WELLINGTON TOPICS.

Taranaki Daily News, 4 December 1916, Page 7

WELLINGTON TOPICS.

COST OF LIVING. PRODUCERS AND CONSUMERS, (From Our Own Correspondent.) Wellington, Nov. 20. The members of Parliament representing dairying constituencies who waited upon the Acting Prime Minister and th« Minister of Agriculture to protest against the butter-fat "licensing fee" which one of their number stigmatised as "an infernal tax," did not find Mr. Allen and Mr. Mac Donald in a very compliant frame of mind. Mr. G. J, Anderson, the member for Mataura, who acted as chief spokesman, while admitting the importance of doing something to reduce the cost of living, utterly disapproved of the manner in which the Government had Bet about this task. Instead c/ 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 butter fat "licensing fee" meant in the case of the small struggling 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 question.

| AX UNRESTRICTED MARKET. . Mr. Allen, iu the course of his reply, referring to ,i suggestion that had been made by several members of the deputation to the effect that the Government should have commandeered the gutter and cheese outputs of the Dominion, said he could not understand how the farmers were being wronged if they now were receiving 3d and 4d a pound more for their products than they would have received if they had been taken away from them at the beginning of the season. As a matter of fact, the dairymen were better off than were any other'clas? of farmers. Ihe export of their commodities wag absolutely unrestricted, and whatever happened they were assured of a large advance on pre-war prices. Mr. Mac Donald, 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 pleased upon tho million people who did not own hind. 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 from 3d to 5d a pound higher than H ose prevailing two years ago. It was absolutely necessary that the cost of living should be kept down, and in this -as-o the best course towards that end had been adopted by the Government. LABOR AND PRICES.

Several of (he messages of sympathy sent to the Drivers' Union during its dis puto. with th" employers have contained allusions to the. cost of living, and people who are credited with knowing more (.bout the mind of the workers than tho average person does insist that high prices are at present the most serious menace to industrial peace. The person a) relations between masters and men, they say, never have been better than they are to-day and employment never has been more abundant at good wages and under reasonable conditions. But prices have bc-tn 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 hov.se are worse ofT on £3 a week than they were on £2 a week a few years ago. Some men of this class are feeling the pinch of actual poverty and rightly or wrongly they have got it into their heads that their troubles are due not so much to the direct effect of tho war as , they are to the machinations of the monopolist and the exploiter. It is easy even for people in comfortable circumstances to sympathise with their less fortunate fellows, and just now a feeling of resentment is pervading the community which those in authority carmot afford (o ignore. BALLOT BLUNDERS.

The Minister of Defence ami the Government Statistician did their best to prepare the public for a certain number of blunders in the drawing of-the first ballot under the Military Service Act, but they hardly can have expected so many mistakes as actually occurred. Complaints arc coming from all parts of the country. The names of numbers of men in camp or on their way to the front or heroically fighting in the trenches are included in the list, much to the pain and embarrassment of their friends. Even the names of men who have been killed doing their duty crop up here and there and also of those who have done (heir "little lit" and returned to the Dominion. The, explanation of all this sad muddle seems to be that the Government Statistician, in the absence of more efficient assistance, was driven to employing a number of temporary hands who could not master in the time at their disposal all the intricacies of the ballot. The t v oublc is not likely to oaYur again, at any Tate in so bad a form, as further precautions are being taken, and the temporary hands are being a?siduously drilled in their duties. One consolation about the matter is that amidst all the complaints there has been not a single suggestion of partiality or unfairness. _