1919, to September 1, 1926.

—with reservations. New Zealand workers in New Zealand factories, using New Zealand materials, can produce goods which are the equal of any produced anywhere. Can these goods be produced at a price with which they may compete with goods from overseas—with a fair measure of protection? If so, well and good. But if these goods cannot he produced without the protection of a high tariff which impoverishes the people, the country is better off without.such secondary industries and would be better paid in the long run by confining its attention to primary products. Manufacturers have now a great opportunity which may he very easily lost. Will they put forth their most earnest endeavours to produce goods, content with only the barest necessity of protection, or will they carry on by costly methods and attempt to force the Government into aiding them by high tariffs at the expense of the general public. The former policy will build up industrial prosperity on sound lines, the latter will provide a suicidal eventuality. Scientific investigation, concentration on big effort, work as near as 'possible along the lines of massed production, the abandonment of antique machinery and costly methods, these M'S tfeb things, even more than protection, which will enable the manufacturers of New Zealand to compete with their rivals overseas. The thoughtful observer cannot but be hopeful for the development of local manufactures. The recent slump in butter showed what terrific blows can he dealt the prosperity of a country which has aTL or most of its eggs in one basket. The cry for immigrants to go on the land is all very well —or it would be well if there were the land for them to go on but how are 12,000 people a year to be settled as farmers in such a country as this under such conditions as prevail? It is only by the continuous

development of the secondary Industries, fai conjunction with the primary, that any degree of immigration at all can successfully he absorbed.

No part of Auckland bears more impressive evidence of the growth of the city’s industries than its waterfront. It is true that unusual congestion of shipping last week fretted the commercial com munity, but the strain did not by any means prove that the Waite mata Harbour is lacking in facilities for handling the maritime trade of the province. As a matter of plain statement rather than an exercise of boasting the port of Auckland is second only to Buenos Ayres for the extent and modernity of waterside equip ment south of the Line