WEDNESDAY, JULY 27, 1938. IMPORTS AND INDUSTRIES.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 27 July 1938, Page 4

WEDNESDAY, JULY 27, 1938. IMPORTS AND INDUSTRIES.

JT is poor advocacy to overstate a case, but the Bureau

of Importers rather obviously falls into that error in propaganda in which it sweepingly condemns the establishment of what it calls uneconomic industries in this country. In its use of terms, the bureau classes industries as uneconomic if the goods they turn out could be purchased as imports at lower prices than are charged for them by manufacturers in this country. This contention only needs to be examined.to fall to pieces.

Probably there is hardly a manufacturing industry in the Dominion which could not be undersold and driven out of the market if free trade were established. If that were done, however, our means of buying imports or anything else would at once be reduced enormously. Free trade in this country would entail either "wholesale depopulation or a tremendous lowering of living standards. Our primary industries, at their present stage of development, are faced by limited world markets. It would be merely foolish to' suggest that they could absorb in productive and profitable occupation the many thousands who would be displaced from secondary industries if these were wrecked.

On the other hand, the exchange of secondary for primary products within the Dominion is .an element of strength in our K national economy and one upon which plainly we must rely if we are to build up a bigger population. An increasing exchange of primary and secondary goods within the Dominion is proof that our secondary industries are economic in spite of the fact that they would be undersold by competing imports under free trade. The balance we have to establish, if our industries and our population are to expand as they should, is an equitable balance of exchange between primary and secondary industries. In the extent to which that balance is established —it is by no means perfectly established at present —we shall be able to disregard as irrelevant the fact that some or all of the goods produced in our factories are being produced more cheaply in other countries. (

New Zealand is by no means singular in the fact that few, if any, of its secondary industries could stand unsheltered against world competition. Not only would the manufacturing industries of Australia and other countries of comparatively recent industrial development wither and perish speedily if they were exposed to free trade, but the same thing would happen to a proportion of the industries carried on, and protected, in countries of much older and more advanced industrial development. Virtually the whole world, Britain included, is protectionist today.

If it, be said that in this country, we 'are in danger of going too fast in the development of .secondary industries and too slowly in the purchase of imports, the answer is that we are manifestly guilty at present of precisely the opposite faults. Our annual excess of exports over imports, which was nearly £20,000,000 (New Zealand currency) in the year ended March 31, 1934, and exceeded £12,000,000 in each of the three following years, amounted to under* £7,000,000 in the year ended March 31 last. That is to say, we have been importing far too much and our trade balance falls seriously short of what is needed to meet our annual total of debt and other charges payable overseas. The position can be redressed only by increasing the value of our exports or reducing the value of our imports, and , it is tolerably certain that the latter course must be depended upon. “A SETTLEMENT IN SPAIN.” WHY should the British Prime Minister have been at such pains to declare, in dealing with questions in the House of Commons on Monday, that he “had never committed himself to a complete or even, a partial definition of the phrase,” a settlement in Spain, which he used and has repeated on a number of occasions as defining an essential condition of the implementation of the AngloItalian agreement? If Mr Chamberlain established anything in the replies he made to his questioners on this occasion, presumably it was that the phrase “a settlement in Spain,” as he has employed it, means nothing in particular. He might have been expected rather to be anxious to establish the opposite. The combination of obscurantism and indifference with which Mr Chamberlain met his questioners is the more remarkable since it is now plain to all. beholders that Spain is in a fair way to become a controlled outpost of the Fascist Powers. It is true that well-informed Spaniards and other authorities on the country declare that Spain will, not tolerate for long foreign domination of any kind, Fascist or Communist. Against that, however, there is the fact that the Geiman Nazis and the Italian Fascists have alike shown themselves to be past masters in the art of putting a whole population under the control of an armed and organised minority. Although Mr Chamberlain says there is no change in the situation, the Fascist Powers visibly are in a fair way to round off the conquest of Spain and to use that country as a pawn in the further prosecution of their plans. From the point of view of the British Empire and all democratic nations, as well as that of Spain, this is a truly deplorable state of affairs.