The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET, AUCKLAND MONDAY, JUNE 17, 1929. A TIMELY PROTEST

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 691, 17 June 1929, Page 8

The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET, AUCKLAND MONDAY, JUNE 17, 1929. A TIMELY PROTEST

OVER a thousand men remain on the official register of unemployed in Auckland. This has been the approximate total continuously for a whole year with occasionally slight variations above and below the thousand mark. And all the time the Labour Department has been doing its utmost to place idle applicants in work, while both the old and new Governments in turn made record efforts to cope with the chronic trouble. Each administration doubtless succeeded in alleviating the worst conditions of unemployment distress. It is only fair that such appreciative acknowledgment of their earnest service should be made, but it is equally right in fairness to add that both failed to remove the malignant cause of enforced idleness. Now, it even looks as though the boastful United Government, which got into administrative office largely on the strength of its cocksure promise instantly to banish unemployment with a dazzling magic of its own, merely has contrived in the past six months to aggravate the industrial disease. It has spent money with characteristic prodigality and increased the number of men engaged on public works to a total without a parallel in the Dominion’s history, and still there is heard every day the plaintive cry for charitable aid and unemployment relief. The position today, or rather one singular feature of it in this overloaded centre of unemployment, has attracted the attention of the Auckland Chamber of Commerce. This is the outstanding fact that, irrespective of everything that has been done in many ways, including the extravagant but essential way of providing charitable aid for able-bodied men and their families, the demand for work remains constant at a thousand applications. It is not surprising that an organisation of business men has sought an explanation of the cause, and has been forced to the conclusion that one of the contributory causes, if not altogether the real reason, was and still is the Government’s policy in deciding impulsively and probably foolishly to pay high rates of wages on unemployment relief works. There appears to be solid ground for this opinion. By placing unemployment relief on a level with normal occupation, the Government at once made industrial assistance attractive, and, in some kinds of unskilled work, more desirable than permanent jobs at less wages than twelve or fourteen shillings a day. It is believed at any rate that men who formerly were employed in such conditions, particularly in the country, have been encouraged to leave their occupations for big wages on public works controlled by a paternal Government whose generosity is an inexhaustible fountainhead of political kindness. Many overburdened taxpayers and ratepayers will be inclined to support the Chamber of Commerce in its timely protest to the Government. Whether there is everything in the protest or nothing in it at all, it is quite obvious that the departmental system of unemployment registration is anything but perfect: Efficient registration would reveal every week whether the perpetual thousand of unemployed applicants are always the same Auckland men or whether a considerable proportion of the total represents work-seeking strangers from other districts. If the aggregate rarely has varied in identity over a period, then it must be conceded that Auckland is in a bad plight as regards unemployment and unemployable men. Of course, it is not to be expected that our politicians would or could make registration perfectly efficient, so that the department and the administration should know the exact source of endless applications for unemployment relief. This problem recently confronted the administrators of Italy, where it was solved within three days. Mussolini merely issued a Government decree ordering all the unemployed throughout Italy to return forthwith to their native towns and districts and there register so that each place could and must employ its own unemployed people. There are occasions when one strong Dictator is worth more to his nation than a hundred professional politicians whose best work is palavering talk. If Sir Joseph Ward really wants to make his party famous, he will tackle unemployment in the old-fashioned way which alone effects a notable remedy. This is to reduce taxation, practise Government economy and promote private enterprise in the development of industrial production.