I move—

1. (a) to make a comprehensive survey of the food needs of all the people;
2. (b) to elaborate plans to make available the supplies of food necessary to satisfy those needs;
3. (c) to initiate and apply a policy of price subsidisation to fill the gap between the market price of the amount of food necessary to establish and maintain physical efficiency and the capacity of the lower income groups to meet the cost involved on earnings at current rates of wages; and
   that, in the interests of adequate nutritional standards and the essential health needs of the population, as well as of a stable labour force and a stable market for the agricultural industry, the Government should consider the advisability of forthwith introducing such legislation as may be necessary to establish such a Ministry.

I propose to state my case as briefly as possible this morning, partly because I believe that there are numbers of members in the House who are interested in the issues which are raised by this motion and who have been prevented from expressing their views on it during the long period over which this notice of motion has been on the Order Paper; and secondly because I believe that the case which I have to make is a straightforward case which needs no great elaboration to establish it. My case is specifically that South Africa has a peculiarly acute problem of under-nourishment and malnutrition, and that secondly this problem cannot be tackled effectively save by a separate, well-staffed organisation whose business it would be to collate all the facts concerning food consumption in the Union and to provide the executive and administrative machinery to deal adequately and continuously with the situation disclosed by these investigations, an organisation which would have functions so important to fulfil as to merit, in my opinion, the standing or rank of Cabinet office. The existence of the peculiar problem of malnutrition in the Union of South Africa has been fully established on several occasions. I do not wish to weary the House by quotations from Blue Books. I could make my case from the whole series of reports which this House has received from Commissions dealing with social problems — Commissions appointed since the beginning of this war—but I propose to limit myself to the more technical of these reports to establish the extent of this problem. I shall choose particularly the report of the National Nutrition Council and the report of the National Health Services Commission, both of which, I think, may be regarded as essentially authoritative. The first published report of the National Nutrition Council was presented in 1944. It summarised the work and the experience of the Nutritional Council over the four years of its existence and its considered conclusions set out here more than established the fact of the extremely grave problem of malnutrition in the country, calling for urgent and drastic methods of approach. Dealing with the various nutritional surveys undertaken by the council and what these revealed, it states—

The Research and Publications Committee of the Council recorded that it considered that it had abundant evidence of the existence of a very disturbing amount of malnutrition and enough evidence about its causes to justify immediate action “and expenditure without limit to achieve satisfactory nutrition”. There was, it claimed, abundant evidence to justify drastic action being taken. The result of the nutrition surveys begun among the Bantu population were recorded thus by the Council—

It went on to say—

The committee considered that the information before it was such as to constitute a serious challenge to action. And finally in its review, in its statement of what it regarded as an essential programme for action for the future, the Council insisted that “the last and most important fact is the reiteration of what has gone before, namely, that in South Africa malnutrition is an urgent national problem of enormous extent, the consideration of which cannot be postponed until the war is ended.” It went on—

And it states in italics—

The findings of the National Nutrition Council were fully endorsed by the Commission on National Health Services which reiterated in a separate chapter on nutrition—

And it went on to show that among all those conditions of improved health for this country, improved nutrition was one of the basic necessities. The causes of the alarming extent of malnutrition in this country have also been the subject of close investigation and are now the subject of agreed findings. Attempts have been made to suggest that much of the malnutrition which characterises this country is due simply to bad education arid bad domestic management. There is no doubt that both of these are considerable factors in the situation; it would be surprisirig if they were not, in view of the low level of general education in South Africa and the continuing extent of illiteracy. But it has been made abundantly clear—it has been proved up to the hilt both by observation and by scientific experiments, that education and the mal-administration of resources are not by any means the root of this problem, that beyond this there is a deeper cause which is the wide gap between the present cost of foodstuffs in this country and the general economic level of the population. Prof. Batson in his studies here in the Cape found that no amount of readjustment, no amount of improved spending of the available income, can bring within the reach of the low income groups which he investigated specially—and they were by no means the worst of these groups—could provide those people with adequate supplies of essential foodstuffs to maintain basic physical efficiency. That situation was fully accepted by the Social and Economic Planning Council when it was called upon to consider the findings of the Social Security Committee and to offer its recommendations as to the foundations of social security in this country. It stated in its report that “ignorance of food values and methods of production are important causes of malnutrition amongst all sections of the community. In many rural areas wrong production systems are a further cause of it. These factors do not, however, detract from the fact that ultimately the inadequate family incomes relevant to the price of necessities are the dominating cause of malnutrition in urban areas, among rural employees, small farmers and reserve natives.” It says—

That is, between 50-60 per cent. cannot buy sufficient food to maintain basic efficiency. The same situation, the Council considered, applied in respect of urban natives. It adds—

Now, in order to deal with the kind of nutritional standards which prevail in this country, it must be clear, both from the definition of the range of malnutrition and from this accepted analysis of the causes of malnutrition, that any plan which may be made to deal with this situation must cut across a variety of interests. Rather let me put it this way: Any plan to deal with the problem of malnutrition as it exists in this country must comprehend a variety of economic interests in this country.

Why in this country?

I am dealing specifically with the characteristic features of this country. I am dealing with the fact that the range of malnutrition in this country is far greater than it is in any of the countries with which we are commonly familiar, at least any country in which the machinery for which I am pleading today has already been set up. And, in the second place, I have referred to this country specifically because of the heterogeneous racial character of the country, which is itself responsible to some extent for the range of our malnutrition, and the differing economic standards which is one of our main problems in facing the situation. Our problem is to bring food to a community which cannot pay the prices which have been established in this country on a basis of social standards which the mass of our people do not share. That is the simple case. That is why I refer to the problem as it exists in this country. Now the issue which will have to be met in dealing with the problem of malnutrition as it exists here is not merely the extent to which our agriculture provides food for the community. It is the extent to which we provide food from all our natural resources. It is a problem not merely of the output of the land. It is a problem of the output of the sea as well. It is a problem not only of the amount of natural food produced. It is a question of processed foods, of derived foods, of by-products from foods not initially suitable for consumption. Beyond all these things, it is a question of the gap between what we can supply from our own sources and what we need to satisfy the basic demands of the whole of our population, and that, I may remind the House, is a very considerable gap indeed. The Social and Economic Planning Council accepted the surveys of Messrs. Haylett and Rees-Davies, and therefore I see no reason why I should not accept those surveys. But the essence of the findings of those surveys was to establish the very large gap between what can be produced in this country and what is necessary to feed our population. The fact established by these surveys is that one of the aspects of the case we have to meet is the availability of outside supplies of food and the necessity for supplies of food from outside; in other words, a question of importation. And when we have dealt with that and proceeded to make plans for the provision from all these sources for food for the people, we still have to meet the problem of getting the food to the people, a mere matter of distribution in the first instance, and of enabling the people to use the foods, which is the economic factor in the last instance. Thus, the range of interests involved is not by any means confined to agriculture. It includes commercial interests in so far, e.g., as our fishing industry is under the Department of Economic Development. It also includes commercial interests in so far as it involves the question of importation. Then there are social and economic considerations to be met in so far as the economic availability of foods to the people is involved. Thus, the range is comprehensive, extending over all these departments. Now, it is on the basis of that analysis that the claim stands for a special organisation to deal with this urgent problem of malnutrition. It was because they were conscious, I believe, of the comprehensive character of the interests involved, the fact that the interests that are necessarily involved in dealing with this problem of malnutrition comprehend and therefore surmount the individual and separate economic interests of this country ….

Why just this country?

I cannot spend so much of my time explaining these simple things to the hon. member. I hope he will just accept the implications and leave it at that and let me get on with my argument. Now it was, I believe, because the Nutritional Council had discovered in their own experience that in order to deal with the problem of malnutrition efficiently and effectively in this country, it was necessary to have a comprehensive organisation which would be above, and at the same time sympathetic to, the economic interests of this country, that they put forward a plan for a separate organisation to deal with this problem. It was, in fact, from this report that I chose the words in which I presented the case for a special organisation. It was then felt that it was essential that we should have a separate organisation, well staffed with specialists who would be able to deal with the problems of feeding the nation independently. Throughout the Nutrition Council’s report, and implicit in every line of it, is the necessity for a special organisation to deal with these problems. And what was implicit in the lines of that report became fully explicit when it came to a consideration of the programme of the Council for the future. There the Council dealt with the fact that a Ministry of Food had been established in England to deal with the problems of providing food for the people of England. It went on to state that—

It is quite clear, however, from the phrasing of the rest of this report that the proposal to establish a Ministry of Food was turned down in other quarters. The Nutrition Council was told in effect that a Department of Food would not be established in this country. It says so as a matter of fact—

In those circumstances the Nutrition Council went on to consider what was put to it as an alternative scheme, that is, that there should be a committee consisting of representatives of Public Health, Agriculture and Social Welfare, which would deal with the various aspects of the problem. This scheme was presented to the Council of the Government. In fact a special committee of the Council was called to discuss “a less ambitious proposal which might, in part at least, achieve the same objects as a Ministry of Food”. This proposal was that the Public Health Department should be responsible for ascertaining throughout the country the nutritional condition, the food requirements and the allied circumstances of all races, and to advise and educate the people in these matters; that agriculture should be called upon to ensure adequate food supplies for the nation and that the Social Welfare Department should administer food and a feeding scheme for certain sections of the population. It is clear from the report that it was with the greatest reluctance that the Nutritional Council agreed that this proposal must go forward. They make that quite clear. They stated quite emphatically—

And they went on to say—

It considered that even if this machinery were established it was absolutely imperative that it should form the nucleus of a special committee which should have the obligation of carrying on detailed and continuous investigation along the following lines—

They went to stress that there must be an organisation carrying on all these obligations continuously, an organisation which would be able to advise and instruct the community as a whole so that it might share the burden of providing food for the whole of the people or of spreading out available supplies among the people. They recognised the fact that feeding would have to be supplied through various channels in all the circumstances of our country, but they felt that it was impossible to expect public bodies or private organisations or even private citizens to help with this matter of distribution of food to the lower income groups, unless there is a central organisation directing, informing and controlling them from beginning to end. Now these were the recommendations of the Nutrition Council in 1944. They were the result as I say of years of experience. What, in effect, did the Nutrition Council actually get, and what did we get? We got a Controller of Food under the Department of Agriculture.

No, he is not under my Department.

Associated with the Department of Agriculture. Let me put it this way. The Food Controller is under the direction of the Minister of Agriculture.

That is better.

Listen to a lawyer.

A Food Controller under the direction of the Minister of Agriculture—it comes to the same thing— whose business it was to distribute the foods available in this country, and to deal with the problem of providing and making supplies available to the whole community; a Department of Social Welfare to which was committed the task of getting the food to the people who are incapable of providing it for themselves through the ordinary channels, and a Nutrition Council to which was committed the duty which was here suggested for the Public Health Department of ascertaining throughout the country the nutritional condition and food requirements of the people, i.e. making a survey of the food requirements of the people and constantly providing information to the other two Dpeartments—of all-over needs to the Controller of Food, presumably, and of the specific needs of the undernourished to the Department of Social Welfare. So far as I know there has been no all-over co-ordinating authority which would gather together the resources and co-ordinate the activities of these three organisations to the effective end visualised as essentially necessary by the Nutrition Council. Certainly the functions which the Nutrition Council visualised as absolutely essential were, from my personal knowledge, not undertaken. At least there are no results available to show that they have been undertaken. At the present time I maintain that we are as ignorant of the all-over needs of our population in the matter of food as we were when the Nutrition Council began its surveys and as it was when it made its report. We literally do not know the food habits of our people. We do not know how much food any particular group consumes. We do not know what alternative diets they might consume. These issues have become very vital at the present time. The war cut us off from the outside supplies, and the aftermath of the war has faced us with declining supplies all over the world and we have had a serious constriction of our own resources as a result of serious drought conditions. I want to make it quite clear and plain here, since I know that our Ministers are peculiarly sensitive to criticism, that I am not blaming any of the Ministers concerned; nor am I blaming any of the officials who were given the job of doing something to alleviate the ravages of malnutrition in this country. What I am doing is trying to make the case that the policy which refused to have a central organisation and which left the the responsibility divided amongst a variety of departments, was one that was doomed to the failure which I contend it has sustained. Now, so far as the individuals are concerned who were given the responsibility of carrying out that policy, I wish to say in defence of them, that they were never given a chance to carry out their responsibilities under the organisation accepted by the Nutrition Council’s report as a second best. There has been no effort to co-ordinate the functions of the Food Controller, the Social Welfare Department and the Nutrition Council so that we might begin to tackle and reduce malnutrition effectively and to build up the physical resources of this country. The Food Controller was faced with a very difficult situation indeed, and I do not see how he could ever have been expected to distribute the increasingly limited sources of food over a field about which he knows almost nothing. That again, as I say, is no reflection on him. The information simply does not exist. If the information had existed we could not have done what we did in regard to the rationing of maize. We could not have rationed maize by merely cutting the amounts that had hitherto been given to the traders. This was what we did when we wanted to conserve supplies in the interests, we said, of the native population itself. When supplies of maize began to run down, we said we must at least guarantee the food of the native population but that they themselves must reduce the amounts consumed presumably to a level that would maintain efficiency but no more. But we had no scientific information as to the amount of maize necessary to maintain that level among the native population and in fact the mere reduction in traders’ supplies on the assumption that these had done much more than that in the past simply reduced the natives to a state of starvation. We still do not know how much maize a native family needs to maintain a basic level of efficiency either in itself or in relation to any other available foods. No doubt that is a difficult matter to which to find the decision when we are dealing, as we are, with a rural population which is entirely unorganised, but we do not even know the demands of our town markets, where it is easier to make a survey. As a result the thing that has happened is this: We have come out of the war period with a rising incidence instead of a decreasing incidence of malnutrition. The ravages of malnutrition are gradually creeping into the higher income group levels of our population. The area of specific demand is not known, and machinery does not exist to discover it. The Food Controller has therefore had to do the best he could in the circumstances. What he has done we know. He has rationed through the trade—a system of hit-and-miss which is now familiar to every member of this House and to every housewife in the country, while in the native areas for long stretches of time last year, food was almost non-existent. I speak with feeling since I saw at first hand the situation in the Ciskei where maize simply could not be bought, and other resources were not to be had, and where there was no organisation to step in except the Native Affairs Department, to which I must give the full credit of having done an emergency job to the best of its ability in that situation. The Native Affairs Department stepped into that emergency. It not only got food sent to the areas, but helped to get committees established which for the first time began to count the population, and on that basis began to be able to evaluate their needs. It also got the pre-school feeding scheme established in those areas which has gone a long way towards neutralising the ravages of malnutrition which was filling the hospitals to such an extent that they could no longer cope with the position. But the truth of the matter is that the Food Controller has been continually regarded as a wartime official. His functions have not been seen in the light of any long-term policy at all. So far as social welfare policy is concerned, the House has only to read last year’s report of the Secretary of the Department of Social Welfare to see that the merest fringe of the needs of the country were met by the services established under that Department. The Social and Economic Planning Council made it perfectly clear that they did not feel that there was any possibility whatsoever of dealing with malnutrition in this country, except by a large-scale scheme of food subsidisation. It maintained that the policy of this country had kept the prices of foodstuffs rising beyond world levels and beyond the tendency of lower income levels to rise, and that many lower income groups could not be assisted within a reasonable time unless there was a wide range scheme of food subsidisation. It produced a scheme for the subsidisation of a large number of basic commodities for a start: wheat, maize, milk, butter and margarine, eggs, fruit and vegetables, which it estimated at a cost of £4,500,000 immediately, rising steadily to £6 million within the next few years after its application. But that scheme has never been brought into operation. At the present time there is subsidisation of the price of bread which has been in operation for most of the war years, but it has simply been an attempt, a successful attempt, to stabilise that price at its pre-war level. In the last couple of years there has been a so-called scheme of subsidisation of maize prices, but it is in no way related to the scheme proposed by the Social and Economic Planning Council, which proposes a subsidy of 5s. a bag when maize was 15s. to the producer. Now the price of maize has been stabilised for the consumer at a producer’s price of 17s. 6d., while the price has been raised to the farmer to 19s. All other commodities have not been subsidised at all, or if they have, only to a fractional extent, where so-called agricultural surpluses were available for distribution to the lower income groups. The whole policy which the Secretary for Social Welfare has been called upon to administer has not been a policy of combating malnutrition. It was a policy of putting into domestic use some of the commodities which it was impossible to market through the ordinary trade channels in this country, and for that purpose the Department has been called upon to create machinery which has been in many cases a complete waste since we have not been able to use it continuously. Last year there was machinery for the distribution of oranges and citrus which could not be sold overseas. This year there is an overseas market, and there is therefore no citrus for distribution here. The same thing is presumably happening with deciduous fruit and in respect of other commodities. The Nutrition Council in the meantime—and this I know also from my personal expedience—has neither been given the machinery nor the facilities to perform the functions which it was claimed by the Government should still be performed by the Public Health Department. I myself approached the Nutrition Council when the situation became acute in the Ciskei. I wanted to know what advice they were offering, and what plans they were putting before the Government for the long-term improvement of the nutritional conditions of an area which is perenially depressed. I am not giving anything away when I say that I know that the Nutrition Council was never approached on any of these problems. I certainly do not hold it against the Nutrition Council. I think the Nutrition Council has within its limits done a marvellous job. I think every line of their report shows the hopeless frustration from which they are suffering by virtue of the fact that they are merely an advisory body which no one makes any serious effort to consult. They themselves say in their report that they can make recommendations, but have no power to ensure the adoption of these recommendations, that in fact most of their recommendations have simply not been accepted, and they cannot therefore show results for their work. But in the field where they could function independently, in research, they have done a magnificent job of work, and are capable still of doing a magnificent job of work. But they get no opportunity and no personnel to do more than that, or even to do all that they might do in that field. The Council could not possibly undertake a full-scale investigation of nutritional problems and the needs of the community which are the essential foundation of any food policy in that country on the basis of their present machinery and personnel. Dr. Latsky was eventually called in, by the Department of Native Affairs, to assist by offering them suggestions to overcome the worst aspect of the situation in the Ciskei, and he has done everything that any man could possibly do in response to that call. To him must go most of the credit for the efficiency of the pre-school feeding centres established by the Native Affairs Department in the area. Incidentally, there are no pre-school feeding centres in any other part of the country where the ravages of malnutrition were just as acute last year. The National Health Commission itself pointed out that the school feeding scheme, which is one of the few practical results of all the work of the Nutrition Council, does not touch the basic problem of malnutrition, which begins before school days. The National Health Commission itself said that the pre-school child and the nursing mother must be provided for, and that in addition to the feeding of schoolchildren there must be feeding of these groups as well. Now, the question may be put: Would the establishment of a Ministry of Food have done the job any better? My reply is this: In the first instance, it would have been absolutely essential, if there had been a Ministry of Food, for all these interests to be co-ordinated. Also, if we had had a Ministry of Food, or at least an independent organisation responsible for the feeding of the country, the problem of combating malnutrition would have been recognised as a longterm undertaking. It is an illusion that the problem of nutrition is a war-time problem. That derives largely from the fact that Britain established a Ministry of Food as part of her war-time machinery. In South Africa, whatever may happen in Britain, the problem of malnutrition is not a war-time problem. It is a problem which has been seriously aggravated by war-time conditions, and by our failing to take adequate measures even in war-time to deal with the problem; but in South Africa this is a long-term problem, and the establishment of an organisation designed to deal with it would have made that fact plain. And it would have been essential and inevitable that such an organisation should have planned and the machinery have been devised to do this job effectively. My second point then arises. Given the machinery and the obligation to use it, an independent food organisation must perforce have elaborated a national feeding policy, and it must have set out to establish the foundations of a long-term policy of national feeding, It would have set itself to discover the food demands of the whole population and explored the possibility of satisfying those demands. And those are the things that have not been done. I have gathered that it is now the intention of the Government, under pressure I presume from public opinion which feels very strongly indeed in this matter, much more strongly than the Government realises —I understand it is the intention of the Government to establish a measure of centralisation at this stage, even with the existing machinery. I gather it is the intention now to remove the responsibility for actual feeding schemes from the Department of Social Welfare to the Food Controller. That in itself is a step in the right direction. Anything that will lead to the centralisation of responsibility for this problem must be an advantage, as I have very ample reason to know. This last year, when we tried to grapple with the problem of poverty and starvation in the native areas, with the problem of food supplies, we found ourselves driven from one place to another; it was not anybody’s business. If we wanted food produced in the native areas, it was the duty of the Minister of Native Affairs. If we wanted food supplies, a share of available resources, it was the function of the Department of Agriculture; if we wanted food supplies on a subsidised basis that was the business of the Social Welfare Department. Between all these departments we were prevented from carrying a burden we were prepared and anxious to carry. This country is concerned about the problem of food and is prepared to make sacrifices all round for the development of a reasonable nutritional standard, but this system of divided control has cut at the very roots of this desire of the public to do its duty. We as citizens have been deprived of the power to carry our responsibilities by the variety of authorities that have wrecked our good intentions and left us only with a growing sense of discontent and frustration. For myself I do believe there is a good deal to be gained by the centralisation of control, particularly if that control is along the lines laid down by the Nutrition Council and in the Social and Economic Planning Council which includes a policy of food subsidisation which is imperative. But I do not believe that the country will be satisfied or that we will be doing the best for the country by leaving the organisation which is to exercise this control under the Food Controller and the Ministry of Agriculture. I strongly support the contention that the food organisation ought to be separate from the Department of Agriculture.

