BUDGET DEBATE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 29 June 1943, Page 4

BUDGET DEBATE

HOPES THAT IT MAY END TOMORROW NIGHT SOME URGENT QUESTIONS ANSWERED. LAND DEVELOPMENT REPORT DISCUSSED. (By Telegraph—Press Association.) WELLINGTON, This Day. When the House of Representatives met at 10.30 this morning, the Prime Minister (Mr Fraser) said it proposed, until 5.30 this afternoon, to discuss the Land Development Committee’s report on marginal lands. The Budget debate would be continued tonight and it was hoped that this debate would conclude tomorrow night. Then it might be advisable to have an adjournment of the session for a fortnight to allow committees to catch up with their work. Answering a question by Mr Polson whether the War Expenses Account would be submitted to the Public Accounts Committee, Mr Fraser said this course would be adopted. A complaint that it was a waste of time reporting absenteeism to the authorities,"as no action was taken, was made by Mr Broadfoot, in an urgent question to the Minister of National Service. Mr Fraser, replying on behalf of the Minister, said an instruction had been issued to manpower officers to take more severe action in cases of deliberate malingering, and he thought anyone who hesitated to enforce the instruction should no longer be a manpower officer. “Dehydration plants for the treatment of a proportion of next season’s potato crop are now being assembled in the United States for shipment to New Zealand,” said the Minister of Agriculture (Mr Barclay) answering an urgent question by Mr Kidd, who asked where such plants were likely to be erected, and pointed out that Canterbury was one of the chief potatogrowing districts in New Zealand. The Minister said the question of the location of such plants was now under consideration.

Moving that the report be referred to the Government, Mr Ben Roberts, chairman of the Land Development Committee, said the committee had been appointed in 1941 to consider the best means, in the national interest, of bringing back into production marginal lands in the Dominion. The committee had visited only about forty properties in the North Island, and, owing to the serious change in the Pacific situation, had postponed its investigation into South Island blocks. The committee’s report said that, speaking generally, all the blocks visited could only be brought into production by large-scale operations.