The Taihape Daily Times. AND WAIMARINO ADVOCATE THURSDAY, JUNE 27th, 1918. A TAIHAPE DISTRICT INDUSTRY.

Taihape Daily Times, 27 June 1918, Page 4

The Taihape Daily Times. AND WAIMARINO ADVOCATE

THURSDAY, JUNE 27th, 1918. A TAIHAPE DISTRICT INDUSTRY.

(With which is incorporated The Xaihapo Post and Walrtrarlao News).,

It is generally accepted that in any great national reform the few who may be adversely affected must suffer for the corresponding advantages of the many. There seems to be rather arbitrary limitations to such an acceptation, however, for we see that a few hugely capitalised bodies of men, whom we will call meat trusts ana shipping combines, must not be limited in their operations, notwithstanding the fact that they will most assuredly bring about a disastrous decrease in the volume and value of a country’s chief exportable products. Meat trusts and shipping rings are exceptions to the rule; they may unmolestedly hum along robbing and plundering, while less influential, though incomparably more essential industries are pursued and baited by interested people who would become parasites upon them. An importantindustry to this district is one of the subjected to this sort of treatment. If the people of our neighbourhood permit outsiders to engineer a compulsory unremunerative price for the timber the district has to dispose of, they must be prepared to experience a considerably lowered spending power amongst that large army who subsist upon sawmilling. It is not so much a question whether a few sawmillers, owing to ad van tageous location, are making more profit than others less favourably placed, as whether the district should view with indifference an arbitrary cutting-down of the market value of one of its chief products. Business men standing behind shop counters should not wonder at a falling-off in their takings so long as they do nothing to stop an arbitrarily falling-off in the takings of a district industry which constitutes one' of their chief sources of custom. •’■lt is grossly and manifestly unjust that a few sawmillers, who, by' chance or foresight, are in a better milling position than the ordinary sawmilling rank and file, should be paraded before the Efficiency Board to create an erroneous and unjust position in the mind of the Board, but that is what has happened. In yesterday’s issue of a city na'per was an irritating garbled statement about coopers not being able to secure sufficient timber to supply the barrels, casks and boxes necessary for packing the country's farm products; but w r e would ask why those men all at once ceased to sene in their usual periodical orders to millers; was it not because they thought they had the Efficiency Board trapped, nobbled, or completely under the whip so that a compulsory reduction in timeber prices was fringing on certainty? We care nothing about small-minded men who rather devote their time to preying upon each other than in striving for legitimate and sound extension of their trade, but we do resent any unfair attempt to unjustly interfere with any industry upon which business in this district largely depends. The men who fur. nished thestory to $ city' paper ,yester-i day are trying gain public sympa-i. thy by unwarrantable methods; flacr they not ceased their usual orders for supplies found necessary to work upon, in the hope of having succeeded in engineering the Efficiency Board into securing supplies at a lowered price, they need not have experienced any shortage. Their cry now is the result of their own folly, for they could hardly expect that sawmillers would go on storing and drying th e timber for them till prices were compulsorily cut down. We have variously been told that timber has gone up in price seventy-five per cent., some say more; that the increases have rendered the cost of house erection double what it was prior to the war, but we think that Mr. Harold Beauchamp, Chairman of the Bank of New Zealand, has somewhat cleared the timber price atmosphere. In the - figures he submitted to

the shareholders of th.e bank at the recent annual meeting, he stated .that Dressed Matai in 1914 was twentyseven shillings per 100 feet; in 1918 it is thirty-five shillings, an increase of 30 per cent. The next item quoted was Dressed Oregon, which in 1914 was twenty-three shillings per 100 feet, while in 1918 if is forty shillings per 100; an increase' ox 74 per cent., significantly showing that New Zealand millers, acting on values in foreign markets that are' hungering for their timber, would be within their rights in putting on a further 44 per cent. We stand by a district industry, not from unfair motives, but be-

cause we are convinced that the aver, age sawmiller is not asking a higher price than that he is justly entitled to, for his timber. He goes out into the wildest country, amongst mountains and torrents to seek his harvest; he constantly braves sucE elements as city men have little conception of; he works in all weathers, and pays unprecedented prices for everything he requires, even as much as 500 per cpnt on pre-war prices; he pays 30 per cent, more for labour, much of which is of 20 per cent, less value than the expert labour which has gone to the front, and yet men who sit in armchairs in comfortable city offices how! because, as Harold Beauchamp shows, timber has gone up, as a result of the war, 30 per cent. As the cost of living generally has increased by that amount, or more, it should convince all but those whose interests do nor permit them to be convinced, that sawmillers have not increased prices to an extent they quite fairly and legitimately might have done. Melbourne and Sydney importers of New Zealand timber are protesting to our Government against any attempt to stop export. This country would 'be in a nice fix if Australians arbitrarily stopped the export of coal, and even if they do not stop coal export, coal prices and, sequentially, gas prices, would have to be increased owing to ; £oal ships having to return, freightless, ,One writer in a city paper stated that the .recent additional shilling per hundred. ?on r timber would add forty pounds to; the post of. a house; that man had a £IOO,OOO building in mind; certainly not ithe workman’s home, containing about sixteen thousand feet of timber. An attitude that has to be bolstered by such attempts to gain public favour, can have nothing said on its hehalf. This district will not stand silently by and see one of its chief sources of income ruined by unprincipled methods. Our farmers are menaced by the meat and shipping octopi, and our timber industry is now harried by sharks of an indigenous character.