But it is so. It is separated.

It is separated technically, but in practice it works in the closest touch with the Minister of Agriculture, and the Minister who answers to the country for the feeding problems of the country is first and foremost the Minister of Agriculture. I want to plead for the complete separation of the Food Organisation and the Department of Agriculture. I do not want the Minister of Agriculture to be Minister of Food. Perhaps that is the simplest way I can state it. If it makes the issue absolutely plain, I want the food organisation to be completely separated from the Minister of Agriculture; and I want that in the interests of a policy of confirmed nutrition for this country. As I see the position in this country there is going to be a progressively grave danger of a conflict between agriculture and the rest of the community, as the agricultural industry presses for the establishment of an all-over European standard in agriculture. I have made it plain on several occasions that I support wholeheartedly a policy which will establish our agricultural industry on sound foundations with the highest possible standard of living for those engaged in it. I sympathise deeply with the demand of the farmers that they, too, should be able to share the high standard which is regarded as a civilised standard in this country. But the pursuit of that standard is going inevitably to raise the possibilities of a difference with the rest of the community. The difference is going to be aggravated, in my opinion, if the department which is concerned primarily with the interests of the farmers is going to be responsible for the food situation as well. Inevitably the people are going to feel, as consumers, that their interests are not the first consideration of an organisation of that kind and as their costs rise their antagonism, which is already incipient to the situation, is going to be increased. I feel there is a much greater possibility of establishing the agricultural industry on a reasonable footing if the interests of consumers are the responsibility of a separate organisation. It has been stated that a separate organisation will depress the standard of the farmers. I know that is the fear of the farmers themselves and I know that it is because they fear a new organisation that the Government has decided to accede to their repeated demands that the food organisation shall not in effect be separated from the Department of Agriculture. I think that is a mistaken idea of how the farmers themselves should be served. I think the farmers have as much right to insist on their standards as have the trade unions or organised industry, and they have every right to be an organised industry competing for their own standards. But the interests of the community as consumers should transcend all these sectional interests and should be the responsibility of an organisation which is free from the pressure of sectional interests. On that basis I believe we have a much brighter hope of maintaining peaceful relations between the farming industry and the rest of the community than at the present time. In any case the argument that the Agricultural Department is particularly concerned with the question of food in this country fails to take into consideration all the other ramifications of the food situation, and above all, the inadequacy of local supplies to meet the national demands. The feeding problem of the country as I have endeavoured to show is not simply the problem of food production of this country. In these circumstances I hope the Government will seriously consider the advisability of meeting the increasing demand that the feeding of this country shall be put on an independent foundation. That demand is backed by strong interests. It is an effort on the part of the people as consumers to organise their own interests over and above other sectional interests, and as such they have as much right to consideration as any industry in the country. Eventually if the Government does not yield to this pressure they will be lamentably blind to public opinion, and I feel that later they and the agricultural interests have much to lose thereby, that a decision against this pressure can only operate against the peace and unity of the country.

I second. It is very appropriate that the hon. member for Cape Eastern (Mrs. Ballinger) and her colleagues, representing as they do the submerged three-fourths of our people, should sponsor this motion this morning. I am happy personally to have the privilege of assisting them in this demand made today upon the Government. In my opinion the demand contained in the motion is in line with the policy of the Labour Party and in line with the policy which it has consistently advocated in the past.

Towards the end of 1945 a very interesting document was issued by the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations. That document gives details of the obligations undertaken by the member governments. South Africa is a member government. We therefore have very specific obligations in connection with food nutrition and agricultural production. These are the obligations which we as a nation have undertaken before the world. Each participant, each member government—

1. (i) To raise the levels of nutrition and standards of living of its own people;
2. (ii) To improve the efficiency of agricultural production and distribution;
3. (iii) To co-operate, so far as may be possible with other nations for the achievement of these ends;
4. (iv) To undertake to submit periodically to the other participants, through the permanent organisations, reports on the action taken and the progress achieved towards these ends.

The fulfilment of those obligations is the main reason why the present British Government has decided to retain the British Ministry of Food as a permanent department of state. It is the reason also why in Australia and Canada and New Zealand special food organisations set up during the war, food organisations that are independent of agriculture and industry, are to remain. The obligations I have read out are the principal reasons I would advance this morning for South Africa’s getting into line with the rest of the Commonwealth without delay. There are other reasons why we should have an independent food organisation, call it a Food Ministry if you like. One is that the Economic and Planning Council, the Nutrition Council, the municipalities in the Union, the chambers of commerce, the chambers of industries, in addition to the people themselves, demand it That is a good reason. There is another good reason. For long years large numbers of Europeans in this country, and most of the non-Europeans, have been unable through no fault of their own to feed themselves adequately and correctly; and they shall never be able to become efficient workers until we are prepared to provide for their nutritional needs as the result of a long-period policy to which the hon. member for Cape Eastern has referred. What do we mean by an independent food organisation? As I understand it, it will be an organisation that would set up in this country a central authority with supreme control over the food policy of the country; and that would establish a State-directed distributive mechanism. Thirdly, it will appoint regional officials, permanent officials, to co-ordinate distribution throughout the country. Before we consider the present food organisation in South Africa against this organised background it will be helpful to the House, I think, to know exactly what are the food organisations set up in other ports of the Commonwealth. My information is from the latest official sources. In Canada, Australia, New Zealand and England long period planning is being done to honour the obligations undertaken under F.A.O., the Food and Agricultural Organisation. I know it has been argued that we cannot do the same because of our diverse population elements, because: of their different living standards. I think the hon. member for Cape Eastern has made it abundantly clear that instead of that being a reason for not setting up a supreme food authority that is the biggest reason we can advance for doing so. What is the position in the Commonwealth? In 1943 Canada set up an independent food department to develop programmes for the Agricultural Department, to ensure with that department adequate production of the essential foods; to pay subsidies to consumers and producers; and to give special attention to the internal food requirements of the country. The Canadian Food Department, as it exists today, is both a planning and an executive authority, an independent body. In 1943, the same year, Australia established a Food Control Board which fixes the volume of agriculture and the volume of food production; controls exports and prices; organises manpower; and the use of agricultural machinery; and generally governs agricultural production and distribution in Australia. In 1936 New Zealand set up a special marketing department with a special Minister to plan, and to distribute, food requirements internally and for export. During the war that particular department assumed greater functions. For instance, it took over many of the functions of the producer boards. Take the case of the New Zealand Dairy Control Board. It took over the functions of the Dairy Board, leaving only the internal side of the dairy industry and the testing of cattle to the Dairy Control Board. In regard to England we in the House know the position well. We know of the control, the almost authoritarian control, brought in during the war by the British Ministry. “The Economist,” a journal which always looks at our social and economic questions objectively, has in the January issue an article on peacetime food policy in England. It is very relevant to what the hon. member for Cape Eastern has said, particularly in regard to subsidisation. The article reads—

It is clear that all parts of the British Commonwealth at the moment are carrying out a long-term food policy in terms of F.A.O. South Africa seems to be the only part that is limping behind. Ours is a country in which the need for food rationalisation on a national scale is more urgent than in other parts of the Commonwealth. Sir John Orr, in his plain direct way, reminds us of our obligations to F.A.O. and our duties to the depressed part of our population and to the other people as well. He is the director-general of F.A.O. He said recently—

What is the present position of our food organisation in South Africa? We have our Food Controller. He is an official of the Minister of Agriculture. His duties are mainly influenced by the Agricultural Department. He has little control over prices; he has less control over production. He cannot buy adequately to build up a national food reserve. The boards, and not he, determine the production quantities, the prices, volume of exports, and the conditions of internal markets to a large extent. He has no power under present conditions to make decisions on the spot. In effect he is not a Food Controller at all. He is the unwilling servant of the food producers, of the Department of Agriculture, and of certain big distributive organisations. He is in the strait-jacket of the Marketing Act. He is helpless in regard to production, processing, storage and distribution of the nation’s food. All the Food Controller cannot do an independent food organisation could and would do, and more. We demand this morning a Food Ministry or some similar organisation absolutely independent of the Department of Agriculture; to co-operate with it; to plan the needs of all groups of our diverse copulation; to control exports in terms of the internal needs of the country; to fix prices; to subsidise producers and consumers if necessary; to organise rationing for all groups of the population on a scientific nutritional basis; to be in effect the national food controller of South Africa working to a long-term policy of production. In that way this food organisation, this food ministry, would ensure to the farmers a stable internal market. I believe that only by such a measure can we put our family nutritional services on a health and efficiency basis. Only by such a measure can we ensure the security that the farmers are seeking and have the right to demand. The next requirement in a food organisation is a national food distribution mechanism. I do not mean to suggest the elimination of the traders. I believe they will be essential to food distribution under a Food Ministry. But as I visualise the set-up, Pretoria would be responsible for the food plans; and the retailers, traders and Government agencies would do the distribution. Co-ordination would be achieved by permanent officials placed at strategic points throughout the country. They would coordinate distribution; and they would, particularly for the lower income groups, provide for their nutritional needs through depots, through mobile markets, through subsidised restaurants; and in certain parts and for certain family groups, subsidise the consumers’ purchases by means of some such plan as has been so successful in the food stamp plan adopted in the United States. Thsee co-ordinating officers would work to a national nutritional programme. I wish to illustrate how they would operate by referring to the nutritional programme given by the Nutrition Council for native labourers. I quote from a publication issued by the National Nutrition Council dealing with the food requirements of native labourers. This is one of the five alternative rations set out—

That is the ration laid down to maintain a normal efficiency of native labourers. How many native labourers get it? How many white people in the workers’ groups get it? In fact, if we were to ask for the fulfilment of that programme by the agricultural producers of the country, they could not measure up to it. Take maize. A leading Natal farmer, Mr. Cameron, has just made a calculation. He mentions that if we gave every native in the country 2 lb. of maize a day, we would have to provide 36 million bags of maize a year; and if we take the other consumption of maize into calculation, it would total 50 million bags a year. In South Africa the peak period for the production of maize was 1938, when we produced 29 million bags of maize. It is clear that our agricultural producers could not measure up to a diet of the standard laid down by the Nutrition Council for native labourers if they were asked to do so. And this is the tragedy. The toll of disease is due largely to the inefficiency of agriculture in providing the country with food. In Durban during January, five people died every day of tuberculosis, and most of them, if not all, were non-Europeans. It is undoubtedly more costly to fight the ravages of a disease like that, than it would be to set up an organisation, and to pursue a food policy, which would be designed primarily to eliminate such disease.

Now a word in regard to rationing. The country demands it. The Government denies it. The Food Controller wants it. He has put up a scheme which he says will cost £90,000, and which he can introduce in three months on the basis of household rationing. He believes that registration is possible; but he does not advocate a coupon system. He would like to make extensive use of military lorries in the five big centres. That is the basis of his scheme. I for one would like to see that scheme tried. The Government apparently has turned it down. That is still another proof of the attenuated powers of the Food Controller. We go further. We ask that the coupon system be introduced for all races in the country. That system of rationing would reveal to the people of South Africa the enormous demand for essential foods from the masses of our people now denied even minimum needs. It would focus our attention as nothing else could do on the possibilities and the duties of the agricultural producers. I believe it would bring about a revolution in the organisation of agriculture, and in our distributive machinery in the country. If we are afraid to introduce such rationing, because we do not want to measure up to the tremendous demand that rationing would reveal, then we are prepared, by the same token, to sacrifice the economic future of the farmer, of the worker, and of the industrialist.

It may be argued that much of what has been advanced today should be considered in the background of world conditions. It is true that we are faced today with world shortages on a big scale. The Secretary for Agriculture in the United States gave us towards the end of last year figures about the present position in the world. Butter production is down by 50 per cent., wheat by 8 per cent., rye by 15 per cent., rice by 16 per cent., and sugar by 18 per cent., and all dairy products, eggs and meat, are down considerably. Now that world position is not due merely to physical inability to produce. It is due in the main to lack of planning. Sir John Orr warned the world in 1943, 1944, and again in 1945, that planning our agricultural production and food requirements is absolutely necessary if we are going to secure the post-war food front. We in South Africa did not take heed. We did not plan. We drifted, trusting to control boards with their scarcity complex. Finally we are reduced to the humiliation of having to beg from a beggared world. I sympathise with the Hon. the Prime Minister with the position in which he is placed today, as a result of past failure in this country to plan, plus of course the ravages of our indigenous droughts. We must insist on a long period programme of industrial and agricultural production to meet, not the physical needs of today, but the needs of a very long tomorrow. An article in the “Cape Times” recently, at the end of February, stressed very emphatically the importance of planning our food needs. That article referred to the Agricultural Research Institute. It showed that when maize production is 1.4 bags per morgen the cost of producing a bag of maize is 18.62s. Where the production is raised to 12.2 bags the cost is only just over 4s. a bag. The producer today gets 19s. a bag. What is the conclusion suggested by the “Cape Times” in its article? It is this—and what is true of maize is also true of wheat—that we should plan for abundance. That is what the hon. member for Cape Eastern (Mrs. Ballinger) is asking. I believe that planning for production must be the policy in future.

