FIGHT AGAINST TARIFF

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 337, 24 April 1928, Page 7

FIGHT AGAINST TARIFF

BODY-BUILDERS’ ACTION FREE BRITISH CHASSIS The motor-body builders m New Zealand will take up the fight for tariff reform again this year. One of their main efforts will be directed to educating Parliamentarians, and they will try for free importation of British chassis, if the bodies are to be built in New Zealand. ACCORDING to Mr. W. Thomson, a visitor to the conference to-day, no one who heard the discussion on the question in Parliament last year could but realise the veriest piffle and uninformed nonsense which was uttered night after night. The tariff questions were again discussed by the New Zealand Coach and Motor-Body Builders at their annual conference this morning. Mr. E. C. Harvie, Wellington, presented the tariff report, already published. He said that some of the traders had asserted the public wanted all-steel bodies; but this was incorrect. Even General Motors knew that, and did not build all-steel bodies. Australia had secured protective legislation, as a result of which one firm alone built over 70,000 bodies every year, which meant millions of pounds remaining in the country. They had to get down to securing the sympathy of the House for secondary industries. MINISTERS UNSYMPATHETIC “Our Prime Minister has been elected the chief commercial traveller of the country,” he remarked, “but we don’t want that. He is not going to boost British goods. He is not sympathetic nor is Cabinet. They won’t listen to us. The Minister is guided entirely by the permanent head of the Customs Department.” He said that had it not been lor the association pressing their points very hard with the Minister last year, their trade would have been almost annihilated. The executive wanted the Government to give free access to British chassis with a 10 per cent. rate on the American chassis. (Applause.) If they could get this it would help both the secondary industries and the country. The body-building trade lent itself to expansion, and could employ a hundred per cent, more men at least. Mr. Thompson estimated that the body-building trade could absorb

12,000 men, with a weekly pay-roll of £60,000. Money which would stay in New Zealand instead of going out of the country to pay foreign w. rhmen, who certainly could not make a better job than the New Zealand work-in. He hoped that the politicians would soon realise the importance of the position, and agree to the tariff required, not only in the interests of the secondary industries, but in those of the country.