EMERGENT INDUSTRIES

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 857, 28 December 1929, Page 7

EMERGENT INDUSTRIES

THE HOPE OF 1930 The greatest problem New Zealand faces as it greets the dawn of a New Year and a fresh decade is that of producing a greater amount of wealth, so that we may enjoy a more widespread distribution of that happiness and prosperity which we are now wishing everyone. To bring all these cood wishes in a successful materialisation, there must be the will and the determination to explore the most profitable paths for increased production and more profitable employment of onr labour. Having seen the light, we must follow those paths with energy and enterprise; with the inflexible spirit of independence and selfreliance that stamped New Zealand's founders and pioneers. The efforts to rouse our people to a sense of duty in supporting the j workers of this country which supI ports them, and to realise the vital importance of home production in preference to importation, is now bear i iug good fruit. It culminated mA i Christmas with a splendid demand for the reliable products of our fellow Xew Zealanders. That patriotic rei sponse to the call to support our local industries means a message of hope and cheer to our workers for the Xew Year, when they start work again with a rush of orders to replenish exhausted stocks. THE OUTLOOK FOR INDUSTRY If. however, the healthy wave of preference for our local workers’ goods was only a Christmas gesture

of goodwill which will fail to endure the outlook for the New Y’ear will not be a very hopeful one to over 100.000 breadwinners, whose content ment and prosperity is now bound up with our manufacturing industries, and who have found the past year one of the most depressing in our industrial history.

We must maintain and increase that determined demand for the products of our own labour and materials, otherwise the blame will be on us, as buyers and shoppers, for throwing our skilled workers idle by giving preference to goods made by those of outside countries. To send an order outside for goods which can be made here is to throw sand into the wheels of our industrial machinery. There is every reason for hope that the clouds of depression and the deplorable wave of unemployment which followed during the past few years will now disperse, and that a greater encouragement for our industrialists will now’ flow from both the people and those in authority over them. At the foundation our industries are dependent on the goodwill and support of the individual buyers, and through them the people as a whole. At the top are those in power who have the responsibility of guiding tindestiny of our people, and who have the power to lead the country to increased independence and sell reliance. OUR NEW DEPARTMENT The department responsible for guiding our industrial development has now been completely reorganised, and a Parliamentary recess committee has been set up to explore the causes of industrial depression and the best methods of stimulating increased local production. The new Minister, (he Hon. J. B. Donald, is a keen and farseeing business man, who should have no difficulty in discovering the cause and cure for the industrial stagnation of recent years. The new head of the department, Mr. C. W. Clinkard. returns from the onerous work of cleaning up the administrative service in Western Samoa to resume his task of conserving the interests of our local industries, and he has every qualification for the job. As a member of the departmental Tariff Commission which made an exhaustive inquiry into the industries of the Dominion before framing the last Tariff Bill, Mr. Clinkard added to the intimate knowledge he had already acquired as one of the head officials of the Department of Industries and Commerce. If there be a fly in the ointment of Cabinet reconstruction it is the continued linking of our industries with that vague abstraction known as “commerce/’ Industry we know, and trade we know, but “commerce’* is sometimes difficult of definition. Industrial production and commercial interests do not always run on parallel lines, but are often antagonistic. With a sympathetic policy in a | practical form from the new department, and a patriotic attitude toward our local industries by the Parliamentary committee shortly to inquire into them, there is a prospect that Parliament may realise the wisdom of the policy adopted in Great Britain, Aus- ; tralia, Africa and Canada of safeguarding industries against an undesirable flood of imports, thereby | causing a w’elcome expansion of our present industries, and the emergence here of new ones which will employ our idle w’orkers and increase the local demand for our farmers’ foodstuffs and raw materials.

With goodwill all round toward our local industries and their workers we can make the new decade an industrial era of unprecedented profit and progress.