Take our cattle position. Our cattle census is about the same as that of Australia, yet in comparison with Australia we produce only 25 per cent. of beef; and only 40 per cent. of the Australian output of butter and 20 per cent. of their cheese. Apparently, even taking into consideration climatic and other factors, it is quite clear that we have not been planning for plenty for the past years; and that is the reason why this motion is demanding an improvement on the appalling position that has been revealed here this morning. Our food organisation in this country has failed the country lamentably. We have no faith in it. We have no faith in the Department of Agriculture as a substitute Food Ministry. We have no faith in the complex, many sided and many-streamed system of control in this country, operating as it does without unity, without a concerted policy, without a directing brain and a directing department. The need for a special department as pleaded for so eloquently by the hon. member for Cape Eastern, and a special Ministry is very urgent; and I say this deliberately, it is so dangerous if we continue to ignore it, that it should evoke a favourable response from the Government. One final factor which impresses me very much in urging the setting up of a Food Ministry in this country is the population trend in South Africa. Within the next ten years, between now and 1955, it is estimated that the European population in South Africa will increase by 475,000, and the non-Europeans by 2½ million. That increase will occur to a great extent in the urban areas, both in the case of Europeans and of non-Europeans. It might be assumed, therefore, that during the next ten years the urban population in this country will have increased by 1½ million. That is going to create a nutrition problem of the first magnitude. Only planned production in this country can enable the farmers to meet the future colossal increase in demand for dairy products, maize, meat, fruit and vegetables. We should aim at increasing production on the revolutionary lines now being carried out in agriculture in the United States. It calls for beginning today to plan to meet the demands of 1955. Our food problem in this country is not a passing phase. It is with us for good. It can become a great tragedy; it can become a great economic opportunity for the farmers. It can become a great opportunity for this country. Because we believe that, we urge the Government to direct every effort to establish a Food Ministry or some other similar organisation with adequate authority to plan to meet the needs of today and tomorrow. We must drive for food with the same relentlessness as we drove for war and victory during the past six years. The next move is with the Government.

Mr. Speaker, let me say first of all that I cannot support the motion of the hon. member for Cape Eastern (Mrs. Ballinger). Let me add, however, that I agree with a good deal of what she said. It is merely with her conclusion that I differ. I do not believe that the answer to the problem she has put is the appointment of a Ministry of Food, but I feel that every member of the House will be grateful to the hon. member, and very much in sympathy with her when she draws attention to the gravity of the malnutrition problem in this country. It is, of course, a problem which has been before us for a considerable time. Reports have reached us from every quarter drawing our attention to the magnitude of this problem and to its seriousness, and it is just as well that it should be emphasised in this House, not on one occasion, but on many occasions. It is particularly important that it should be emphasised that the problem of malnutrition is not merely a wartime problem. I for one am grateful to the hon. member for having stressed that. It is a problem which will be with us for many years, and upon the solution of that problem ultimately depends all our hopes and plans for the future. No health plan, no industrial development plan, no plan for raising the standard of living of the native, or the standard of any other section will be effective unless we first solve the problem of malnutrition. So far I agree with her. That means that I agree with a great deal of what she said. But when she says that the only way of combating this problem is to establish a Ministry of Food, there I part company from her. Broadly speaking, her argument rests upon this: She says what we need is co-ordination. She draws attention to the fact that the problem of malnutrition affects various departments of State. She mentioned the Departments of Health, of Economic Development and of Native Affairs. I do not know whether she mentioned other departments, but she might have mentioned Labour, Finance and Social Welfare. I think I have added at least one or two departments to her list to indicate that in order to deal with this problem in a broad way you have to embrace the activities not of one or two departments, but of half a dozen or more. She says that the activities of all these departments in so far as they impinge on the problem must be co-ordinated under one single authority, and that that single authority must operate on a single national plan. Here again I agree with her. I agree that we shall never combat this problem unless we can coordinate the activities of various departments. I agree that in the past and at present there has been and still is great deal of spasmodic action, independent action, being taken by various departments, and although I have no doubt that there is a certain amount of co-ordination, there is certainly not sufficient. But why, I ask the hon. member, is it necessary or even desirable that this co-ordination should be effected through the medium of a single Minister?

Business suspended at 12.45 p.m. and resumed at 2.20 p.m.

When the House adjourned I had just agreed with the hon. member for Cape Eastern (Mrs. Ballinger) that while we should have a greater degree of co-ordination between the various departments responsible for the distribution of food, I disagreed with her that in order to bring that about we require a new Ministry, a Ministry of Food. The hon. member who moved this motion goes further. She says not only must there be a Food Ministry responsible in the widest sense for satisfying the nutritional requirements of the people, but this Ministry must be an authority above other departments. She says, in effect, so important is this matter, that unless you have a department with supreme authority, with power to dictate the policy of other departments concerned with the same problem, like the Departments of Social Welfare and Health, you will never get any effective action. I venture to suggest to the hon. member that there she is on very dangerous ground. In the first place, she is making a suggestion entirely contrary both to the facts and the spirit of the Constitution. We did not establish our ministerial control on that footing.

It is not a dictatorial* department I asked for.

The hon. member says it is not a dictatorial department, but then I do not know what “supreme authority” or the word “above” means. I remember she used the words “this Ministry must be above others.” I think she must have intended this department to be able by some authority to dictate the policy of other departments. Otherwise the thing has no meaning. There she is violating not only the facts, but the spirit of the Constitution. What is more, the scheme would be totally impracticable. The work of the various departments of State is so interdependent that if you were to give to one department any form of control or authority over other departments, it would make the work of individual Ministers quite impossible. It would not, in fact, work. It is because these departments are so closely associated, because their work is so interdependent, that you arrive at your conclusions, not by the method of one department dictating to another, but by consultation, involving as it does a certain measure of compromise. The fact is, and we have to face it on all matters of’ public policy, that there is a conflict between various departments of State. That conflict is, of course, particularly well illustrated in the case of the constant conflict between all departments and the Minister of Finance. All departments would like to spend a lot of money, and they all have to go to the Minister of Finance to get it, and he has frequently to revise it or modify their demands. That is an ideal example of the conflict that exists between one department and another. But it goes right through all departments; there is conflict between them in the sense that the policy of one department must inevitably have repercussions on the policy of another department, so you can only arrive at a general conclusion by the method of consultation and compromise. And there the co-ordinating authority which the hon. member says should be a Ministry of Food in this particular case is and must always be the Cabinet. There are several departments that she did not mention which would be intimately concerned with this problem of food distribution. The idea of putting one body in supreme authority over those departments is totally impracticable, and what you must get is a policy arrived at after consultation under the ordinary constitutional methods by which the Cabinet is your co-ordinating authority and the final framer of policy.

I come now to what I call the second limb of the hon. member’s argument when she gets down to particulars. She says not only must this Ministry of Food be in control of the organisation “above” other departments but in particular it must be divorced from the Department of Agriculture. When the hon. Minister interrupted her to say that the Minister of Agriculture is not in control of the Food Controller he was stating a plain fact; that is very important and ought to be borne in mind for those constantly clamouring for a Ministry of Food. The Minister of Agriculture is no more in control of the Food Controller than the Minister of Finance is in control of education. They happen to be vested in the same person. That is all. Just as we have running through all our Cabinet appointments a single individual responsible for more than one department. It is Mr. Strauss who is Minister of Agriculture and Mr. Strauss to whom the Food Controller is responsible. They happen to be the same individual. It is totally wrong and very misleading to suggest that the Food Controller, that the organisation which deals with the consumers’ side of food, is under the authority of the Minister of Agriculture.

What ministry is the Food Controller responsible to?

It is the same individual but the ministry has no name. The hon. member suggests I am splitting hairs. We are no more splitting hairs than when we say that Mr. Hofmeyr is Minister of Finance and Minister of Education. It is inmaterial whether hon. members regard this as a hair-splitting matter or not. The real point I want to make is that when she claims that the food organisation should be divorced entirely from the Minister of Agriculture the hon. member is entirely false to her own argument. Her own whole argument is based on the necessity for greater co-ordination, and here where she has an example of a degree of co-ordination she quarrels with it. She now wants a department independent of the Ministry of Agriculture. You have, I claim, a measure of co-ordination—not sufficient I agree—but you have a measure of co-ordination between the department responsible for production and the department responsible for distribution by virtue of the fact that both fall under the same individual. [Interruptions.] The hon. member can try his own logic in a moment. Not only do I claim you have a certain measure of co-ordination between those departments but I say it is important you should.

There are no two Departments where coordination is more necessary than between Agriculture and the organisation responsible for the distribution of food from the consumer’s point of view. The problems of production and distribution are so closely inter-related that to suggest that they should be put into water-tight compartments would be to destroy the very basis of co-ordination. In fact, I would suggest that the hon. member is really making the same mistake which is being made by so many members of the public at present when they clamour for a Food Ministry. The assumption behind much of this clamour is that the Minister of Agriculture is responsible primarily for production, and consequently to a large extent for seeing to the interests of producers, and because it is the same Minister who is responsible for food distribution, he must necessarily subordinate the interests of the consumers to those of the producers. That is the whole basis of this clamour, but from every point of view that is a totally false assumption. First of all with regard to the facts—I will not go into them at any length—but it has been suggested that the Minister of Agriculture has been responsible for maintaining high prices to farmers for their agricultural products.

You mean low prices.

I knew that remark would be made, but as a matter of fact I agree to a large extent with the hon. member. As a matter of fact the activities of the Minister of Agriculture have been directed to keeping prices below the figures which they would have reached if the ordinary laws of supply and demand were allowed to operate. During the last war when there were acute shortages of wheat and maize, the price soared far above the prices reached in the present war.

The farmers got up to £4 a bag for wheat.

Hon. members will therefore accept that the activities of the Minister of Agriculture have been in the interests of the consumer with regard to the prices fixed for these primary products. I believe that the Minister has tried to hold a fair balance between the two, and tried to give the farmer a fair price for his products, bearing in mind that the cost of production has gone up considerably. My point is only to establish that the Minister of Agriculture, has not acted solely in the interests of the producers, ignoring the consumers. The facts prove the contrary. His job as Minister of Agriculture and his control, through other organisations, is aimed at trying to balance the two sides and to be fair, and I think he has achieved that to a large extent. I said a moment ago that it was most important that these two Departments, Agriculture and Food Control, should be very closely co-ordinated, and that brings me to a remark which the hon. member for Cape Eastern (Mrs. Ballinger) made which surprised me very much. She appears to assume that the present agricultural policy of the Government is a policy of self-sufficiency. I was very surprised indeed to hear her say that, especially in view of the fact that the hon. member for Boshof (Mr. Serfontein) attacked the Government for not adopting that very policy. The agricultural policy of the present Government is precisely the reverse. The policy is to get away as far as we can from the policy of self-sufficiency into which we were driven during the war, and which has had such unfortunate effects upon the development of agriculture as a whole. If the hon. member would read—and I dare say she has read it; she seems a glutton for reading White and Blue Papers—the White Paper on agricultural policy, she will surely not find there any suggestion that the policy of the Government is a policy of self-sufficiency. She will find, on the contrary, that the policy is much more in line with the policy adopted at Bretton Woods.

I said it was the policy laid down at Hot Springs.

I mean Hot Springs. That policy was laid down at Hot Springs, and this Government follows that policy, not of self-sufficiency, but of producing those things which we can readily grow and which we are best suited to grow, and importing all the other things we need. Such a policy might involve and probably will involve a considerable reduction in our present wheat-growing areas, and the importation of wheat on a large scale. I merely mention that to illustrate how far from self-sufficiency our present policy stands.

I quoted the report of the Planning Council.

Then they were wrong. Now this policy which was laid down in the White Paper is not only sound from the point of view that it follows world policy adumbrated at Hot Springs, but it is also sound from our own national point of view. The effect of following a more rational agricultural policy, a policy more in tune with our natural conditions, must bring down the price of foodstuffs. In the long run that must be its effect, and not only will it bring down the price of foodstuffs, but it will considerably simplify the problem of distribution, which is a very acute problem. There are considerable complaints about the costs of distribution, etc., but with a more rational agricultural policy, growing only what we are best suited to produce, the result in the long run will be a much more stable flow of products to the markets, which will in turn simplify and cheapen costs of distribution. I simply make these remarks to indicate how close the connection of the Department of Agriculture must be with any department responsible for distributing foodstuffs. I will say that any departure from that close association would be a step backwards and not forwards. There is one other point I wish to touch upon which was raised by the hon. member. She complains that under present conditions the Social Welfare organisation simply toys with the problem of malnutrition, that in fact all it does is to buy up surpluses where it finds them on the market, and distributes them to the lower-income groups; that it acts, in other words, as a buffer to keep up the price of agricultural products to the producer. I agree that that is more or less what the Department of Social Welfare does. It does simply act as a buffer. It does not buy up any substantial quantity of products for distribution. It goes rather for surpluses than for foodstuffs in short supply, with the exception, perhaps of milk. But when the hon. member suggests that this department or any larger department into which it may grow must in fact assume a far greater responsibility for feeding the people as a whole, then I must say my doubts begin to stir. We would all like to see such an ideal arrangement, and the State assuming full responsibility for combating malnutrition, and for feeding its people, but I ask myself whether it is possible, whether it is within the realm of possibility at present. One aspect of it with which the hon. member did not deal is the question of cost, and I ask myself: Supposing the State were to assume responsibility for combating undernourishment of every individual in the country, could it do so? It would, I feel sure, be rather beyond our reach at present, just as so many of these other ideals which we have set before us in connection with health and other services, are at the moment beyond our reach. We have to approach them slowly and face the fact that we will not become an ideal Utopian State in the next few years. We must tackle these problems slowly and look to the eventual position where you will have no malnutrition and no ill-health, but that state of affairs will come about only when we have raised our national income far above its present level. May I say in conclusion that I have agreed with the hon. member that we should have closer co-operation between these various departments, and that at present there is insufficient co-ordination. I hope the hon. Minister will deal with that point, and give some indication of what the Government’s plans are in that regard. I agree that the public is not satisfied with the present position, and though I think the clamour for a Ministry of Food is misguided, being based on false assumptions, I do think that the public is on the right track, when it says that this problem must be tackled in a big way on a national scale, and not dealt with piecemeal by a number of departments acting independently and often, as the hon. member says, passing the buck.

In other words, there should be a Food Ministry.

That is just what I did not mean. The thing the hon. member aims at is that the State should assume full responsibility for feeding the people. We all hope that that will happen in time, but I am afraid we shall have to wait and that we shall have to deal with this problem of malnutrition in the same slow, but I hope, sure way in which we deal with all other matters concerning our social services.

It is somewhat strange to hear the hon. member for Parktown (Mr. Stratford) discusing a national food scheme, and to hear him expressing anxiety over the malnutrition of children. If the truth must be told, it is peculiar that he should participate in a debate on the food shortage while he was the man who, together with Mr. Nyman and the hon. member for South Peninsula (Mr. Sonnenberg), travelled through the country for the purpose of collecting £2,000,000 to export food to Great Britain. He is not in a position now to come and talk of malnutrition of children or of a national scheme, because he was more concerned about the children of another country than he was about the children in his own country.

That is not so.

Before I go any further, I will move the amendment which we wish to propose to this motion—

Let me put it this way, that if our amendment is accepted, the motion of the hon. member for Cape Eastern (Mrs. Ballinger) will read as follows—

1. (a) lack of precautionary measures and effective planning;
2. (b) the export of foodstuffs on a large scale during the war period, directly and as ships’ supplies, regardless of the needs of the people of the Union;
3. (c) excessive supplies to ships at present; and
4. (d) inadequate encouragement to farmers to increase production;

and that the Government be requested to take into consideration the advisability of granting immediate assistance to producers by inter alia—

1. (i) providing seed for wheat and other food crops under a subsidy of at least fifty per cent.;
2. (ii) providing fertiliser at reduced prices;
3. (iii) making available traction power and fuel;
4. (iv) supplementing the stock of farmers who have suffered losses owing to drought; and
5. (v) modifying the existing system of taxation which has a restraining influence on agricultural production;

and that the Government be further requested to take into consideration the advisability of providing adequate subsidies to consumers, where necessary, with the object of reducing the cost of living, particularly for the lower income groups.

The mere fact that such a motion has been introduced by the hon. member for Cape Eastern is an acknowledgment that the food situation in the country is serious. Indeed it is unnecessary to make such an admission, for the whole country is aware of it. But the hon. member has admitted it by introducing this motion, and as far as such an admission is concerned, we agree with her wholeheartedly. She advocates certain measures, and I want to say that as far as one or two of them are concerned, there can be objection whatsoever to them, but I also want to say that some of the proposals will be of little help.

For instance the hon. member speaks of a survey of food supplies. I want to put the question whether it is not a little late in the day to begin with a survey of food supplies? Isn’t this a matter which should have been tackled by the Minister of Agriculture and his Department long ago? You do not begin with a survey when the position is acute, because then it is time to provide the necessary food and to take the necessary measures in connection with distribution. The hon. member speaks of a separate Ministry of Food. The hon. member for Parktown (Mr. Stratford) dealt with that, but I want to ask the hon. member this question: Why should South Africa have a separate ministry? South Africa’s position is not like that of England. England is not a producing country as far as food is concerned. Thus I can well understand that a food ministry is called for in England. But in South Africa which is a highly productive country, there can be only one person who under the circumstances must also be responsible for the provision of food, and that is the Minister of Agriculture. And now I want to ask the hon. member for Cape Eastern whether her request for another Minister is not perhaps in reality a motion of censure in the present Minister of Agriculture? If this in her intention, then I agree with her wholeheartedly.

