TRANS-TASMAN TRADE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 18 January 1939, Page 9

TRANS-TASMAN TRADE

NEW ZEALAND READY TO GO HALF WAY

STATEMENT BY MR SAVAGE.

SETTLEMENT OF DIFFERENCES DESIRED.

(By Telegraph—Press Association.) WELLINGTON. This Day

The statement that the Labour Government was ready now, as it always had been, to meet the Australian Government halfway in any trade arrangement with the Dominion, was made by the Prime Minister, Mr Savage, when commenting in an interview last evening on a report from Sydney that a united conference of citrus growers had decided to form a committee to protest to the Federal Government against a continuation of the New Zealand embargo on citrus fruit. Speakers at the conference criticised the prohibition of the importation of New Zealand potatoes into Australia, which, they claimed, had made New Zealand retaliate with an embargo on Australian citrus fruit.

Mr Savage said he had stated before that the potato and citrus fruit position between Australia and New Zealand had been, pretty close to being stupid. “We have been prepared all along,and we are still prepared, to discuss the question with a view to having the whole thing straightened out,” Mr Savage added. The Minister of Marketing, Mr Nash, in a recent statement, said that though the Commonwealth still placed an embargo on the importation of New Zealand potatoes, there was now, in effect, no embargo on the importation of Australian oranges into New Zealand. “All the Australian oranges which the New Zealand market can absorb are now imported, the only restriction being that no oranges can be sent to Now Zealand from the districts suffering from the Mediterranean fly,” he said.

“The embargo on Australian oranges was a retaliatory measure imposed by a previous Government following the Commonwealth embargo on New Zealand potatoes. The chief sufferers, however, were, of course, the New Zealand consumers of oranges and the growers of potatoes.”