The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET, AUCKLAND MONDAY, MARCH 25, 1929 POLITICS AND UNEMPLOYMENT

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 621, 25 March 1929, Page 8

The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET, AUCKLAND MONDAY, MARCH 25, 1929 POLITICS AND UNEMPLOYMENT

THE great need of tlie day in British, politics, as it also is in New Zealand, is a practical policy for dealing with unemployment. In addition to providing immediate work for idle men and for youths who are more susceptible to the demoralising influences of idleness, there is an appealing necessity for the promotion of industrial recovery and expansion. Those who are not familiar with the raw misery of distress in a country which suffers the rigour of a harsh winter and the squalor of pernicious slums may. quicken their imagination toward a mental picture of British conditions by merely looking at distressing circumstances in this favoured community and multiply these an hundredfold. A Salvation Army officer has announced that his organisation in Auckland alone last year provided 4.800 free beds and 8,400 free meals for destitute persons, and also clothed five hundred ragged men. That, in itself, is a remarkable record of charitable service, but it is at the same time a lamentable exposure of the extent of social distress in one population centre of an imdeveloped country to which the questing eyes of British statesmen look for a generous scope for the employment of British unemployed men and women in prosperous settlement and industrial activity at a higer standard of comfort. But the Salvation Army’s vivid record of social service is not by any means tlie full story. The Army was only one of many organisations whose civic services included alleviation of distress. For example, the Hospital and Charitable Aid Board spent, about <£40,000 within the same period on helping destitute persons, while different missions, the churches, many private citizens, and both local and State administrations actually "did more for the relief of unemployment than all the different organisations together ever had done before in nearly half a century. There still remains about a thousand unemployed in this fine city. It has been well said of British politics that the party with the best unemployment cure or remedy deserves to be the next Government. Something of the same theory filled the minds of a discontented electorate in New Zealand last November when the electors surprisingly gave the United Party an opportunity to put it into practice. The United Government has yet to overcome its severest test. In Great Britain within a few months a record general election in respect of national voting power will be decided largely on the question of unemployment. Industrial depression is at the root of British political discontent. Already, the Tory Government, which has done its best in an amiable way, as symbolised by the Prime Minister’s pipe and charming speeches, has received a slap on the face for what its most hitter critics harshly call “protracted futility.” Curiously enough, such policy as Mr. Baldwin and his sagging party possess for the relief of unemployment and industrial depression is a measure of protection for industries against foreign competition. The Tories mean to assail with tariff manipulation the obsolete tradition of Free Trade! If mirth he permitted on the Elysiau fields, it would almost he worth while (as Tom Sawyer used to hope) “to die temporarily” in order to hear the ghosts of Protectionists twit those that died as champions of Free Trade. Neither the Liberal Party nor Labour has much, if any sympathy with safeguarding and derating as magic cures for unemployment. These are contemned by them as extravagant quack medicines. The Liberals, whose leader, by the way, has just been likened to “a very active wasp beneath an inverted tumbler,” intend or promise to spend money prodigally—a real Liberal art—on unemployment remedies. They have s~> many schemes that it has been necessary to embody them in Grom, Brown, and Yellow Books. Labour has discarded the violent hue of one of its wings and has adopted a soft pink shade as a more attractive colour for it programme of nationalisation of almost everything.