“SQUANDER AND TAX”

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 491, 22 October 1928, Page 12

“SQUANDER AND TAX”

MR. VEITCH’S RETORT TO PRIME MINISTER 40,000 PEOPLE LOST IN YEAR (Special to THE SUN) WANGANUI, To-day. Mr. W. A. Veitch, M.P.. Dominion President of the United Party, referring to the Prime Minister’s speech at Invercargill, in which he was reported to have likened Sir Joseph Ward’s policy to “borrow, boom and bust,” said that an appropriate reply would be that Mr. Coates’s record was “borrow, squander and tax.” Mr. Coates had deliberately misrepresented Sir Joseph when he not only said once, but repeated himself, that' the United Party leader intended to borrow £70.000,000 in one year, whereas Sir Joseph’s proposals were for an arrangement .in one year to borrow that sum over a period of ten years. Mr. Coates was reported to have said: “If we agreed to such a suggestion we would have disaster and a repetition of the effects of the Julius Vogel policy, when New’ Zealand lost in a | short time no fewer than 12,000 of its population by migration.” “Now just let us have a look at what Reform has lost in population,” said Mr. Veitch. “For the year ending December 31, 1925, the arrivals from Australia were 9,262 and the permanent departures for Australia 19,304. For the following year the arrivals were 10,301 and the departures 22,576. and for the year ending 1927, the arrivals were 9,432 and departures 24,876. “The total departures for the three years were 66,756, and the total arrivals 28,995, so that New Zealand lost in population to Australia alone 37,761. “It was fair to assume that a large number of these were immigrants for whom the State had to foot the bill to bring them to New Zealand. “The whole thing,” said Mr. Veitch, “is that those who so violently condemned Sir Joseph Ward’s scheme are not really big enough in their mental capacity to grip the bigness nor the soundness of the scheme any more than those who, years ago, were just as violently opposed to Sir Joseph’s scheme of advances to workers and settlers.” Sir Joseph Ward’s borrowing policy was really much more modest than Reform’s own policy over the past ten years.