So far, so good. But now I want to put this question to the hon. member: Why come now, when things are so black, with such a motion? May I ask the hon. member why in the past when this side of the House drew attention time and again, and especially during the past two years, to the serious state of affairs, and when this side advocated certain measures, did she not support us then? Where was the hon. member for Cape Eastern then? And that time she was hand in glove with the other side; on every occasion she voted with the Government. And when last year this side of the House introduced a motion, the principal portion of which concerned the question of food, where was the hon. member for Cape Eastern then? She had a little to say about it, but when it came to a division, where was she? Then she voted with the Government. It does not behove her and those who sit beside her, and who always voted meekly with the Government when we were drawing attention to the state of affairs which was developing, to introduce such a motion now.

I now come to her seconder, the hon. member for Berea (Mr. Sullivan). Where was he last year? Then he was an independent member in this House. The hon. member for Berea has concluded no Coalition agreement, which is perhaps an excuse for the hon. member for Cape Eastern. The hon. member for Berea was independent; he could do as he liked. What did he do? When we introduced a motion which dealt with the food question, he crossed over and voted with the Government. It does not behove him—however eloquent and professorial his speeches may be—to second a food motion now. But is there perhaps another reason? Since that time the hon. member for Berea has jumped off the fence and joined the Labourites. Would the reason perhaps be that the Labour Party are now trying to recover what they have lost in the past six years when they voted with the other side?

You lost a great deal more.

They want to recover what they have lost, for they are out of favour with their people. They are now seconding this motion. But when they should have helped, when we were dealing with the question, and when we attacked the Government on account of its laxity in respect of the food question, then the hon. member for Krugersdorp (Mr. van den Berg) and the then Independent member (Mr. Sullivan) and the whole Labour Party voted with the Government. It does not behove them to second a motion on food now. Or is it their object to obliterate their past? I think that that is the real object, for their actions have made a very bad impresion on the people who regarded them as the Labour Party. Those who have the right to introduce a motion like this and to discuss the food problem, and who have the right to criticise the Government for its laxity in the past, are the official Opposition, who during the past two years have drawn attention to the dangerous situation which was developing. We have the right to talk.

In 1945 we introduced a motion on food. This year we moved a motion of no confidence, and once again we drew attention to the situation, which was deteriorating by the day. What was the Minister of Agriculture’s reply, for I am coming to him now? He made excuses. First of all I will deal with last year, 1945. When we drew attention to the serious state of affairs which was developing in the country, the Minister’s excuses were the drought on the one hand and floods on the other hand; he, spoke of a shortage of labour, a shortage of fertiliser and a shortage of farmers who had gone to the front—a shortage of everything, except a shortage of Government policy. He did not mention that. Of the lack of policy and precaution on the part of the Government he made no mention whatsoever. And when I say that no precautionary measures were taken on the part of the Government, then I can quote the hon. member for Parktown who has just spoken. I have done it before, but it will perhaps be as well to quote once again what he said about the Government as far back as 1944. At a meeting the hon. member said—

That was the opinion expressed about the Minister of Agriculture by his own member, who today participated in the debate. Apparently he forgot the speech he made in November, 1944.

I said the same again today.

Then I hope that the Minister heard it, and I am grateful to the hon. member for his candour and honesty in connection with the matter.

What else did the Minister say when we drew attention to the danger of a food shortage in the country? He spoke of the Broederbond and about Hitler. Those were his stories. He said that by harping on the food shortage we were trying to divert attention from those matters.

You were busy covering up your tracks.

I am coming to the Minister of Lands in a moment. In 1945 the Minister of Agriculture, during the debate on the supplementary estimates, told us that the farmers had never produced as much as they had done in the last few years. He bragged about it. If that is the case, I want to ask the Minister: “Where is the food today?” Where is the food if the farmers produced as never before? Why have we the situation which is prevailing in the country today? The country is confronted with a serious situation which he can no longer or dare no longer deny. His excuse is that at the time when he exported food there was a surplus in the country. As he expressed it in his speech, the cold storages were chock-a-block full of meat, and there was so much cheese that they did not know what to do with it. So they simply exported it. This testifies to lack of precaution, lack of vision and a hopeless lack of competent counsellors in his Department; or otherwise we are dealing with an arrogant Minister who would not listen to his counsellors’ advice; for if his counsellors had understood their work they should have been in a position last year to warn him as regards the situation which was developing. Thus either they did not serve him with advice, or they did advise him, and he, the arrogant Minister, refused to accept the advice. And now this year he is confronted with the difficulty of a serious food situation in the country. It is the same man who informed the country only five months previously how much food they were going to export to Britain. Here I have a cutting from a speech that he made on 12th October, 1945—October of last year—when the Minister of Agriculture was prepared to export food to the value of £6,500,000. He informed the country that he had already exported food to the value of £4,750,000. A few months ago he boasted about it and now he has to admit in this House that a serious position exists in the country. Now he advances excuses. He tries to shield behind Providence. This time it is not floods but the drought—there has never been such a drought in this country! The Minister is not so young that he cannot remember. He comes from Calvinia where there have been many droughts in the past. He ought to know that in the past we had just as big droughts as we had recently, if not more serious droughts. His department can tell him that. He must not come forward with that story and try to shield behind Providence; he must not say that the Lord inflicted the drought upon the country and that it is not the Government’s fault that there is no food in the country. Then he and the Prime Minister come forward with another story; they point out what the position is in other countries, that the position there is much more serious. They forget, however, that a country like England did not only suffer heavy, direct losses through the war but that England is not a food producing country. The Minister also forgets that a year earlier he had boasted that the farmers of South Africa have never produced as they are producing at present. Then he advances a third excuse. He and the Prime Minister say that the Government is doing its best. May I remind him of what the hon. member for Gardens (Dr. L. P. Bosman) said in this House only last year in reference to all the promises which were being made. He quoted what Alexander Pope said about a tree which is full of leaves but which does not bear any fruit of commonsense. He made the statement in respect of his own Minister. Now they advance the excuse that they did their best.

I come back now to my submission that an extremely serious position prevails in the country. That cannot be denied. Is it necessary to furnish proof? We could produce convincing evidence from the Government’s own newspapers. Here I have cuttings which talk about “Starvation in the Ciskei;” “Durban’s worst meat shortage,” and so I could go on. I could take up half an hour in quoting evidence from the Minister’s own newspapers with regard to the seriousness of the position which exists in the country. There is no reason why South Africa should be placed in this position. We are a big agricultural producing country; we were not in the war in the sense in which England and America were in the war.

Half the farmers were in the war.

The necessary food supplies were available, but we were dealing with a Government which failed to take the necessary precautions and which was guilty of negligence. It was a Government which was intent only on waging war and which was prepared to allow things to take their course. That was the attitude of the Minister and of members on the other side. During the past six years they have been more concerned about waging war than about the position of their own people.

But what is still worse, is that since the war and also during the war the Minister of Agriculture, with the approval of the Prime Minister, has been exporting food out of the country to the value of millions of pounds. When he must have known what the position in South Africa would be, he was more concerned about the people of other countries than he was about those in his own country. Now I come to that portion of our amendment which deals with export, and I will quote certain figures which I obtained by means of questions which I put to the Minister, and which indicate very clearly to the country what the Government’s policy is. They put the Government’s attitude in a very bad light. It is all very well to say that we must help the people in England and so on. If other people are in trouble, we must help them, but there is a proverb which most of the members on the other side know, and it is “Charity begins at home.” Look first to your own people, and then to the people in other countries. Provide first of all for your own family, before you try to help other people—before you help waging a war which the country is not directly interested in. I come now to the export which was taking place and is still taking place now. I have already referred to the Minister’s own statement in October of last year, to the effect that he had already exported food to the value of £4,700,000 during that year. I now come to the figures. I took the trouble to put certain questions on the agenda, and I have here the replies which came from the Minister. I asked how much had been exported and how much had been delivered in the way of ships’ supplies since the beginning of the war. It gives us an indication of what has happened to the food in spite of the fact that the farmers have produced on such an enormous scale, as the Minister said. Fresh meat, almost 110,000,000 lb.; tinned meat, 12½ million lb.; butter 28 million lb.; cheese 7,848,000 lb.; sugar 790,000 tons; eggs, 10,400,000 dozen; it is not hundreds of thousands, it is millions. During the years when the housewives had to pay 4s. and 5s. per dozen for eggs, 10 million dozen were exported.

Does that include ships’ supplies?

I have already said so, but the hon. member probably did not hear it. I can also give the quantities supplied to ships separately.

Should we not have done so?

Naturally not. Should we have provided the sailors and passengers on the ships with bacon and eggs while our own people had no food? During 1945, at a time when the Minister knew or must have known that a serious situation was in the offing, until November of that year—thus over a period of eleven months—he exported more than 4,000 carcases, 440,000 lb. of cheese, 61,000 tons of sugar, 147,000 dozen eggs. I am only mentioning a few items. Last year over a period of eleven months, when our own people were queueing up to try and get meat, cheese, butter and eggs, those articles were exported in the quantities I have mentioned here. In that same period of eleven months he also supplied ships with the following quantities: 102,000 lb. of fresh meat, 214,000 lb. of tinned meat, 55,000 lb. of butter and 71,000 dozen eggs. We must remember that this was at a time when there were no convoys.

Now I come to the sugar position. During the year 1944-’45, 117,000 tons were exported, and last year 71,000 tons were exported—at a time when the housewives of South Africa struggled to obtain sugar. On the platteland it is customary among the people to make their own jam and to can fruit. This year they could do practically nothing in this line, because they did not have the sugar. It was rationed to clients, who were fortunate in being able to obtain it, at half lb. per week. But nevertheless in 1944 the Minister exported 117,000 tons, and again in 1945, 71,000 tons.

Now I come to a serious matter. During the last six months certain large ships have arrived in the Cape Town harbour. While our own people could not obtain meat, butter, cheese and sugar, the Minister allowed the passenger and sailors on these ships to be supplied with food in plenty. The Mauretania was here, and she obtained 2,000 lb. of cheese, 6,000 dozen eggs, 36,700 lb. of ham and bacon and 30,000 lb. of sugar. Then the Reina del Pacifico came. She obtained 59,200 lb. of fresh meat, 6,200 lb. of butter, 4,400 dozen eggs, 6,000 lb. of bacon and ham, and 24,500 lb. of sugar. Is the Minister trying to tell me that the sailors and passengers needed 6,200 lb. of butter for only one journey? No, what they did was to stock the ship for future journeys, and the Minister allowed it.

He said at Caledon that those stories were only jokes.

Yes, but it is no joke that the housewives of South Africa could not obtain that food. Next Thursday evening, the 21st of this month, I am going to hold a meeting in the Durban Town Hall, and I want to invite the Minister of Agriculture to accompany me to that meeting. I hope he will have the courage to accept that invitation.

It is not a question of courage.

The Ile de France took 90,000 lb. of fresh meat, 1,000 lb. of cheese, 13,500 dozen eggs, 16,700 lb. of bacon and ham, and 30,000 lb. of sugar. The Carnarvon Castle obtained 146,900 lb. of fresh meat, 8,000 lb. of cheese. Is it credible? The housewives of South Africa cannot obtain cheese, ham and bacon. They were pleased to get hold of ¼lb. of cheese, but the Carnarvon Castle could obtain 8,000 lb. of cheese, 7,140 dozen eggs and 57,000 lb. of sugar. Then we come to the Franconia: 131,700 lb. of fresh meat, 4,000 lb. of butter, 2,600 lb. of cheese, 12,000 dozen eggs, 22,100 lb. of bacon and ham, and 32,000 lb. of sugar. I will not mention all the ships. It concerns eight ships over a period of six months. I asked the Minister how much food was supplied to certain ships only over a period of six months. These eight ships received the following from the Union: 494,000 lb. of fresh meat, 13,700 lb. of butter, 14,800 lb. of cheese, 74,500 dozen eggs, 99,100 lb. of ham and bacon, and 173,550 lb. of sugar. I am not surprised that the Minister is ashamed and is sitting there with his hand over his eyes. I hope that the Minister will make use of this opportunity today to tell us why he allowed it. The housewives of South Africa demand an answer from him. I want an answer from the Minister, for on Thursday evening I want to give the answer to the people of Durban. There was yet another ship here two or three weeks ago, the Empress of Scotland. Surely the Minister knew by then how serious the position was. All over the country there were demonstrations and meetings. Nevertheless the Empress of Scotland obtained 49,000 lb. of fresh meat; 1,120 lb. of cheese; 5,500 lb. of butter, etc. We read in the newspapers that our own people cannot obtain butter, but the Empress of Scotland received 5,500 lb. In addition she obtained 4,200 lb. of ham and bacon and 21,000 lb. of canned fruit. I want to mention something else which is not food but nevertheless an agricultural product. Everyone knows that throughout the country there is a scarcity of soap. On the platteland people are using toilet soap to wash their clothes with. This ship received 10,690 lb. of soap for the use of passengers and sailors. Can the Minister make a statement as to why this was done? In connection with the export of cheese and meat, it is said that it was exported to feed the hungry children in England. In this case it was for the sailors, passengers and wives of R.A.F.’s that this food was loaded on the ships, while our own women had to queue up to obtain meat, cheese or butter. I hope that the Minister will give us an explanation.

Then I come to another matter. While this situation is prevailing in the country, while there are meetings of protest being held in the country, and while we read of starvation in the Ciskei; while in Durban we hear the cry “away with control” and “away with the Government;” while this is happening, “The People of Britain Fund” is launched, and it is decided to send food to England. Food to the value of £2,000,000 will be sent to England. Not only that, but the Prime Minister made a special statement in which he gave the campaign his full support and blessing.

It is not your money which went.

But it is my food and the food of the country. The hon. member for Rustenburg can contribute as much as he wants to. I hope he has contributed generously, but I suppose he has only deposited a shilling or a sixpence or a tickey in the collection box at the bioscope. That is possibly his contribution: They can all send their money. I have no objection to the Chamber of Mines donating £150,000. Our complaint on this side is that, while our own people are starving, our food is taken and sent to another country. In December of last year the Prime Minister gave his blessing to this movement. The captions in the newspapers were “National Tribute to Britain,” “General Smuts launches food fund appeal.” Then the report went on to state what the Prime Minister has said on that occasion—

The Minister of Agriculture’s information is so poor that he allowed the Prime Minister at that juncture, when there was no food in the country, to state that we could export food to the value of £2,000,00 to another country. How does he explain this to the women of South Africa? It is possible that people like the member for South Peninsula (Mr. Sonnenberg) or the member for Parktown (Mr. Stratford) want to export food. They have people who look after them. They have butchers and grocers who see to their needs. Every day they obtain what they require. If we look at the blooming health of the hon. member for South Peninsula, we can see that he eats well. He has never suffered from a shortage of food. He has also never had to stand in a queue; he and his friends are not badly off. It is easy for them to start a campaign for “food for Britain,” for they do not queue up the way we see it happening eyery day in Cape Town; and when half the people in the queue have obtained something, the others are told that they may as well go home for there is no more meat, cheese or butter. I see that the “Cape Times” sent a reporter to the Minister’s wives to find out how they are faring, and whether they were also feeling the food shortage. The first one she interviewed was Mrs. Strauss. She describes the interview as follows—

A whole leg of lamb, and a few pounds of mince twice a week. That is quite a lot. I know of people who have not had a piece of meat for 10 or 14 days. Then she went to the wife of the Minister of Lands. What did she hear there?—

One whole sheep per week! She is one of the fortunate ones. [Time limit.]

I have pleasure in seconding the amendment moved by the hon. member for Beaufort West (Mr. Louw). We have heard this morning of a long term plan which should be introduced and the lengthy argument about it. We on this side of the House realise only too well that a long-term policy is necessary for the future. That is why this side of the House has accepted the plan of the Committee for the Reconstruction of Agriculture for what it is worth, but we feel that we cannot at this stage occupy ourselves with a long-term plan. We are, in truth, in a state of emergency. If we realise that half of our wheat consumption during the next year has to be imported; if we realise that more than half of the maize consumption has to be imported, then we realise that we are in a state of emergency; and if we realise that at the moment there is only one plan to save the situation and that is importation, then we can realise how serious the position is. What is more, the position overseas is such that we cannot expect anything from Europe. We realise that Europe is in a state of confusion and it is clear from reports that there is a food shortage in Europe. It is expected that the shortage will be still more acute next year. We cannot therefore rely upon importation in future. We must prepare ourselves to supply our own food in this country. It is very clear to me that all the other countries of the world realise that a state of emergency exists and that they are making preparations in every possible manner to provide food for their own people. In this morning’s newspaper we see the following Reuter report from England—

It is very clear that in England active steps are being taken to encourage food production in the country itself. In the first instance it is going to increase the price of the products, and it is practically going to exercise compulsion to ensure that in the next year a larger extent of land will be used for wheat production than has been used in the past. The question I now want to put is what our own Government is doing in this connection. What is this Government actually doing to encourage the production of food in this country? We have heard of some sort of small wheat scheme, but no one in this House can describe it as an attempt to encourage the production of food in this country in an effective manner. Not only is there insufficient encouragement for production in future, but also the products, which we have are distributed in a most inefficient manner. We have already seen in the past, in connection with the meat position, what happened in Cape Town over a period of three weeks. In the one week the supply was 107 per cent. of the quota. The next week it fell to 9 per cent. of the quota, and the week after that it was again 61 per cent. of the quota. Now again we find that in Johannesburg there is plenty of meat, that the farmers are finding the greatest difficulty in obtaining permits to send their stock to Johannesburg, and while farmers are without permits, here in Cape Town there is a total shortage of meat. Why must we have such a state of affairs? Since there is such a supply of meat in Johannesburg at this particular time, why cannot the cattle be slaughtered there and sent to Cape Town in refrigerator trucks in order to attain an even distribution of meat? Why must we have this position that in Johannesburg there is a surplus of meat, while in Cape Town there is a complete scarcity? No, what we have suggested is practical planning for the near future, and we can only plan for the near future if we concentrate on securing an increase of the production of those products which can be sown in the near future. The primary requirement of each farmer to enable him to increase his production is that an adequate supply of seed should be made available to him; but the seed should not only be made available to him. The farmer should be enabled to procure the seed in the shortest possible time, and I want to indicate briefly what the position is in the country today with regard to oats, rye and barley seed. We know that everything is controlled. What is the position today? The farmer must first of all go along and ask for a permit to purchase so much seed.

