DOMESTIC PROFITS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 439, 21 November 1947, Page 16

DOMESTIC PROFITS

HE New South Wales State Parliamentary Labour Party, after several heroic. caucus debates, decided recently how the purse strings should’ be held in the home. It agreed that a Government bill to allow wives to retain all their savings from their housekeeping allowance should be amended so that savings could be divided equally between husband and wife. Some members thought that in a happy home there should be no need for legislation to give wives the right to keep all the cash they rescued from the allowance. But ine an unhappy home compulsion would make the position of the wife worse, because the husband might go the niggling way and restrict the allowance. The «subject was seized on for a radio debate by Elsie Lloyd, of the NZBS staff, who, acting as chairwoman, induced three other Wellington women, Zenocrate Mountjoy, Mary McKenzie and Mary Jefferies, to take part.

When the recording was made the controversialists were not aware of the Australian decision. All they knew was that it had been suggested that wives should be allowed to keep all they cquld save out of their quotas. Curiously enough they, too, came to the conclusion that a fifty-fifty basis of dividing the spoils, if any, was the most reasonable. The broadcast was heard from Station 2ZB in the Women’s World session last Monday afternoon, and it will be broadcast from the other Commercial stations in the near future.