THE BUTTER LEVY.

Taranaki Daily News, 24 October 1919, Page 4

THE BUTTER LEVY.

The decision of the Government to compensate dairymen supplying the local market with butter for the past year will be received with satisfaction, especially in Taranalti, where the handicap of supplying such a necessary article of diet at below its cost of production has been severely felt. It will be recalled that the retail price of butter was fixed at Is 8d per lb, but the export value was considerably higher, and the producers, in order that those supplying the local market should not be unduly penalised, agreed that the burden of loss should be distributed over all the producers. The dairymen petitioned the Government this year that this loss should not be borne by themselves alone, but by the country generally. The Government has now acceded to this request, making up the difference between the local price and the export price, involving the payment from the Consolidated Fund of £170,000. In our view, when the National Government decided to limit the price of butter sold locally—to which no exception can be taken—it ought to have made provision that the loss should not be borne by one section alone, and that section, as Mr. Massey frankly acknowledges, the hardest worked and poorest of all our producers. When the same National Government desired the wheat growers to put in more wheat it took a different and more proper line. The price of bread was kept down to a point that made wheat growing, unprofitable, so the Government offered the growers a payable price, the wheat was put in, and the loss borne by the Consolidated Fund. Having admitted the principle in one case, the Government could not consistently have refused the dairymen's petition, and it is to its credit that the right thing by a very deserving body of producers has at last been done. Mr. A, Morton (chairman of the National Dairy Union) and the Taranaki Members of Parliament, who have taken an active interest in representing, the justice of the dairyman's claims to the Government, are to be congratulated upon the success that has crowned their efforts.