He must first ask for a form.

Yes, he must first ask for a form, and then he must fill in this form and indicate where he is able to obtain the seed and what kind of seed it is. Then he sends this form in and asks for a permit. By the time he receives the permit he cannot get the seed any more, and he must apply for the second time, and it even happens that he has to apply for the third time. Farmers in my area who wanted to sow rye in January waited for more than a month for their seed, and then they were lucky to get half the seed they asked for. It is very clear to me that in this case not only the Department of Agriculture is to blame—they are definitely to blame — but there is no co-ordination between the various Government departments in dealing with this matter. We are faced with the difficulty that once the farmer has received the permit and got into contact with the man who can supply him, then the railway administration simply does not provide the transport for the seed and the farmer has to wait for weeks and weeks before the seed is delivered to him. In a country such as South Africa where we only have a short period during which to sow our fine winter seed, you can think for yourself what a delay of more than a month means. No scheme has been drawn up for providing the farmer with an adequate supply of seed in these abnormal conditions, and I want to appeal to the Minister, now that we are practically nearing the end of the season, to see to it that seed will be supplied to the farmers in a more convenient manner. Now we come to wheat seed. We are faced with the position that in the Union of South Africa we have a complete shortage of wheat and maize. We at least hoped and trusted that there would be a reasonable mealie crop for the coming season, but every report received showed that also in this case our hopes have been disappointed to a very large extent. I heard from my own district only this morning that mealies which had been so promising a few weeks ago are already being cut and stored as fodder. Also the mealie crop will be a very small one, and only one thing remains, and that is that we will necessarily have to concentrate on increasing our wheat production very largely. Here we see that in England prices are increased and they are going to concentrate on using much more land for the production of wheat. What do we find in South Africa? The hon. Minister did, it is true, introduce a small wheat scheme, but it is absolutely nothing in relation to the conditions obtaining in the country. It is a scheme which is simply the same as the schemes we had under normal circumstances. The Minister is now prepared to give the farmer twenty bags of seed wheat. He is not even prepared, now that the scheme is being put into operation, to extend it to any considerable extent.

I have extended it.

The Minister has extended it, but in a very small way.

The scheme is so good that they have taken all the seed we have available for the Free State.

But the position is this. The contention of this side of the House is that under the present circumstances there should not be any shortage of seed. Here the Minister admits himself that all the available seed is being used up.

All the wheat harvested in the Free State has been kept for seed. More than that we could not do.

If the crop in the Free State failed, that is no excuse for the Minister to say that all the available seed has been used up. That is exactly what we contend, that no extraordinary measures are taken to deal with this abnormal state of affairs. We are pleading here for an extension of the wheat scheme and that enough seed should be made available to enable every farmer who is in a position to sow wheat to obtain as much seed as he is able to sow. And we want to go further and tell the Minister that at the time when the rains fell we had to travel all over the country and hold conferences and discussions in order to get Government tractors and other tractors in order to get as much maize as possible into the ground. We want to tell the Minister now that we want him to extend the seed-wheat scheme and to encourage the farmers to sow more. For the third year in succession now some parts of the country, some farmers, had a bad harvest. The farmers have become cautious about planting and we want the Minister to encourage these people, and what we ask is not that 20 bags should be made available to each farmer, but we ask that as much seed should be made available to each farmer as he is able to get into his land. We ask that a subsidy of 50 per cent. should be paid on seed-wheat in order to encourage farmers to produce more. We on this side of the House are pleading for these farmers to be encouraged, and in order to do that it is necessary that a subsidy of 50 per cent. should be paid on seed wheat. But the farmers cannot plant only. It is also necessary that they should get the necessary fertiliser. For quite a number of years now the farmers have been exhausting their soil by planting wheat and maize without the necessary fertiliser. We see that appeals are made continually on the part of the Government that the farmers should plant more, but we must bear in mind that every farmer who sows wheat today without the necessary fertiliser is busy ruining his own financial position for the future, and not only that, but he is also busy impoverishing the country. That is why this side of the House is pleading for this as something essential and that the Government should make special efforts to provide the necessary fertiliser to the farmers of the Union. We can only make a success of our farming, we can only produce enough for the country when the necessary fertiliser is available, and we want to make this accusation that if the Government had done its best in the past to obtain fertiliser for the farmers, their best has not been good enough, and ships should simply be chartered to import fertiliser; but, no matter how, the Government must see to it that the necessary fertiliser is put at the disposal of the farmers. They need it desperately. A further encouragement for which we plead on this side of the House is this: for many years now the farmers have not been able to get the necessary agricultural machinery. They could not get tractors, and for that reason we feel on this side of the House that it is the duty of the Government to encourage the farmers to produce by enabling them to procure tractors at a more economical cost. Why is it necessary that even in these times when there is a shortage of food in this country, farmers still have to pay import duty on tractors. It is the duty of the Government to see to it that food production in this country is encouraged. It is also the duty of the Government to ensure that food in this country is produced more economically, and for that reason we recommend that the Government should abolish the import duty on tractors, and, further, we recommend that power paraffin and also fuel should be supplied to farmers at a more economical price. Every farmer who has a tractor knows that one of his largest items of expenditure is his fuel, and it is in the power of the Government today to reduce production costs in this country by supplying fuel to farmers at a more economical price. Even today the import duty on petrol is still 11½d. per gallon, and thousands and thousands of gallons of petrol are used every year by farmers who are producing food. My question is whether it is right that when a farmer uses that petrol for food production, that he should pay an import duty of 11½d. per gallon on it. It is also possible to provide fuel and power paraffin to farmers at a more economical price. Also in this case we want to ask the Minister, in view of the conditions prevailing today, to see to it that fuel and power paraffin are supplied to farmers at a more economical price, and one of the ways in which this could be done is by reducing the railway tariffs. Another way in which production could be encouraged, and could be tremendously encouraged, is by our system of taxation. We have seen now during the Budget debate—it was very clear to us—that the present Government is determined to encourage the production of gold in this country. We will leave it at that, but we on this side of the House contend that at the present time, when there is a scarcity of food, the production of food is more essential even than the production of gold. For that reason, we on this side ask that encouragement should also be given to the farmers by way of taxation relief, and we suggest in the first place that the excess profits duty in so far as it affects agricultural production should be removed. There are large numbers of farmers in the country today who are not producing to the full extent, for the simple reason that they are not prepared to impoverish their own soil, while if they had grown the products they would have had to give a large portion of the proceeds to the State in the form of Excess Profits Duty. It is very clear from the report of the Reconstruction Committee that the great difficulty of the farmers today is that they are over-capitalised, and the report states very clearly that some plan should be framed for a mortgage redemption scheme. In this respect the State and the Minister of Finance could actively co-operate if they would be prepared today, in view of the acute food position in the country, to allow that the portion of the farmers’ income used by him for mortgage redemption should be exempted from taxation. If that was done, I could assure you that you will be giving a tremendous encouragement to a large number of farmers to go in for increased production during the coming year with new courage and with new strength. We also feel on this side of the House that in that respect the farmers should be encouraged. One of the things which should be done is that in the near future a better price should be given to the farmer for his agricultural products — wheat, rye, oats, barley, etc.—but in doing that we realise that consumers’ prices will also be increased, and we feel that it would not be fair at this stage, when the cost of living is so high, to do anything which will increase the cost of living still further; and that is why we ask that further investigations should be made into the advisability of introducing adequate consumers’ subsidies with a view to reducing the cost of living, particularly for the lower income groups. That is, of course, the old policy of this party. Here I have in front of me the financial policy of the party, in which we say this—

That is why we plead for a consumers’ subsidy. If there is one section of the population who has had a very difficult time in this country as a result of the food scarcity, it is the less well-to-do section of the population. It is true that a cost of living allowance is paid to certain classes, but there are also large numbers who do not receive a cost of living allowance, and even in those cases where it has been paid, the cost of living allowance has never been as high as the actual increase in the cost of living. And while we are now facing a state of emergency, and while we are pleading that production should be encouraged by means of increased prices and consumers’ subsidies, we also plead that the Government should see to it that the cost of living of the less well-to-do classes in the country does not rise any further. For that reason we ask in the amendment that a system of subsidy should be introduced which will be designed to provide the less well-to-do sections of the country with adequate food supplies. We feel that much is being done for the more well-to-do people. In this Budget, in the taxation proposals of the Minister, much is being done for the more well-to-do classes, but very little is being done for the less well-to-do people, and we feel that there is one thing which the less well-to-do section of the population needs, and that is food; and that is why we plead for increased production and increased prices, but at the same time for a system of consumers’ subsidies which will enable the less well-to-do man to procure the necessary food at reasonable prices.

The hon. member for Smithfield (Mr. Fouché) has made out a case for the producer and for the areas that he represents in this House, and I accept his plea in the spirit in which he made it. But when he stated here that thousands and thousands of farmers were not producing because of taxation, I say that is not correct, and the hon. member knows that that is not correct. As a matter of fact he promptly corrected himself and said “numbers and numbers” of farmers. I cannot believe that the farmers of this country will not produce food for the people because they are anxious to avoid the payment of a certain amount of taxation. I say that that statement does not carry any strength as an argument. The hon. member also referred to some other point that I happen to know something about and that is in regard to oats. He complained bitterly of the delay in getting seed to the farmers. I want to tell the hon. member that if it were not for the Agricultural Department and the fact that they insisted on getting affidavits signed when application was made for seed oats, there would be no seed oats available for the farmers of this country today, because they would have been consumed and taken up in the ordinary trade channels. Priority number one in this country has been seed, whether it be for barley, oats or any other commodity, and restrictions had to be applied over the whole country to prevent the entire consumption of seed oats, and the hon. member’s argument that the farmers are suffering great hardships as a result of the action of the Government is absolutely unfair.

But the delay is unnecessary.

I would like to refer to the remarks of the hon. member for Beaufort West (Mr. Louw). Unfortunately, as usual, he has left the House. This House has heard the warped speeches of this individual right throughout the war years, speeches which have shown the character of something which is quite strange to South Africa— paranoia of the worst type—a man who can see only bad in anything connected with Britain or anything connected with the Jews, a man whose character shows in his face— small miserable …

The hon. member must not make personal remarks of that description.

I was referring particularly to his speech. After months and months of saying very little about Great Britain the hon. member has seen an opportunity of picking on the hon. member for Parktown (Mr. Stratford), and immediately starts on food for Great Britain and the collection that the hon. member for Parktown sponsored for food for Great Britain. The hon. member for Beaufort West sees in it something terrible and he immediately infers that this country is giving stuff to Great Britain so that we are starving here. He knows that that is not correct. The House knows that that is not correct, and I will prove that it is not correct. This country has obtained from our Allies—and hon. members opposite would never have obtained it from their Allies—fertilisers which we could never have obtained if we had remained neutral. If we had remained neutral we would have been absolutely without facilities. This country obtained fertilisers from our Allies and in quantities reasonably sufficient to produce food for this country and to give the farmers satisfaction. The farmers know it. This country has looked to them and will look look to them for the production of food in the near future, and right throughout the war years we have obtained quantities of wheat and flour from our Allies in excess of the amount that we expected.

Did we not supply the convoys?

We supplied the convoys and we are proud to have supplied the convoys. We know that the hon. member would have liked these convoys to go from our ports without food. We are proud to have supplied the convoys. But they have never turned their backs on us when we have gone to them, and the hon. member knows that we have had quantities of wheat far in excess of any wheat or wheaten products or bread that we have given to these convoys. We have had mealies from them; we have had maize from them, maize that has saved us over a period of great difficulty in this country, far in excess of the exports that we have given them. We have got millions of bags from them. We have obtained from them proteins, rich seeds for the obtaining of oil; we make the soap in this country and a paltry amount was exported as the hon. member for Beaufort West mentioned—a paltry amount compared with the tremendous quantity of oil and soap that we were able to make because they made available to us supplies of raw products that we would not have got if we had relied on Germany and Japan, but we got it because we were one of the Allies. I wish the hon. member for Beaufort West could have been in the House to hear how many tons of goods this country imported, not miserable little pounds. He made such a great feature of what we had supplied to the convoys. He read out the figure in terms of pounds. We imported not in terms of miserable pounds but in terms of tons. But I do not wish to waste much time on the hon. member. I regret that I had to be personal as far as he is concerned, but I can see nothing more personal than his reference to the conversation which he quoted between a newspaper report and certain housewives in regard to the meat position and the sneering way in which he referred to the wives of Ministers. I wish that some of the soap we exported could have been used to wash his soul a bit white. I want to refer to the subject under discussion and make a few points in that regard. First of all, it is very difficult to get an objective view of the whole food position. It is very difficult because we have seen in this House that there is a great deal of misleading propaganda made and that a great deal of political feeling is brought into discussion. We have the opposition of the agricultural union to a Ministry of Food, and opposition which in my opinion has also been built up by their publicity officer. I have tried to get an objective view of this position, as I see it, not from reports as the hon. member for Cape Eastern (Mrs. Ballinger) has ably quoted, but purely from practical experience. The whole agricultural position in this country is a tremendous problem. It is no good our denying it. Our production has fallen in yield to a morgen over a period of years. Long before the war it was also falling. Today we get about five bags of maize per morgen, and I think we get under four bags of mealies per morgen. These are figures that cannot compare with the production in the Argentine, or these other great producing countries. I say that the task of production in this country and the organisation of it is a task that is almost superhuman. It is a task that is going to take tremendous funds and tremendous brains, and therefore I say that in my opinion our agricultural policy should be bound up entirely with production. It is wide enough in scope. I want to discuss, first of all, the pre-war set-up in regard to the food policy of this country. We all thought that South Africa had no food problem. In the first instance you had your Minister of Agriculture, your Department of Agriculture and your control board. Their concern was not the concern of today; their concern was the bogey of surpluses. That was the biggest problem as far as agriculture was concerned, and as everybody knows, that was really responsible for the evolution of the Marketing Act to try to handle in some way the surplus agricultural production. The result was that no terms of reference with regard to the food policy were contemplated in the Marketing Act. They were not concerned with the fact that there was under-consumption in this country. That was not their problem; their problem was how to try and put the producer in a better position than he was with the ordinary flow of the demand and supply. That policy rather develops on what is generally classified as scarcity lines. That term has been used by the hon. member for Durban (Berea) (Mr. Sullivan). He spoke of the scarcity policy. The policy of exporting your surplus was really to meet this scarcity policy. In many cases those surpluses had to be exported under subsidies, and even in those early years we were in the position that in one season that I know of, of exporting our maize, and having a shortage the following season. I did not read in the Hansard of those days of a great fuss being made by the hon. member for Beaufort West about a shortage of food at that time, and yet the country was faced with that issue. But now, of course, the whole position has changed. Here is an opportunity to make political capital out of the food situation, to go to Durban and tell the people in Durban what he can do for them. I know he went to Durban once before and he came out of it in a hurry, and I think that is probably the treatment he will get again and the treatment he will deserve. At that time there was ’no contemplated food policy on the long-term basis as contemplated by the hon. member for Parktown, and as contemplated by the hon. members who moved and seconded this motion. There was no idea that storage facilities should be made available for foodstuffs, and the result was that this side of our food policy was sadly neglected. It was sadly neglected because, as I have said before, the terms of reference did not cover that aspect of the matter. You have the other point, a point which this House also knows about, namely the question of margarine. At that time, although there was under-consumption of protective foods, I realised that there was also not sufficient income produced by the lower income groups to enable them to buy, but margarine was not manufactured. The war came along, and there was a different set up. On the one hand, there was the Minister of Agriculture and the Control Boards. On the other hand there was the Cabinet Food Committee, the Minister of Agriculture and the Food Controller. There is no doubt about it that the whole policy was completely changed. The Control Boards held down the price of products. Maize on the open market would be very much higher than the price at present of 19s. a bag. So there has been a revolutionary change in the whole direction of the policy adopted with regard to food in this country.

A complete lack of policy.

I do not accept that. Can one say that there is a lack of policy when prices have been held down? If you allow food prices to soar that is a lack of policy.

A lack of policy is when you change your policy from day to day.

