Wairarapa Times-Age THURSDAY, MAY 26, 1938. DAIRY PRICE TRIBUNAL.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 26 May 1938, Page 6

Wairarapa Times-Age THURSDAY, MAY 26, 1938. DAIRY PRICE TRIBUNAL.

§INCE the Prime Minister had stated on the previous day that the idea certainly appealed to him, the resolution passed by the Interprovincial Conference of the Farmers’ Union in favour of setting up a tribunal, presided over by a Supreme Court Judge, to compute the price to be paid for dairy produce, presumably will be acted upon by the Government. In its full scope, the resolution appears to represent an attempt to graft the compensated price policy on to the guaranteed price. The details of the resolution (published yesterday) in effect embody a demand that the price fixed by the tribunal should be one that will enable the farmer to close the gap between the high costs he has to meet and the relatively low prices at which he sells his produce.

It must in justice be noted that the Farmers’ Union favours primarily an equitable reduction of internal costs where these are unduly high in relation to the prices obtained for export produce. Obviously, however, if the projected tribunal is to operate in terms of the conference resolution, it must abandon marketing standards, as a basis on which to determine the price of dairy produce, in favour of a process of internal adjustment, taking effect, presumably, in some form of monetary manipulation.

In the event of a fall in the prices obtained for dairy produce exports, any additional payment to dairy farmers could only be drawn directly or indirectly from the remaining resources of the community—that is to say from other branches of production. There are no means of spiriting resources from the air to meet the dairy farmers’ needs.

One of two vital facts to be faced is that a steep rise in internal costs, such as is now being witnessed, works out in an economic injustice to the dairy farmer and to others who depend on the sale of export products in unsheltered external markets (though not to them alone). The other of these facts is that any method yet suggested of compensating farmers in these circumstances —for example, by methods of monetary inflation —carries serious dangers for all concerned, farmers not excluded. The establishment of a fair and just economic balance between primary producers and other sections of the community by bringing all basic internal costs into a just relationship now involves difficulties that many people regard as insuperable. Is there, however, any other hopeful method of bringing the whole position to a stable and satisfactory settlement? BRITAIN’S EFFORTS FOR PEACE. ADDRESSING the Imperial Press Conference the other day, the British Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs (Mr R. A. Butler) maintained that any action Britain had taken recently had been designed to widen the area of agreement and lessen the area of conflict. Let us also understand (he added) that we cannot control as our intimate responsibility every situation which may arise. We have not taken sides in Spain, since we do not consider this to be our quarrel, and we cannot make ourselves responsible for every change, if changes there be, as the new world unfolds itself, but by not becoming involved in every conflict of extremes our influence will be all the greater on the critical occasion when we feel called upon to exert it. It must be said at once that the principles of policy thus outlined have much to commend them. The late Mr Bonar Law once tersely epitomised much the same principles when he said that Britain could not become the world’s policeman. A good many people may feel, however, that it is in departing in some measure from the principles expounded by Mr Butler that British foreign policy has in recent times given just ground for uneasiness. A refusal to become involved in every “conflict of extremes’’ surely ought to imply complete abstention. How far has that rule of conduct been observed in the friendly approaches Britain has made to Italy and Germany while these countries are still pursuing unchecked a course of illegal aggression in Spain? Is it not possible to trace some relationship of cause and effect between these friendly approaches to aggressive dictatorships and the subsequent seizure of Austria by Germany and the development of the still undetermined crisis that centres on Czechoslovakia? The possibility at least appears that the principles Mr Butler laid down would have been observed better and more effectively by holding rigorously aloof from the still aggressive dictatorships whose past

acts of aggression, as the British Prime Minister stated recently, Britain is as far as ever from condoning. The trouble is that friendly approaches carry an appearance of condonation in spite of statements to the contrary.