Wairarapa Times-Age MONDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 1939. DISCOUNTING PESSIMISM.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 27 November 1939, Page 4

Wairarapa Times-Age MONDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 1939. DISCOUNTING PESSIMISM.

VISITING Hamilton, where a mass meeting,’ is to be held at the beginning of next week in protest against import restrictions and for the discussion of other aspects of the economic situation, the Minister of Labour (Air M ebb) has set himself to show that “the fears that have been expressed in some quarters that we are facing an immediate economic smash are groundless.” Nothing better can be desired than that the Minister may succeed in this endeavour and may be able to show that conditions are being established in which the development of local industries, as he contends, will be stimulated. To that end it is very necessary that members of the Government, as well as other people, should deal frankly with aspects of the existing state of affairs which are regarded as menacing by those who have no desire whatever to stir up party political feeling or to harbour unwarranted anticipations of “economic smash.’’ Most people are agreed, for example, that the general aim should be to co-operate in extending and enlarging industrial miterprise and building nip production. That being so, is it not essential that some means should be devised ol dealing with admitted obstacles to the expansion of productive enterprise? It was not a representative of farming industry, hut the president of the New Zealand Employers’ Federation, Air A. C. Mitchell, who contended emphatically the other day that a threat to general prosperity was involved in the present high level of internal costs in this country in relation to the prices we. can receive for our exported produce. The latest statistics show, Air Mitchell pointed out, that while the wage level is now 76 per cent higher than in 1914 and retail costs are 58 per cent higher, export prices are only 21 per cent higher and farm expenditure costs are 50 per cent higher. It follows, therefore (he maintained) that the supreme necessity of our whole economy at the present time is to keep our internal costs in as reasonable proportion as is possible to export prices over which we have no control. Anyone who has followed the course of economic events in this country even within comparatively recent years knows that the apprehensions expressed by Ah’ Alitehell are not. imaginative. In some respects existing conditions definitely favour the expansion of industry within the Dominion, but high and rising costs impede that- expansion and make it insecure. The assured and confident optimism with which the Minister of Labour anticipates a prosperous development of local industries would be rather more convincing if the Government were prepared to give practical encouragement to that very desirable development, for instance by cutting its own unproductive expenditure to a minimum. There are other aspects of the present situation which might with great advantage be cleared up. In one of his references to the. coming meeting at Hamilton, for example, Air Webb said he knew that the quantity of imported articles had been reduced and in some cases stopped, but that the Government had determined that New Zealand should live within its income. It is a disconcerting feature of the operation of the import control policy, however, that it has done very little as yet either to reduce the volume of imports or to enable the country to live within its income. Many of the protests that have been made against the import restrictions are based upon a. shortage of consumers’ goods. These goods constitute only a little over a quarter of our total imports and a large proportion of them are classed as necessaries. Yet while there is an increasing outcry over the present and prospective shortage of consumers’ goods, our total outlay on imports, as stated, has been reduced only slightly and correspondingly poor progress has been made towards building .up the sterling balances that are needed to enable ns to meet our oversea obligations, now to be added to more or less heavily by war costs. As to the desirability of building up productive enterprise within the Dominion, it is impossible to do anything else than agree with Air Webb, but positive action by the Government towards stabilising internal costs and in clearing up the astonishing tangle of the import, situation would do more to encourage and stimulate that expansion of industry than even the most emphatic expression in. general terms of optimism and good intention. SOLIDARITY IN GERMANY. jyjANY recent reports from Germany, through neutral and other sources, have spoken of widespread and increasing popular discontent, arising from hardships, deprivations and fears awakened by the war. There have been more or less convincing stories, too, of disputes and dissensions in the higher reaches of the Nazi oligarchy and particularly between the political members of the dictatorship and the military leaders. A strikingly different account, of internal conditions in the Reich is given by a .journalist, Air Hecolonna, who describes himself as the last Englishman to leave Germany and is reported to have crossed the Danish frontier on November 19. In one of Saturday’s cablegrams, Air Hecolonna whs quoted as stating, in a letter to “The Times”: — I found the Germans almost all united in a refusal to listen to arguments supporting the Poles and Czechs. They asked: “What about Ireland and India ” I saw no signs of disloyalty to Hitler. There was even greater solidarity after the Munich bombing.” Accepted as authoritative, these observations would imply, not only a remarkable degree of national unity in Germany, but that economic and other factors of undoubted magnitude are failing to produce, as causes, their logical effects. It is, for example, not a matter of opinion, but-' of fact, based on dependable evidence, including German statistical evidence, that under the Nazi dictatorship the working hours ol the body oi German wage-earners have been increased heavily while living standards have been reduced to a deplorable extent. It is broadly true that where industrial and economic conditions are concerned, the Germaai people started in this war approximately where they ended in the Great War. To suggest in these circumstances; that the Germans are a united people is to make an impossible demaaid on credulity. As to there being no signs of disloyalty to Hitler it is not to be expected that there will be many signs of overt., “disloyalty” in a nation whose members are in the unpleasant grip of the Gestapo and have the terror ol' the concentration camp and Avor.se hanging at all times over their heads. The question oi loyalty does not arise in the ease of a people controlled by the methods that Hitler and his fellow-gangsters have adopted and carried ruthlessly into effect. 11 will be time enough to attach significance to surface expressions of German opinion when the Gestapo has been disbanded and the concentration camps have been closed down. In light of facts that, are well established, any suggestion that the Germans are fighting this war as a contented and united people can only be regarded as fantastic. On the other hand the lengths to which the German, people are prepared to go in snhmissiveness to their Nazi dictatorship have yet Io be measured. It is one thing to suffer and to resent and another thing to strike boldly for the ending of abuses. If the German people are incapable of easting off the yoke that now rests on their neck’s and of redeeming themselves from the degrading serfdom to which they have been reduced under Hitler’s leadership, the outlook is so much the wo*rse for them and lor other nations