No, there has been no such lack of policy. The Minister has held the balance. He has had attacks made on him by producers and by consumers, and he has kept down prices to the consumer at lower levels than they would otherwise have had to pay. Therefore the hon. member cannot say that there has been a lack of policy. What has been the result of this policy? First of all I am quite confident that the prices which the Minister fixed for agricultural products, 19s. for maize, and 27s. 6d. for wheat, were fair and reasonable prices to the producer. Then prices of their means of production, fertilisers, grainbags, petrol, oil and vehicles were also held down by the various price controllers. In view of that the price to the farmer was reasonable, and I do not think that the farmer has at any stage felt that he was being discouraged from producing. We have seen it in the quantity of maize handled by the Maize Control Board during the last year. It was only a matter of 18½ million bags of maize produced, compared with the bumper crop mentioned by the hon. member for Berea (Mr. Sullivan) of 29 million, but it was a fair harvest considering that climatic conditions were not good. I think of that quantity, nearly 11 million bags came into the open market for sale. That would not indicate that the farmer was dissatisfied with the price given to him. He marketed his maize through the Control Board and was satisfied with the price. I think that generally, with the possible exception of dairy products, there have been no cases for complaint and the whole basis on which the farmers worked and the whole food structure, was satisfactory. I have referred to the fact that there has been a revolutionary position with regard to our food policy, and I would like to emphasise here that one must look at this change and not pay attention to the propaganda being made in the country. First of all I refer to the Marketing Act. One hears the cry that this is the Magna Charta of the farmer. My only objection to it is that it does not fit in with present conditions, but that does not mean that I want to take away the farmers’ Magna Charta. I want to give him even more rights and more opportunities to produce, but at the same time there must be radical changes. But all this propaganda does no good, and makes for bad feeling between the producer and the consumer.

Like “Arthur Barlow’s Weekly”.

I accept the interjection. My time is short, but I want to say something about the present food position of this country. This country has nothing to be ashamed of with regard to its wheat policy during the war years. No country in the world had an extraction of 96 per cent. of its wheat to produce the standard loaf. In England it was 80 per cent., which was recently increased to 85 per cent., but we had 96 per cent., a lower grade of flour. The result was that our bread was not so good, but that was the only rationing we had for bread. Rationing bread is really the last resort in the feeding of a nation. If you are forced to ration an essential food like bread, the position must be drastic. Therefore I say that this country has nothing to be ashamed of in putting forward its claims internationally. We are quite entitled to make the necessary demands on international stocks and shipping. Our position is quite different today. During the war we did not make those demands but today we have to get supplies and I think that we know that this Government has made every possible effort to get these supplies from the international pool. With regard to maize, two years after the commencement of the war, this country rationed it. We had never done it before, but we rationed it in 1942, and it was strictly rationed in view of the quantities available. There is no doubt that various sections of our economy suffered very badly because of the strict rationing of maize, but the claim must not be made that we did not ration foodstuffs. We have nothing to be ashamed of in regard to our handling of wheat and maize. We realise that there are periodic shortages of food in this country and in the world, and we realise that there are nations in Europe who are going to starve, but we also realise that those nations are really the belligerent nations who fought us during the war. One of the biggest burdens on the Allied peoples is the claims of these nations which fought us for six years, Germany, Italy and Japan, to be fed.

At 4.10 p.m. the business under consideration was interrupted by Mr. Speaker in accordance with the Sessional Order adopted on 31st January, 1946, and the debate was adjourned; to be resumed on 29th March.

The House thereupon proceeded to the consideration of Government business.

I move—

In proposing this motion, I might just briefly indicate to the House the main reasons why it is necessary for me to ask for additional appropriations from the House, at the same time leaving any particular item that any hon. member may be interested in to be dealt with in the Committee stage. As the House may remember, in my Budget speech I made it quite clear that there have been considerable increases in traffic, and the sine qua non of that is that there also was increase in expenditure. In this case the actual expenditure was rather greater than the revenue, and that accounts for this amount that is asked for. In addition to that, cost of living allowances paid under the Government scheme have been on a higher level than was estimated when we passed the Budget last year. That has amounted to a considerable sum over and above what was provided for in the Estimates. In a number of directions also there was considerable increase in the actual cost of materials purchased. The costs have been steadily rising in many directions during the year, and in certain of the items that also accounts for additional money over and above what we estimated we would require a year ago. You will recall that when the Estimates were made last year a war was on, and we were quite in the dark as to what to do about our air services. Fortunately, we were able to inaugurate these services in the year, and that in turn involved considerable expenditure. There is, of course, revenue to be set against that, but that does not enter into the calculations. I have to have authority to spend money. Overtime payments have also been higher than we hoped. Staff is still short, and we still have to make men work overtime, with the result that they have to be paid. We had no alternative but to do so, and that also accounts for extra expenditure. With regard to the dry docks, the work was expedited rather more than we anticipated would be possible. We were able to finish one dock and make considerably more progress with the other than we originally thought would be possible, with the result that more expenditure was incurred during this year— not more expenditure altogether, but more during this year than we estimated. Then we have the international airport and the airports at Cape Town and at Durban, and in these two cases also we have been able to make progress at a rather faster rate, owing to changed world conditions, than was contemplated. For these reasons, I have now come to the House to ask the House to agree to a revenue account of some £4 million odd, and a loan account of £750,000. I do not think at this stage I can say more, but naturally, when we come to the Committee stage, if there are any items in which hon. members are interested, I shall be only too pleased to give them all the information I possess or can obtain.

I second.

Last year when the hon. Minister of Transport framed his estimates, the war was still on and possibly he could not at that stage make known his full programme. In introducing the original estimates he said that he would need approximately £8,000,000 for purchasing 6,800 trucks. At a later stage the Minister said that the railways would require about 35,000 trucks. I should very much like the Minister to give us a full statement on the requirements of the railways and what he expects to obtain in materials during the current year and the following years. His Renewals Fund amounts to £16,000,000, and the Minister now proposes to spend immediately on trucks alone an amount of £8,000,000, quite apart from railway engines and passenger coaches. Seeing that he proposes to use half of his Renewals Fund for trucks, we should like to know what his expenditure on locomotives and passenger coaches is going to be. I ask this question because the Minister has now discontinued his contributions to the Renewals Fund. He is no longer contributing to that fund, and in my opinion the amount which he has in his Renewals Fund is far too small for the purchase of new rolling stock. For that reason we should like to know from the Minister what is his programme in regard to rolling stock. Last year in his budget speech the Minister emphasised the poor condition of the rolling stock. He said that there were many vehicles the repair of which could not be justified economically. We know that when travelling on our trains, one finds the coaches in a very poor condition indeed, and I assume from what the Minister said that many of those passenger coaches cannot be repaired any more, that it will not pay to repair them. Therefore we should like the Minister to give us a comprehensive exposition of his programme in regard to rolling stock and how he proposes to obtain the funds to buy the new material. I cannot see that the Renewals Fund can be adequate, but I presume that the Minister thinks it is adequate, since he is discontinuing his contributions to the fund. Now, however, he wants to spend £8,000,000 on one item, trucks, and that amount must come out of the Renewals Fund. Furthermore the Minister asks for an additional £152,000 for the Table Bay dry dock. The total estimate is £3,500,000. The Minister said that part of that expenditure would be covered from special sources. We know that the British Government has contributed almost £1,000,000 towards the construction of the dry dock. I want to ask the Minister whether he has undertaken any obligations towards the British Government in consideration of this subsidy of £1,000,000. Or was that given as charity without any compensation or obligation on our part? The Minister also wants £70,000 for the aerodromes he is building. The original estimate for these aerodromes was £3,000,000. When that was discussed last year I was not present, but I presume that the Minister has given particulars in regard thereto. Does this amount refer only to the three large aerodromes which the Minister wants to construct and which he mentioned, or is this a first instalment on aerodromes which he wants to construct later at other places? Then I want to ask a few questions in regard to his expenditure on betterment works. The Minister said that the employees had to do much overtime on account of a lack of labour, but something is apparently wrong if we look at the staggering additional amount which is being asked here. Take for instance Head No. 2, “Maintenance of track and works.” In regard to allowances for supervising personnel he wants £47,693 extra. Surely when the Minister framed the estimates he knew that cost-of-living allowances had to be paid. He knew that overtime had to be paid, for at that time he already paid large sums in overtime. He framed his estimates, but now he finds out that he is £47,000 short on this one item, and that only for supervision. He also asks for an additional £92,000 for salaries and wages. The Minister, when framing his original estimates, knew that he would have to pay for overtime and cost-of-living allowances, but in spite of that he now wants an extra £92,000. Did the Minister perhaps take on more people so as to be able to perform more work? What is the position? Under “Miscellaneous expenditure” No. 241, the Minister requires an additional amount of £171,620 on an original estimate of £316,572. It seems to me that particularly in this instance the estimate was none too accurate, and we should like to hear why this colossal additional amount is now to be voted. I presume that the Minister has not prepared himself to give all this information now, but he may perhaps be able to give it when he introduces his Bill.

I do not want to deal with specific items, but I want to say a few words generally about the second additional estimates. As a reasonable person, one can assume that during the war years there was a great deal of expenditure which could not be foreseen, expenditure in connection with which no correct estimates could be made. But one finds it a little inexplicable when in peace-time the Minister comes forward with additional estimates three weeks or a month after introducing his first additional estimates. We get together and negotiate with a view to shortening the sittings as much as possible. That is the desire of everyone.

I have not submitted additional estimates previously; I have only submitted a Part Appropriation Bill and supplementary estimates.

The Minister has a large number of officials, and surely it is possible for them to frame proper estimates. The Minister’s staff has been increased and he has capable officials under him, and I cannot understand why these large additional amounts are necessary. For example, there is a sum of £152,000 which we are asked to vote additional in connection with the dry dock. How is it possible that this could not have been foreseen three or four weeks ago? Rolling stock may have been delivered more rapidly than was anticipated at first, but how is it possible that the necessary provision was not made four weeks ago? I just want to draw attention to this matter and express the hope that this type of thing will not take place in the future again.

I was thankful for the few introductory words of the Minister. He said something important in a few words. He said that the additional estimates were necessary owing to increased traffic. We are very glad to hear that. May the Minister come to the House every year to ask more money for increased traffic which his personnel cannot provide for in the ordinary Estimates. We will welcome nothing more than that this will happen every year. But the disturbing feature in connection with it is that the expenditure increased more in proportion than the revenue. By comparison the expenditure was more than the revenue. The expenditure rose higher than the revenue. These are things which we brought to his attention repeatedly. I hope that the Minister will not be annoyed when we criticise his Budget proposals and his administration. I should like to ask him not to be so impatient and sensitive when we criticise his administration and policy, because it is all for the good of the Administration and of the Department controlled by him. My colleague referred to one or two items, for example the traffic expenditure and the maintenance of permanent way. In what respect could they not have foreseen that expenditure? That has nothing to do with increased traffic. If the Minister tells me that the locomotive and train personnel had to work overtime because of the increased traffic, I can understand it. If he says that the despatch clerks and labourers had to work more overtime in order to handle the increased traffic I can understand it. They handle the traffic. But when we come to the maintenance of railway lines, they have to be kept up to standard whether there is increased traffic or not. That does not depend on the traffic. More than £600,000 additional expenditure has been asked for permanent ways. That is an increase of more than 10 per cent. on the original estimate. That has nothing to do with the increased traffic. The Minister does not inform the House properly. He comes here and makes a few friendly, humorous and flattering superficial remarks, and then wants us to accept the proposals. If we do not accept them, he becomes impatient. If we criticise, he has developed the habit of attacking us personally and passing personal remarks. If the Minister had come here and said that he had bought rails which were more expensive than was estimated, or if he had said that they had bought sleepers without knowing what they would cost, we can understand it. That is information which the House must have. The interests of the Railways cannot be discussed in any other place but in this House. We represent the shareholders in the company, and this is the only place where the affairs of the company can be discussed. The Minister must come and tell us here what the real reason is why more than £4 million is asked for additionally and why he wants £600,000 more to maintain the permanent way.

It is caused by the increased traffic.

Is the hon. member such a baboon that he does not know what the position is? I beg pardon, Mr. Speaker, I should not have used that word.

On a point of order, Mr. Speaker, is an hon. member entitled to call another hon. member a baboon?

I have already withdrawn it. But the hon. member’s remark was so foolish. It has nothing to do with the amount of traffic. The permanent way has to be kept in order. My colleague also spoke about the increased amount for supervision. The other day in the debate about the Railways Administration we levelled the criticism that the Administration is becoming top-heavy. We warned the Minister in all friendliness that he should not allow the Administration to be top-heavy. Of an amount of £387,000 for supervision, there is £47,000 extra. Where does that supervision come in? Supervision for maintaining the permanent way is a constant figure. Is it for additional cost of living? That cannot be, when we compare it with the proportional increase on other Votes. The salaries and wages of the personnel engaged on the maintenance of permanent way is £2,393,000, and there we have an additional expenditure of £92,000. It is not a proportional increase to ask for an extra £47,000 on an amount of £387,000 for supervision. Increased traffic cannot be the reason for this increased expenditure. The Minister ought to know that this cannot be the reason. There must be another reason, and he ought to give the House the correct explanation of it. If there were a proportional increase of the lower paid ranks as compared with the higher paid personnel, we would not have remarked upon it, but as I pointed out, on an expenditure of £2,293,000 there is an increase of expenditure of £92,000, as regards the personnel doing the actual work, while in the case of the supervising personnel there is an increase of £47,000 on £387,000. That makes the service top-heavy, and the Minister will find that that is the basic reason why his expenditure is rising higher than his revenue. That is the danger we see for the future. My colleague also commented on the miscellaneous expenditure. That can include anything. The original amount was £316,000. The additional amount is almost 50 per cent., namely, £171,000. The Minister asks for that without an explanation of any kind. He covers it by saying that increased expenditure is the result of increased traffic. We now come to Vote No. 4. There we have the train personnel. We accept that with increased traffic there must be increased expenditure as regards train personnel. But in the case of the locomotive shed personnel, there is an increase of £118,000. Proportionally, that is a greater increase than the increase in the case of the men shifting the traffic. On the amount of £2,680,000 for drivers and stokers there is an increase of £306,000, but in the case of locomotive shed personnel there is an increase of £118,000 on an original expenditure of £626,000. That also is not in proportion. The Minister owes us an explanation on that point. It cannot be cost of living allowances, because there is no proportionate increase. The expenditure for the personnel shifting the traffic is proportionally much less than for those who sit in the locomotive sheds. Surely there must be a reasonable explanation for that, and the Minister should tell the House what the reason is. I take it that it is justifiable that the Minister ought to give us the reason. Then we come to coal and wood, where there is an increase of £150,000. That is a 10 per cent. increase. Is it just due to increased consumption, or are there more costs connected with it? It would be interesting if it were not due to increased consumption. If it is due to increased consumption, it is correct, but if it costs more we should like to know why the Railways have to pay more. Lubrication has risen more than anything else. What is the reason for that? It cannot be due to just more lubricants being used. Originally the estimate was £80,000, and now there is an increase of £27,000. It cannot just be the quantity of lubricants used which causes this increase. Then we come to diverse expenditure. The original estimate was for £273,000. There is now an increase of £106,000. Then we come to Vote 5. There supervision has risen by £31,000. We want to warn the Minister in friendly but serious fashion that he is making the service top-heavy, and is unnecessarily increasing his expenditure. If the wages of the people who have to do the work in the interests of the Administration increase proportionally with the increase in traffic, we are satisfied and allow it to pass without criticism. But if the increase for supervision rises out of all proportion, we have to draw attention to it. Another item which is not explicable is the increase in connection with shunters. Those people deal directly with the increase of traffic. They are the people who are most affected. Here an additional amount of £80,000 is asked on the original estimate of £855,000 In the case of other station expenses, there is an increase of £143,000 on £388,000. That is a disproportional increase. If the Minister had given us more information in the first instance, it would have saved the time of the House, because we should perhaps have been satisfied with the information and accepted it at once. I pass these few remarks in the hope that when in future the Minister gives information he will go more into detail in connection with these matters, because if he gives the information at once, we can decide whether the increase is justified, and then it is not necessary to comment on it. For instance, he told us that the completion of the airport proceeded a little faster than was expected. We do not comment upon that. Also the harbour works proceeded faster. We do not object to that, provided we have the assurance that the final expenditure will not exceed the original estimate. We are satisfied to spend money this year which otherwise would have had to be spent next year. We only want the information. Now I want to say a few words in connection with capital and betterment works. In that connection we are not quite satisfied. We feel that there is a measure of—I hardly know what word to use—irresponsibility noticeable on the part of the Administration in asking funds for certain objects, and in then finding that in the end the expenditure is immeasurably greater than the amount originally asked for. I shall take a few items from the report of the Auditor-General to illustrate the matter. On page 135 of his report, the Auditor-General mentions a number of items with which he is not satisfied. I mention one by way of illustration. The Minister cannot expect us to be satisfied with that. He asked for £2,800 for a nursery at Capitol Park, and eventually £14,000 was spent.

The hon. member is now discussing a matter which does not appear on the Estimates.

I mention it as an example. The Minister mentions here unforeseen works, under Vote 10, an additional £50,000 is asked for and this item probably is included in that. We trust that the Minister will see to it that when an amount is placed on the estimates for capital works, the final vote will not be higher than what is asked for in the estimates. The position is that a small item is budgeted for, but later we find that the expenditure is 6, 7, or 10 times as much as the original amount asked for. I do not wish to call it conscious misrepresentation, but still it is misleading in this sense, that a small amount is asked for for a certain work, and because it is a small amount it passes without comment, but later we find that the actual amount required is immeasurably greater. By then we have been compromised and we are practically obliged later to approve of it. They ask for a finger and take the whole hand. If they asked for the whole thing at once they probably would not have received it. We should like to draw the Minister’s attention to that. There are various items amounting not to thousands of pounds, but to hundreds of thousands. When the Minister asked for an additional £50,000 for unforeseen expenditure, we can take it that in an abnormal period there will be unforeseen works, but we do not like small amounts originally being asked for capital works, and that that item then increases from year to year. If the Minister wants to put into operation a definite policy requiring a scheme, he ought to tell the House about it, and then he can receive year by year the amount of money required to put the scheme into execution. We shall then feel happier about the position. I hope that the Minister will keep in mind these few words, and when next he comes to the House with such a proposition, I hope that he will give us more information. It will ease and speed up our work if he would give us a little more information in the first instance.

