Wairarapa Times-Age FRIDAY, JULY 17, 1942. WAR SERVICE AND PRODUCTION.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 17 July 1942, Page 2

Wairarapa Times-Age FRIDAY, JULY 17, 1942. WAR SERVICE AND PRODUCTION.

WITH the. end of the war not yet in sight, it is very necessary ’ that the manpower of the Dominion should be organised and drawn upon in an orderly way, so that military needs and those of essential production may both be met to the maximum degree that is practicable. Obviously there is a balance to be struck and an adjustment to be made between these competing demands, but whether the results to be desired will best be obtained under the policy outlined by the Minister in Charge of Primary Production for War Purposes (Mr Polson), in an address to the annual, conference of the New Zealand Farmers’ Union yesterday, is open to question. Mr Polson'said the War Cabinet had adopted his recommendation that manpower should be pegged on the farms and had said it would get back from the Army men necessary to carry out the programme of farm production. We sent word to the Army (he added as he is reported) to return all men who are farmers or farm workers. And here there was another difficulty. In many cases the men do not want to go back, and the responsibility is on the Army to send them back. It is causing some consternation in the Army, and some officers say that it will deplete their strength by 50 per cent. My answer to that is that if half their men are farmers, then there are far too many farmers in the Army. If the nature of the proposals approved by the War Cabinet has been indicated fairly in what has been published on the subject, these proposals appear to represent a somewhat bullheaded attack on the problem involved. Mr Polson is reported, for instance, as saying that if men now in the Army refuse to go back to the farms they will be turned out of the camps. This opens lip prospects of trouble which it should be comparatively easy to avoid. Taking account of men who have been accustomed to put in a certain amount of time on farms, as well as of farmers and workers constantly engaged in rural industry, a fairly considerable proportion of the able-bodied manhood of the Dominion is included in the section now to be dealt with under the War Cabinet policy. No doubt in dealing with this section, as with others, a process of selection must be adopted. This, indeed, was recognised by Mr Polson, who said, as' he is reported, that the Production Councils would have the responsibility of deciding whether a man should be sent back or kept on the farm. It seems likely that the adjustment needed could be reached most satisfactorily, and with a minimum amount of friction, on the lines suggested by the Dominion President of the Farmers’ Union (Mr Mulholland) in his address at the opening of the present conference. Mr Mulholland’s suggestion was, in brief, that the essential men of essential industries should be given a reasonable period of military training and that they should then be posted to reserve —an active reserve —and while rem.ahq.ing members of that reserve should be returned to industry. It ought to be quite possible, under a scheme of this kind, to reconcile the two essential aims of organising the strongest possible Army and maintaining the greatest possible labour force in farming and in other essential industries. With the war extending over a period yet to be determined, a continuing interchange no doubt would be necessary, both in the Army and in industry, but this should raise no insuperable difficulty. In regard not only to farming, but to all essential industries, the plan of an active reserve might be expected to work much more smoothly, and to better effect in every way, than a policy of simply ordering men out of the Army and back to industry.