WELLINGTON TOPICS

Taihape Daily Times, Issue 219, 1 December 1916, Page 5

WELLINGTON TOPICS

COST OF LIVING

PRODUCERS AND CONSUMERS

(Special Correspondent)

WELLINGTON, Nov 29

The members of Parliament representing dairying constituonces who waited upon the Acting Prime Minister and Minister of Agriculture yesterday to protest against the butterfat “licensing the” which one of their number stigmatised as an “infernal tax,” did not find Mr Allen and Air Macdonald in a very compliant frame of mind. Mr G. J. 'Anderson, the member for Mataura, while admitting the importance of doing something to reduce the cost of living, utterly disapproved of the manner in which the Government had set about this task. Insm-ad of giving the poor man relief at the expense of the whole community, which would have been a perfectly proper proceeding, it was helping well-to-do people at the , cost, of the unhappy dairyman. The but-ter-fat licensing fee meant in the case of a small farmer a tax of £1 a year upon each of his cows, and an impost of this kind was wholly opposed to the democratic principle of equality of sacrifice. Mr Wilkinson, Mr Hunter, Mr Okey and Mr Young followed in a similar strain, the member for Waikato urging that if the Ministers were not prepared to do justice to the farmers On their own responsibility they should call Parliament together and take the sense of the representatives of the people on the whole question. AN UNRESTRICTED MARKET. ' Mr Allen in the course of his reply. referring to a suggestion that had been made by several members of the deputation to the effect that the Government should have considered the butter and choose outputs of the Dominion, said he could not see how the farmers were being wronged if they were now receiving 8d or Id a lb more for their products than they would have received if they had taken them away from them at the beginning of the season. As a matter of fact the dairymen were better off than were any other class of farmers. The export of their commodities wag absolutely unrestricted, and whatever happened they were assured of a large advance on pre-war prices. Mr Macdonald, elaborating the points that had been made by the Acting Prime Minister, said it would be highly improper to allow the 70,000 people who owned land to impose what prices, they chose upon the million people who did not owu land. But the Government was not,, as had been implied by some of the members of the deputation, treating the dairymen unfairly. After deducting the licensing fee the prices for butter this year were 3d to 5d a lb more than those prevailing two years ago. It was absolutely necessary that the cost of living should be kept down, and in this case the best course towards that end had been adopted by the Government.

LABOUR AND PRICES. Several of the messages of sympathy sent to the Drivers’ Union during its dispute with the employers have contained allusions to the cost of living, and people who are credited with knowing more about the mind of the workers than the average person docs, insist that high prices are at present the most serious menace to the industrial peace. The personal relations between masters and men, they say, never have been better than they are to-day and employment has never been more abundant at high wages and under reasonable conditions. But prices have been going up steadily since the beginning of the war, and now have reached such a level that married men with three or four children to feed and clothe and house are worse oft’ on £3 a week than they were on £2 a week a few years ago Some of this class are feeling the pinch of actual poverty, and rightly or wrongly, they have got it in their heads that their troubles arc due not so much to the direct effect of the war as they are to the machinations of the monopolist and the exploiter. It is easy for people even in comfortable circumstances to sympathise with their less fortunate fellows, and just now a feeling of resentment is pervading the country which those in authority cannot afford to ignore.