I presume that this increased expenditure is the result of the debate we had in this House and that the Minister of Transport found that his programme as drawn up by him in the first instance, could not be carried out with the money already at his disposal, that is to say if he wants to come up to the expectations of the country. There is something wrong either with me or with the Minister. I am in the peculiar position that I fully agree that there should be increased expenditure, especially on this item which he has submitted to us. I do want to say, however, that if we read this item in conjunction with the original estimates, then I am afraid that the Minister will still be unable to fulfil the great expectations cherished in the country in connection with the enormous number of new measures required, the new material we shall require to meet the requirements of the Railways and the country. I am not speaking as an expert on these matters, but it seems to me that this amount will not be sufficient for our railways whose material has been worn down to the very last during the past six years. Rolling stock, the building of stations and those things have remained in abeyance. Provision will have to be made for air services, aerodromes and that kind of thing, for contingencies and all these other things and the Minister comes here with an amount which is so meagre that I am afraid the Minister will not be able to fulfil the great expectations we have at present. I am sorry that I have to offer this criticism on the revised estimates which the Minister has submitted to us. I have to offer the same criticism in regard to the further expenditure in connection with the poorly paid section of the staff, such as shunters, level crossing attendants, signalmen, loading masters and similar employees. They still form the poorly paid section and I am sorry that our criticism of the Minister has not been effective enough to induce him to ask for further additional expenditure in respect of these employees. I thought that the wear and tear on the railways and renewals would be such a serious matter that judging from the maner in which the Minister informed the country of this fact, we would spend from £20 million to £30 million in order to remedy the position. Now we find that only these additional amounts are asked for, although we all know the condition of our rolling stock. Our railway workshops should be used to the fullest extent to remedy the position. Talking about this point, I should like to say a few words to the Minister in regard to unforeseen expenditure. I am thinking of the workshops which I have seen in various parts of the country, where people have to work, but when you look at the roof it looks quite dangerous—almost as dangerous as here in our Parliament where somebody can also crash through the roof. I am surprised that the number of accidents is not higher. I have in mind, for instance, the ugliness of the workshops at Volksrust.

Which item is the hon. member discussing?

I am talking about unforeseen expenditure.

The hon. member may only discuss the reasons for the increase.

I reckoned that I could discuss this matter under unforeseen expenditure, because no provision has been made for it.

No, the hon. member may only discuss the reasons for the increase.

I hope you will show me some sympathy. We are dealing here with unforeseen works, and I took that to mean works which the Minister had forgotten. No details are given here what unforeseen works they are. I reckoned that one would be allowed to discuss whatever might be placed under this head.

The hon. member may put a question during the committee stage, but he cannot discuss that now.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Then I should like to focus the Minister’s attention on the additional expenditure of £11,000 in connection with air services. If read in conjunction with the original estimates, the Minister has said nothing in this House this afternoon to indicate what this small improvement is for. I hope that when the Minister asks for these increases, he will tell us what the improvements will consist of. At the moment we have nothing before us.

I should like to say a few words in order to obtain some information from the Minister in regard to head No. 18. I notice that the Minister made use of not less than five officials in order to have an investigation carried out of aerodromes in the United States, and I would like to know whether this has anything to do with this expenditure of £75,000. The expenditure in connection with that investigation amounted to £3,000.

Which item are you discussing now?

Item No. 8, Aerodromes. It seems to me that not only the railway service is top-heavy, but that the investigations which the Minister had instituted were also top-heavy. It seems rather overdoing it to send five officials to America for an investigation, and I should like to have an explanation from the Minister, and I want him to tell us what the value is of the work they have done.

I would like to ask the Minister to remove a misunderstanding in connection with a reply he gave to a question which I recently put to him. I am speaking about Head No. 5, and I should like to have a specific explanation. I asked whether the dry dock at Cape Town had been completed and the Minister replied that the dry dock had not yet been completed. I do not know whether the Minister still remembers that he officially opened the dry dock and that he gave us a very nice party when he opened it. On this item an increase of £158,000 is now being asked for the dry dock. Is still more money being spent on the dry dock? I should like to receive a reply from the Minister, for we were surprised to hear that the dry dock is not yet finished. We thought it had been already completed during the war years, so that it might be used during the war years. The other item I want to refer to is under Head No. 4. There we find an increase of £12,066 for the purchase of water. We have become rather scared as far as the purchasing of water in the Union and especially in the Cape Province is concerned. We should like to hear from the Minister where this money has been spent. I shall be glad if the Minister will reply to these questions.

I regret that there should be any misunderstanding about my attitude in introducing this measure. I made it quite clear that it would be much better practice for me to give a general indication of why there was an increase, and in the Committee stage I would reply to questions raised. As it is, a number of items have been fired at me with such speed that it is difficult to get an impression of all the questions asked. I shall, however, do my best. Let me first of all say that I consider, having regard to all the circumstances of the case, that the additional estimates for the railways, which are the first and only additional estimates —I have introduced no others—I do not know how my hon. friend, the member for Albert-Colesberg (Mr. Boltman), could have thought I did—having regard to the fact that these estimates were framed in wartime and that finishing the year in peacetime that meant going back, and much work had to be done, are very reasonable. We did a lot more work. We wanted to bring the work up to scratch. Having regard to all that, it is significant that there is an increase of less than 10 per cent. on the Revenue Fund and on the betterment fund. Instead of being criticised, I think I should be congratulated on my estimates, having regard to the completely changed circumstances. As the House knows, there has been an enormous increase in traffic. The main revenue loan went up to the neighbourhood of £4 million. There is additional expenditure on every hand. Unfortunately we had a difficult time. This is the most difficult period for the railways, the period of adjustment between war and peace. We still have a great deal of war expenditure to face, and we are not yet in receipt of our normal income. Until shipping increases and imports become higher, we cannot expect to have highly paid traffic, and for a period of a year or two we shall have a difficult time. I am satisfied that times are not as difficult as I thought they would be. I thought they would be worse than they are, and it is for that reason that we made provision through our reserves in the Rates Equalisation Fund, to carry us over this difficult time. I think on the whole I am not asking the House to make unduly liberal allowance for any miscalculation in estimating. In regard to the remarks of the hon. member for Bloemfontein (District) (Mr. Haywood) renewals do not come into the amount to be voted at all. There is no question of what must be paid in respect of renewals. If anything in the renewals fund is taken out, it must be automatically replaced. There is much more money, as the hon. member knows, in the renewals fund than we are likely to be able to spend for two or three years, and for that reason we had to reduce our contributions to it. But that does not mean that there is not being written off against all assets everything we have to write off in respect of renewals. It stands to reason that if we are using an article beyond its normal life, as we did in the war, we have to slow up in renewing is, otherwise we do not renew but do more than renew, and that we do not do. We merely replace. That applies to the Betterment Fund also. In regard to this question as to what we are doing, I want to tell him that when we have our truck programme practically completed that will be the end of our renewals fund as far as trucks are concerned, but the hon. member must not think that we take money which was laid aside for the renewals of trucks, and use it for anything else. We cannot do that. What is laid aside for trucks must be spent on trucks. What is laid aside for any asset must be spent on that asset. What is laid aside for Cape Town Station must be spent there. We cannot divert the funds. If we have trucks to replace, we replace them from renewals. If we are buying more trucks than we have today, as we are doing today, they come out of capital and betterment funds. As far as other stock is concerned, we have a large programme for buying coaches, which I gave details of in my Budget speech. I do not think I need repeat that, but we have something like 400 railway engines, 210 motor coaches and 264 passenger coaches of all types to buy. In so far as these are renewals, they come out of the renewals fund, and in so far as they are capital and betterment works they come out of the capital and betterment fund. In regard to the dry dock, I would like to make it clear again—I have said it many times before—that we have entered into no commitment whatever with regard to the British Admiralty. They did contribute to the dry dock, both the Cape Town dry dock and the East London one. The amount is approximately a million pounds for the two.

What did the Admiralty give you towards your dock?

As regards the Admiralty, materials to a total estimated value of £739,000 was given by them without any commitment on our side for the Cape Town dock and £302,000 towards the East London dock. The reason for that was simply that the Admiralty was anxious that we should have a dock capable of holding larger ships in case of emergency, and if we would make it rather bigger than we had contemplated, they would compensate us. With regard to air stations, the hon. member wanted to know whether we are laying down any more. We are not laying down any more apart from these three, but we are going to harden the runways of certain others which are used by S.A. Airways. Kimberley and Bloemfontein will have hardened runways for the use of our heavier machines. But apart from that we are not doing any more work on aerodromes. The hon. member for Vredefort (Mr. Klopper) had various questions about various accounts, and I would like again to emphasise to him that the increases are not out of the way. In my opinion they are very reasonable and they are due to the causes which I indicated quite clearly in my introductory remarks. If the hon. member thinks that I am hiding anything I will tell him that I intended to give details about the accounts in the Committee stage, but since he has asked about it, I will give him information now. With regard to Account 283 to which he referred, that is due to additional staff and increased payments on account of extra traffic, also increased leave and holiday payments. On the question of steam locomotives, the figure of £27,000 extra which the hon. member thinks is very large, is due to increased oil consumption due to extra mileage and extra cost of purchasing and importing the oil. The hon. member said that we were paying £31,000 as salaries and wages to certain branches of the staff and in the case of other staff, we were paying a lower proportion. I would point out that in the case of salaries and wages the total account is only £390,000, whereas in the case of all employees, the rest, it is over £2,000,000. So I think it will be seen that the salaries and wages account is a very much bigger account, and it may be that the increased costs do not affect that part of it.

The proportion of increases is not the same.

They cannot be. It depends on what it is due to. To begin with, we were able to put more superintendents on the work now that the men are coming back. Proper superintendence means greater efficiency. We have had to work shorthanded with the result that our efficiency suffered. Now we are getting our engineers and other officials back. We are increasing the number of superintendents, but that merely means that we get greater efficiency out of the workmen. The workmen know better what to do when they are supervised, and there is greater efficiency.

You go from one extreme to the other.

These figures do not show any extremes. The total amount was £389,000 for superintendence and for other salaries it was £2,393,000. The actual increases on that were almost proportionate, if you take all the points. You must not only take shunters, but all the different ranks. Then it is almost in the same proportion. If there is any other account about which the hon. member wants information he can ask me in the Committee stage. I am glad that the hon. member for Krugersdorp (Mr. Van den Berg) supported my view. With regard to the enquiry of the hon. member for Mossel Bay (Dr. Van Nierop), it seems to me that the hon. members jump up and ask questions, and then do not wait for the answer.

The hon. member asked to be excused.

Let me explain that the expenditure on the Dry Dock is not finished yet. It will take another twelve months. We have to put in more machinery. But this does not add anything to the total expenditure. It is merely due to the acceleration of the work. We have to pay more this year than we originally contemplated because we did more work this year than we thought would be possible. I think there are a few more hundreds of thousands of pounds still to be spent on that Dock.

Motion put and agreed to.

House in Committee:

The Committee has to consider the Estimates of Additional Expenditure to be defrayed from Railways and Harbours Revenue Funds during the year ending 31st March, 1946, and the Estimates of Additional Expenditure to be defrayed from Loan Funds during the year ending 31st March, 1946.

The Committee proceeded to consider the Estimates of Additional Expenditure to be defrayed from Railways and Harbours Revenue Funds.

On Head No. 2—“Maintenance of Permanent Way and Works—Railways”, £607,288,

The Hon. Minister has now tried to give an explanation but his explanation was almost as clear as mud. I hope the Minister will be able to follow me, but my point was that on Item 222 there is an increase of £47,693, whilst on Item 224 there is an increase of £92,000. The original estimate on Item 222 was £389,985 and on Item 224 £2,393,806, and that refers to wages only. Surely there is no proportion in the increases of these two items. The Minister says that he has now more supervision and that this will ensure a more efficient service, but the expenditure in regard to supervision surely cannot rise so enormously. We should like to have some more information. It almost looks as if the Minister has now more supervisors than labourers.

I would like to explain again that you cannot really expect these amounts to be proportional. Superintendence covers all the other items on that page, Items 223 to 241, and if the hon. member will calculate all these different items, quite a number of them are obviously much higher. Residential property and maintenance is £89,000 odd. That is much higher in every way. The superintendence mentioned in 222 does not really refer only to that; it covers all this. You will see that the proportion is not far out. But even it if is, it does not mean anything. It just means that certain items will be up and others down. In the case of superintendence, it is almost entirely due to the appointment of additional staff. If you add a few superintendents, it very soon alters the percentage.

I would have been satisfied if the increases had been more in proportion, but when we look at Item 241, we notice a tremendous jump, an increase of more than 50 per cent. That is under “Miscellaneous expenditure”, which has been increased from £316,000 to £488,000. What is that for?

That particular increase is mainly due to additional maintenance and plant and tools, including sick benefits to the non-European staff as from January, 1946, and increased leave and holiday payments.

Head put and agreed to.

On Head No. 4.—“Running Expenses — Railways”, £1,055,649,

Item No. 280, Loco shed staff, shows a much higher increase proportionately than that in connection with drivers and firemen. The drivers and firemen are not supervising staff, but people who really handle the traffic and in comparison the increase is out of all proportion. What is the reason for it? In the case of drivers and firemen there is an increase from £2,680,000 to £2,987,000, an increase of £306,000, but in the case of the loco shed staff there is an increase from £626,000 to £745,000, or an increase of £118,000. That only refers to cost of living allowance, overtime and wages. Why is this so much out of proportion?

Again I say that you can really draw no inference from the fact that expenditure on one account is higher than on the other, but I am told that the reason why it is higher as regards locomotives is that there was such a big back-log of work necessary on the locomotives. They were run hard during the war, and thére was a great increase in staff in the sheds. For that reason it was necessary to put a bigger proportion of the staff on to repairing locomotives than on any other work.

I just want to ask the Minister what the amount of £12,000 in regard to water stands for? When we hear about water our thoughts invariably turn to Hutchinson.

I have explained that I had a great deal of extra traffic. That means extra locomotives and extra mileage, which means extra water, and I have had to pay £12,000 more for the water.

Has it anything to do with Hutchinson?

Head put and agreed to.

On Head No. 5.—“Traffic Expenses—Railways”, £1,084,878,

I should like to refer once more to the slight increase in regard to shunters as compared with the immeasurably higher increase for supervisory staff. If there is one section of the staff which has to perform heavy and dangerous work and which has to handle the flow of traffic, it is that of the shunters, and the increase on their item compares unfavourably as compared with the increase in regard to the supervising staff.

I will answer that question in another way. Will the hon. member realise that we are so well aware of what a shunter’s duties are that we made adequate provision in the Estimates for shunters? Apparently we did not make enough provision for superintendence, and therefore at this stage, we have had to pay more for superintendence than for shunters. But that does not mean that the shunters did not get their share.

Oh no, this is overtime.

Head put and agreed to.

Head No. 12.—“Road Motor Services—Railways”, £421,840, put and agreed to.

On Head No. 17.—“Miscellaneous Expenditure—Railways”, £1,298,752,

I wanted to speak on Vote No. 12, but am informed that it has already been passed. It is quite impossible for the business of this House to be satisfactorily carried out under present conditions. As soon as a Vote is called out, it is declared to have been passed Under Vote No. 17 we are asked to vote an additional amount of £1,298,752, and there is placed before us a bare printed statement that this constitutes “miscellaneous expenditure”. I hope the Minister will not put a strain of this kind upon a serious body dealing with such large sums of money. We have had no information whatever as to what this expenditure comprises. I hope that we shall be duly informed what kind of expenditure we are expected to authorise this money for, and I commend to the Minister the suggestion that we should have this in print in future. The passing of Estimates in their present form is going to amount to a ridiculous formality if we are expected to vote on a bare statement that the Minister wants £1 million odd for “miscellaneous expenditure”.

I would like to say that I am only too pleased to give that information. As the hon. member will notice in the footnotes of the particular items, an indication is given of what the item amounts to, but so far as the special cost of living payments are concerned, these total £1,309,000, but there are certain savings against that which we can set off which brings the total to £1,277,000, which, as the hon. member will see, accounts for nearly the whole of this item of miscellaneous expenditure. The additional items are £20,000 in respect of extra expenditure involved in financial relief to pensioners—I hope the hon. member is hearing me ….

I can hear you, but why did you not put that where it ought to be put?

Item (c) is for certain payments of arrear contributions to the Superannuation Fund on the part of Railway employees who were on military service. Item (d) is £500.

What was the amount of Superannuation contributions?

£750. Then there was £500 required to cover the expenses of the S.A. Shipping Commission over and above what had already been estimated for them, that is to say, £1,277,502 for cost of living allowance, £20,000 for payments to pensioners, £750 for the Military Service Act payments and £500 for the S.A. Shipping Commission, a total of £1,298,752.

