Wairarapa Times-Age WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 1940. DAIRY FARMERS’ DEMANDS.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 6 November 1940, Page 4

Wairarapa Times-Age WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 1940. DAIRY FARMERS’ DEMANDS.

9 ACCORDING to a Press Association message from Auckland, the Minister of Finance (Mr Nash) said that the difference of opinion between himself and the Dairy Conference had resolved itself into opposition by the conference to the increase of five per cent granted as a cost of living bonus to wage and salary earners throughout the Dominion. If he has been reported accurately, the Minister has fallen strangely into error as to the attitude of the Dairy Conference, besides somewhat exaggerating the scope of the five per eent cost of living bonus. In its resolution, the Dairy Conference declared its deep disappointment with the Minister’s failure to meet specific undertakings to the industry to pay a price that would cover costs of production or to carry into effect the principles laid down in Section 20 of the Primary Products Marketing Act, 1936. This industry (it was added) is smarting under a sense of injustice because it is being asked for the third season in succession to accept the same fixed price and also to carry added costs due to increases granted to other sections of the community .... From this it is clear that the five per cent cost of living bonus to award workers and some others was a detail only in the total grievance stated by the Dairy 'Conference. The grievance is that- of an industry which was promised a guaranteed price covering the costs of production and finds itself awarded instead a fixed price which has been cut into progressively over a period of three years by rising costs. It is possible, however, to agree unreservedly with the Minister of Finance in his reported statement that he was satisfied that unless we get an element of stability in costs and prices we will run into difficulties far exceeding those that followed the last war. There is every reason to fear that, in the absence of effective action, increasingly serious economic difficulties will develop as the war continues and after it has concluded. The root, remedies demanded are the greatest practicable expansion of useful production and the concentration of public and private expenditure on essentials. Amongst other things the scheme now being inaugurated for the rapid training of men to undertake skilled work in essential war industries might very well be broadened to provide for the training for genuinely 'productive employment of all men, capable of being trained, who are now less profitably employed. In particular, an effort should be made, in this way and perhaps in some others, to do away with the necessity of subsidising indefinitely the employment of a section of the working population. The Economic .Stabilisation Conference has’reported on the broad principles x of economic stabilisation. It should be well worth while to follow this up by mobilisinrg industrialists and other people possessed of special qualifications in furtherance of a co-operative effort to promote a direct expansion of useful production, by turning to the best possible account our existing industrial resources with such additions as it is feasible to make to them. Enterprise on these lines is called for without, delay, not only on account of the immediate results that might be achieved in adding to the available volume of consumers’ goods and limiting inflation, but in. order to lay foundations for the much more intensive efforts on similar lines that undoubtedly will be needed when the war comes to an end.

Much besides, of course, is necessary, notably an overhaul of State expenditure, with a view, not to general retrenchment and deflation, but rather to directing expenditure into the channels in which it is justified. It, is certainly very much more to be desired that our problems of national economy should be dealt with in this way and by an enterprising expansion of useful production—which in the right conditions might be developed after the war to a point that would justify reopening the door to immigration—than that we should drift into conditions of stringency which sooner or later would make inevitable rough and ready adjustments, bringing in their train hardships and deprivations that might have been escaped.