CORRESPONDENCE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 19722, 13 December 1926, Page 7

CORRESPONDENCE

CHRISTMAS GIFTS NEEDED (To the Editor). Sir,—Would you kindly allow me again to make an appeal to your many readers on behalf of our District Nursing League patients. Through your courtesy and the kindness of the public we have for many years been able to give our patients their Christmas dinner and gifts. We wish to arrange a dinner for the coming Christmas and should deem it a great favour if the public would aid us with gifts in money or kind, so that we may brighten the homes of these old people on Christmas Day. All donations may be sent to the secretary, Miss Newcombe, Ridgway Street who will acknowledge same. —I am, etc., H. A. CHRISTIE. FRUIT EXPORT GUARANTEE (To the Editor). Sir, —•“ An article on the fruit export guarantee which has been appearing tne round of the Press contains so many serious misrepresentations of the position that it is due not only to the Government, but to a very hard-work-ing class of producers, that something should be said in justification of the guarantee.' 7 These are the words in which Mr H. E. Napier, the secretary of the New Zealand Fruitgrowers’ Federation, prefaces a very long letter in x reply to some observations concerning the Government’s guarantee to the apple exporters you were good enough tu allow me to make in your columns a little while ago. I have read and reread Mr Napier’s letter, from beginning to end; but, while I have found isolated sentences in which my facts and my conclusions are denounced, I have not discovered a single word in which any one of them has been discredited. I am charged with referring “misleadingly to a subsidy’ 7 ; with guessing at the amount “last year’s guarantee cost the Government”; with omitting to state that though last year‘*s area under orchard was smaller than that of the previous year the yield of fruit “was an easy record’ 7 ; and with “mainly expressing opinions and being shaky on facts.*’ I must confess that after writing “guarantee 7 ’ four or five times, by a slip of the pen, I used the word “subsidy”; but that the words were meant to represent the same thing was obvious. The authorities announced some time ago that the guarantee for last season would involve the Government in an expenditure of “about £90,000. 77 It was not a very hazardous “guess’’ that with incidentals and administrative expenses added the total would reach £lOO.OOO. That matured trees, other things being equal, yielded larger crops than younger trees scarcely needed demonstration. Expressing opinions is not regarded as a very heinous offence in this progressive country, and it is the privilege of all of us to think the other fellow “shaky in facts. 77

As for the rest of Mr Napier’s voll iminous epistle, I think I should be k istified in saying it is made up rather ' of opinions than of facts. “It can be fairly urged.’ 7 he says “that the Government is doing no more for the fruitgrowers than is being done for some of the secondary industries. 7 ’ There certainly is no secondary industry in this country first protected by an import duty of 50 per cent, and then guaranteed a payable price for its exportable surplus products. The three-halfpenny import duty on apples and pears to all intents and purposes is a ‘ ‘subsidy 7 ’ to the growers, whether Mr Napier likes the term or not. It is true that the subsidy is paid out of the pockets of the consumers and not out of the national treasury, but that makes the impost only the more obnoxious. “Fruitgrowers, given reasonably good marketing conditions,” says Mr Napier again, 4 ‘could push our national income from exports up by another million sterling, but at the moment they are struggling, though the industry has demonstrated its capacity to reach that objective. 77 Just what this means I am unable to grasp, but surely if the fruitgrowers still arc waiting for “reasonably good marketing conditions,’ 7 after they have demonstrated the capacity of th'* industry to add another million sterling to the national income from exports then they are sadly lacking in initiative and enterprise. Sop-fed industries never ran become great national assets. Sustained by excessive import duties, subsidies, guarantees and other stimulants of the kind, one section of the community profiting at the expense of all the other sections, such industries are unable to stand on their own feet and with the first breath of adversity they collapse. Had the fruitgrowers, instead k of expending their energies upon appeals to the State for special assistance, thrown themselves whole-heart-edly into the moulding of their own destinies, with such opportunities and concessions as the Government might hav.e afforded them legitimately they would not now be leaning on artificial aids for a precarious existence. Mr Napier has to go as far afield as the Huapai district. North of Auckland, to find a community that has taken its courage in both hands, applied itself earnestly to the development of the fruit industry, achieved success and filled three or four schools, as Mr Napier says, with children ready and eager to follow in the footsteps of their parents. I am not writing with definite authority, but I believe I am correct in saying that the prosperity of Huapai is not due to guarantee and subsidies, but to the stout hearts and ready hands of the pioneers who first applied themselves to the subjection of the northern wilderness and won from it their appropriate reward. [ am, etc., TAXPAYER.