| Subject: | RE: [socialcredit] question regarding Australia and New Zealand during the Depression | | Date: | Friday, May 1, 2009 20:26:42 (+0000) | | From: | John G Rawson <johngrawson @.......com>
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I thought the actions of the first Labour Government here were well known. Prof. Hotson remarked on them to the extent of stating that NZ helped to lead the world out of the slump.
It had nothing to do with "Greenbacks". It was bank credit, not notes, although obviously the note issue would have risen during the period.
Reserve Bank credit, then in £NZ, was issued, not borrowed, to finance some Government spending, particularly building of State Houses for the homeless people, but also for roads etc.
Some local body works were financed also, one example being the Wairarapa Drainage Board. I'm not sure whether that was issued money or 1% loan.
As a very key industry to recovery, the then Dairy Board (cooperative) was financed by 1% loans from the Res. Bank, and this carried on until the '40s.
About two-fifths of the caucus of that government were monetary reformers of some shade.
The policy was abandoned under pressure from the Bank of England shortly pre-war, causing a split in the party and takeover of it by a very narrow margin by the socialist section. Nash, then Finance minister, was prominent later at Bretton Woods, and the party, like all socialist ones, became firm "bankers' men". John A. Lee, former minister of housing, and the Member with the biggest majority of all in parliament ranb against the Govt. in the wartime election. He organised the first leaflet raid in NZ, over Auckland, (I saw it) with the aid of a friendly US DC3. How I don't know. Maybe someone close was going out with a Yank. His opponent, an unknown tramway man, giot the biggest majority in the electiomn. This was in the time when nearly every poorand middle class home had a photo of PM Savage over their fireplace, and people went home and boasted if they had touched the clothing of a Labour MP.
Frank Langstone, another prominent monetary reformer and ex Minister, ran for us in an Auckland seat in ?1954.
This sort of thing has been carefully expunged from NZ history books, as, I presume , has similar material elsewhere.
Regards.
John R.
> Date: Fri, 1 May 2009 04:00:20 -0700
> From: william_b_ryan@yahoo.com
> To: socialcredit@elistas.com
> Subject: [socialcredit] question regarding Australia and New Zealand during the Depression
>
>
> Ellen Brown is not defending her arguments at the present time, but is focusing "on the more important work of exposing what is really going on in the economy today and suggesting better solutions," so I'll put this question to the list, and especially our Australian and New Zealander subscribers. Perhaps someone will get back to us on this:
>
> It has to do with her assertion that during the 1930s and 40s, the central banks of Australia and New Zealand accommodated their governments to spend Greenback-type money into circulation for infrastructure projects, thus helping those countries to avoid the effects of the Great Depression. For example, in her essay dated March 6
> http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/monetary-proposal/ she wrote:
>
> "A truly federal central bank would issue funds directly to the Treasury as debt-free U.S. Notes, or as 'national credit.' This was done successfully in Australia and New Zealand during the 1930s and 1940s. A state-owned central bank funded public projects that put people back to work, at a time when most of the rest of the world was struggling with a depression brought on by a global shortage of bank-created money."
>
> This is news to me. Where did this come from? I am not aware that either government did anything especially innovative or unorthodox during that period.
>
> I am presently converting into plain text a document sent to me by Wally Klinck, "Major C. H. Douglas Before The New Zealand Government's Monetary Committee Notes of Evidence and Examinations With Correspondence preliminary thereto" from 1934. This statement is from one of the initial questions to Major Douglas, on February 24, 1934:
>
> "In this country we are suffering from an economic depression and it is commonly known that we are suffering severely in consequence. How can that be remedied in a land of plenty, and we have a land of plenty and there is poverty and stress everywhere?"
>
> So from this question we know that any Greenbacker-type policy that might have been introduced must have been introduced after this question was asked, if New Zealand was relieved from the Depression before other nations.
>
> This piece from the Internet suggests that New Zealand's monetary policy helped that country recover from the Depression, but it says nothing about Greenback-type money being spent into circulation. It says specifically "fiscal policy was not the driver of recovery from the Great Depression."
> http://antidismal.blogspot.com/2008/11/new-zealands-recovery-from-great.html
>
> I have also been studying the book, *Recovery from the Depression* By R. G. Gregory, N. G. Butlin, published in 2002, which is a compilation of several essays by various authors discussing the Depression experience in Australia and New Zealand. Chapter 5 entitled "Depression and Recovery in New Zealand" by G. W. Hawke is available online from the archive at Googlebooks. I've seen nothing in that chapter that talks about Greenback-type money.
>
>
>
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