The trouble is not that we object when the Minister wants to give financial assistance to certain people. Our objection is that he does not put it under a special heading. He now asks us to vote an additional amount of £1,298,752, and this he can spend under any heading he likes If he does not need £500 for one thing, he may use it for another thing. If he had distributed the expenditure over the various heads, he would have been forced to come to Parliament for approval when he wanted to make use of a saving under one head for the expenditure under another head. When money has been voted for a certain head, he has to spend it under that head, and if he has received money under one specific head and wants to spend it under another head he has to come to Parliament first. But as it has been put here, he can spend that money where he wants, and that is the objection we raise in regard to this way of framing estimates.

Will the hon. Minister kindly let us know what expenses are included under the item £500, “Expenses of S.A. Shipping Commission”? Were these fees payable to the members of the commission, or were they travelling expenses, or what were they precisely? Perhaps he can tell us while he is on his feet whether the chairman of the Perishable Products Board was a member of this commission, the gentleman who gets £1,800 per year?

To deal with the last points first, the hon. member may recollect that the S.A. Shipping Commission submitted an interim report which has been laid on the Table of the House. It was an interim report because they asked that they might be allowed when the war was over to finalise their report, so that they might make any further suggestion for the improvement of the situation immediately after the war. The cost of the original report was provided for in the original estimates, but when they decided that the time had come for their final report, for them to finalise their work, they asked that they might get their expenses paid on the same basis as before, and a further £500 was allowed for that purpose. This £500 was to cover the expenses of the commission, including the secretariat. Of course, it includes such fees as they normally get. Some of them are Government servants and they get the usual fee that is paid for services of this kind. The hon. member also raised the question of the chairman of the Perishable Products Control Board. But he is not a member of this board. With regard to the points made by the hon. member for Swellendam (Mr. S. E. Warren), that is a point he might raise on the general accounts, but on the additional estimates it is impossible for me to ask for an increase on any amount that was not in the original estimates, so I am compelled to keep to the heading in the additional estimates, but I agree on this point that it might be possible to give rather more information in the footnotes below, and I will go into that matter to see that the actual expenditure on each head is indicated. I think that would probably meet the hon. member’s point.

I shall be glad if the Minister will kindly tell us what this amount is under (e), “Payments to Department of Social Welfare in respect of butter supplied to railworkers and certain other staff, and milk supplied for railway preschool children.” I was under the impression that that came under the Agricultural Vote. I am trying to find out the amount of subsidies that is paid in connection with agriculture. I see that the railways are making a payment of a certain amount for this purpose. I was under the impression that the Department of Social Welfare was assisting in this. I do not find any fault with this. I am rather pleased to see it, but I would like to know from the Minister what the qualifications are of the people who are given this butter and this milk. Are they railway servants being paid so badly that they have to be subsidised by being given cheap butter and milk? Will the Minister tell us what class of person is in receipt of this assistance, as it seems to me to be a new item on the estimates? I would like to say to the Minister that it is very difficult to hear the Minister on this side of the House because of the conversation taking place here, and he must not take umbrage when a members says that he did not hear what he said. We resent that sort of attitude and we would like the Minister to understand that. We do not want to be calling out every time the Minister gets up that we cannot hear him. It is not the first time the Minister has made a remark of this kind. Although we are on this side of the House we are still members of the House and we expect that respect from Ministers. It is not our fault that some of our Ministers can only be heard by someone sitting next door to them, and I hope the Minister will not mention that again. We are seeking information; we are sent here for that purpose and we hope the Minister realises it.

I would like to explain to my hon. friend that far from saying that I would not give the information I said that if possibly he could not hear me I would see that he got the information privately. If he wants me to shout it out across the floor of the House I will do it, but I thought the hon. member alone was interested in these points, and I can assure him that I have no desire to be discourteous in any way. On the question that he raised.—I am glad he raised it because it will now give me an opportunity to deal fully with the point—item (e) does not call for additional expenditure. Provision is already made for it in the original estimates, but we are changing the payee, and it is that authority that is required under (e). In regard to the authority for £34,000 to be spent on the State-aided butter scheme to rail workers and certain other staff, those payments are only, of course, in the lower paid groups. They were previously made to the Dairy Industry Control Board and they are now made to the Department of Social Welfare. Originally we paid it to the Dairy Industry Control Board, but under the changed control of the business we now have to make the payments to the Department of Social Welfare. Also the amount of £12,000 provided for a contribution to the Dairy Industry Control Board for milk supplied to pre-school children cannot be utilised for the purpose of payments to the Department of Social Welfare for milk now supplied for railway pre-school clubs, the estimated cost of which is approximately £8,500. No additional funds are necessary in respect of these items, it merely being a matter of a change in the payee, and in the case of the milk supplied the purpose of the payment, namely, in respect of railway preschool clubs in place of pre-school children, actually there is no additional expenditure involved in this item. It is merely due to a change in the arrangements for this particular class of work.

Apparently I either did not make myself plain enough to the Minister or he did not understand what I had to say or his interpreter was at fault. My objection to this method of estimating is that if you give this explanatory note as you have given it here, you are not bound by it. If money is voted for a certain purpose and it is specified where you have miscellaneous expenditure, then you are bound to expend it under that head, and if you do not expend it under that head, it is a surplus. You cannot use money that you have over for any other purpose, but when you put it in the form of an explanatory note, as in this case, you are not bound by it. In some cases you simply put down a globular amount, but in one case you put £500. If you spend £300 out of that sum and you have £200 left, then under ordinary circumstances if you had mentioned it under the head, not in the form of an explanatory note but if you asked for a vote of £500, then you cannot use the balance without coming to Parliament for its approval. What you have now done is to take it as miscellaneous expenditure. You have put a globular sum down and all you state in your explanatory note is how you intend to spend that money, but that does not bind the Department to come to Parliament for approval as to the method of spending that money. You can utilise it for any other purpose, and that sort of estimate is not safe because Parliament loses the control which it otherwise had. In those circumstances I would like to know from the hon. Minister why he does it. He says in his reply that these were the original heads and now he brings it under the original heads. I have no objection to that; I have no objection to setting out these items under the original heads. But once we have agreed to this globular sum you can spend it where you like without coming to Parliament to ask for its approval. It is no good telling me that you intend to spend so much on the special cost of living allowance. If you do not spend the full sum there, you can use the balance for any other purpose, whereas if it is voted by Parliament for a specific purpose you can only use it for that specific purpose. That is the position.

I should like to add my objection to those already expressed here. If one considers all the items in these minor estimates, one finds here an amount of nearly £1¼ million under “Miscellaneous Expenditure.” We have here more than £1¼ million under this one miscellaneous head. It now appears that there is more than £1¼ million for cost of living allowances alone. The Minister did not tell us this in the first instance. We were under the impression that the increases on all the other heads were partly due to cost of living allowances but now we get on top of that this figure of £1,277,000 for an increase in cost of living allowances. One feels dissatisfied about this statement and surely there was no valid reason whatsoever for the Minister not specifying the figures therein, which he has now given us. It would have saved the time of the House. I want to urge that in future the Minister should be more specific and should give us more information and I readily support the suggestion that he should issue a White Paper with these estimates. It will save much time if the members receive that information. Then it will be no longer necessary to obtain this information across the floor of the House. Surely this is very important information and I am surprised that such a great, important Administration should come here with estimates totalling approximately £4,000,000 without submitting a White Paper in connection therewith. I suppose we shall have to accept the Minister’s excuse. He is making debating points here and puts forward all kinds of excuses which we know to be ridiculous, but we have to accept them for there is no other explanation given. I do want to express the hope that in future we shall not again be faced with such a position.

I made it clear in my opening remarks that in regard to the whole amount the cost of living figures were included, but I did not mention the cost of living figures in respect of any item. The cost of living allowance is in this particular item, but since Parliament voted the money originally, to which this is an additional amount, I have no choice but to ask you to make those additions to the same account as you did before. It is all very well to talk about miscellaneous expenditure; we always have a miscellaneous expenditure item because it would be quite impossible to waste the time of Parliament with every ten-pound note we are going to spend. The cost of living allowance has always been included in this item, and because it has been so included, we have to put the additional expenditure under this item. I understood the hon. member for Swellendam (Mr. S. E. Warren) perfectly, and I explained to him that I was prepared to go into the question of giving fuller details in footnotes, but I am powerless to change the amount. The Auditor-General would object.

Do you deny that you are not entitled to do what you have done here?

I think the hon. member is going rather far to suggest that any Government Department will take funds voted for a specific purpose and spend it on other items, except in cases where at law there is provision for a saving under one head to be used under another head. What is the controller and Auditor-General for but to see that this £1,277,000 is used for a cost of living allowance and nothing else? If it were used for any other purpose the controller and Auditor-General would immediately call the attention of Parliament to the strict letter of the law in respect of Votes of Parliament and how they are to be spent. That is what he is there for. It is really childish to suggest that a Minister would be concerned to do such a thing. There is no point in it. But in certain cases it is possible for the Railways in respect of columns one and two as hon. members who know Railway accounts will understand, to devote savings on one head to meet increased expenditure on other heads. If it had not been for this, this sum of £1,277,000 would have been a good deal larger; it would probably have been £1,400,000. But the position is that certain savings can be written off against increased expenditure on the other heads, and the controller and Auditor-General approves of that, and for those reasons I can do nothing else but to ask Parliament to add these amounts to the amounts that they passed last session, and if there was anything wrong with it that was the time to draw attention to it and not now. But I agree that if I can I will in the future make it more clear in the footnotes what these items are.

Whilst we are on the subject of miscellaneous expenditure I would like to refer the Minister and the House to the special cost of living allowance under Head 17, I think; I am not sure of the number. The special cost of living allowance is shown for the current year as £7,042,387 as against £5,495,000. My point is that an amount of £7,000,000 should not be included under miscellaneous expenditure. Surely the amount is large enough to come under a heading of its own.

Are you referring to the main Estimates?

I am referring to the main Estimates and these additional amounts here under Vote 17 and again under Head No. 25. The main estimates of £7,000,000, according to this, still comes under the heading of miscellaneous expenditure. Surely the amount is large enough to have an item of its own in the Railway accounts instead of being lumped together with a proportion of the office expenditure of the High Commissioner in London.

You should bring that up in the main Estimates, not here. I cannot do anything now.

I am quoting the footnote that is referred to in these additional estimates. I would refer the House to page 8 or 10 of the main estimates to show that £7,000,000 is a large amount to include under miscellaneous expenditure, and I dp suggest that in future estimates of that amount be taken out of miscellaneous expenditure and placed under a heading of its own.

I do not think the hon. Minister has answered my question. I think he has dodged all round it. In your Estimates under head No. 17 you asked for miscellaneous expenditure. Ýou say you want an additional £1,298,752 for miscellaneous expenditure. You do not set out under this head what you want that for.

It is set out in the original Estimates.

That may be so, and to have to retain the original heads that you had in your main Estimates, under this head you would have to do the same. What you say here is that “the additional amount includes provision for …”, but you do not say that it is provision for those items; it only includes those items.

Order, order. I must ask the hon. member to address the Chair.

Yes, I am addressing the Chair.

Order, order. The hon. member is not addressing the Chair. The hon. member is addressing the Minister direct.

The hon. Minister knows as well as I do that as the particulars are set out here he is not bound by those particulars. It is mainly an explanatory note. In fact, he gives no figures at all. It is only in respect of one item that he gives any figures, and that is the expenses of the S.A. Shipping Commission, £500. In respect of the others he gives no figures at all, and if he spends less under a specific head he is not bound to give an account to this House as to what he has done with the rest of the money. The Controller and Auditor-General is bound to accept the resolution of this House, that is, that there is an additional amount voted which the hon. Minister can use as he pleases. The Controller and Auditor-General would only raise a query when the money was not used for the purpose for which it was voted by the House. If he does not bring it under the different heads, the explanatory note means nothing to us. This is not the way we used to receive the Estimates, and it is not the way we on this side of the House are prepared to receive them. We want them done in the proper legal way, so that when we vote an amount for a certain purpose and it is not used for that purpose the money cannot be applied to some other object It is not the same as the explanatory note under his Bill. There it says: We want additional money to pay the interest on our capital, because we spent the money quicker than we intended to spend it. But he has it under the right head. He cannot use this for the welfare of the poor children in the employ of the Railways. If he does, the Auditor-General will soon take notice of it and report it to Parliament. I do not say we should throw out the Estimates because he has done this, and we will be quite prepared to accept the position if he informs the House this procedure will not be followed in future.

I might once more explain for the benefit of the hon. member that Head No. 17, “Miscellaneous Expenditure”, includes a great variety of miscellaneous items. Cost of living has been included in these items. It is a very big amount; I admit it is a big amount. But originally it was not thought it might be a big amount, and therefore it probably went into this account before a separate account had been opened for it, but the things that fall into this account are numerous. They include: Proportion of office expenses of High Commissioner, London; special contributions to the Benevolent Fund; payment to the Department of Social Welfare; loss on catering in the House of Parliament; special cost of living allowance; the last is a very big item. Then there are items such as restoration of the late President Kruger’s coach, and a great variety of minor items; and if I want to increase any one of these items I have no choice but to ask you to agree to an increase of Head No. 17. The position is quite clear, and I hope the hon. member will accept it.

What the hon. Minister has said has made the position perfectly clear. But that has only served to increase our misgivings in regard to this matter. It shows that the Minister can budget under one head for a sum of £7,461,974 and all he is bound to do is to see that money is specified to be “Miscellaneous Expenditure.” There is nothing before the House to show he is bound by the mandate of this House to spend any specified sum on any one of the services embraced in a note which precedes the estimate proper. He is not bound by that. He is merely bound by the term “Miscellaneous Expenditure”, and as long as he shows he has expended it on “Miscellaneous Expenditure”, no questions can be asked by the Auditor-General. It is really a most immoral way of carrying on the public business of the country, for the Minister to come and ask for a globular sum of £7,000,000 to be spent on miscellaneous expenditure without let or hindrance, and with no obligation to reply to the comments of hon. members. He asks us to authorise him to spend the vote we are discussing, but he is not bound by a single word in the authorisation by Parliament to allocate the money as he has shown in his explanatory memorandum. The explanatory memorandum is not part of the estimates and will not be printed in the final estimates. There is a long list of the sub-divisions making up the £7,000,000, but that list does not form part of the estimates and the Minister is not bound to observe the sub-divisions mentioned there. That is the objection. I hope the Minister will be reasonable and say: “I do not conceal anything from this House, it is my duty to lay before you the statement showing how much money has been spent on any particular item, so if there are savings they will be dealt with in the orthodox manner, and if there is an excess I shall come to the House and ask for a supplementary vote.”

I am glad that we are having this discussion. I hope that it will serve as a warning to the Minister so that in future we shall be given more information. Just now I said that not only on this item but right through we have items for miscellaneous services to an amount of almost £½ million. These are enormous amounts which have to be voted. The Minister said that originally when it was still a small amount, it was placed under head No. 17. That is quite right. But when the Minister saw that it was growing out of all proportion, he should of his own accord—it was his duty towards this House—have taken it out of the miscellaneous item and have made a special item of it so that we might have had the full information. The whole afternoon I have been basing my remarks on the assumption that cost of living allowances had been included in the increases for all the items and the Minister did not correct me. I now have to find out that this has nothing to do with cost of living allowances. The Minister did not explain that. Nobody could be any the wiser from the few remarks the Minister made. As far as item E is concerned, the Minister now says that the item was put there because the receiver of that money had been changed. He could have given us that information in the first instance so that we need not have squeezed it out of him. It is information to which this House is entitled. He could have told us that the money is now being paid to Social Welfare instead of to the Dairy Board. Then we would have been acquainted with the matter, but we were completely in the dark, and we did not know who was looking after this important matter. An amount of £40,000 or £50,000 is to be spent on it, and if our constituents had asked us about it, we would have had no information, merely because the Minister withheld that information from us. I definitely think that he should have tendered that information of his own accord. If the Minister had only framed the note somewhat more clearly, we would have known what the position is. Before I sit down I want to object once more against the large amounts appearing under miscellaneous expenditure. If it continues in that way the important items can disappear one after the other and the whole of the railway expenditure may then one day appear under miscellaneous expenditure. The Minister should be more specific in regard to this matter.

Head put and agreed to.

Head No. 24.—“Interest on Capital—Harbours,” £28,562 put and agreed to.

On Head No. 25. — “Miscellaneous Expenditure—Harbours”, £34,992,

What are the specific amounts? There are two items and I should like to have the amounts from the Minister under each heading.

Item A is an initial amount of £44,000 required on account of special cost of living allowance owing to the percentage index figure having advanced higher than was anticipated when the estimate was framed. There are savings on other items. Item B is an amount of £25,000 to cover the Administration’s liability on arrear contributions due to the Superannuation Fund in the case of reinstated Railway servants and discharged soldiers who have joined the service.

Head put and agreed to.

Head No. 27.—“Miscellaneous Expenditure —Steamships”, £580, put and agreed to.

On Head No. 28. — “Working and Maintenance—Airways”, £297,127,

I should like to have a few more details in regard to Account No. 804 and why the figure of £2,000 has been increased to £19,000.

I explained when we made our original estimates we did not really reckon we would be able to start the air services during the year, and only a very small provision was made. In connection with the air services certain agents receive 5 per cent. in respect of their bookings. In the original estimates we only inserted what was more or less a nominal amount to cover any agency commission that might fall due. But as hon. members know, with the starting of the service great success has attended it and the number of passengers travelling on our aeroplanes has exceeded all expectations. Consequently the original figure has had to be materially increased. It merely represents the payment of booking fees to various agencies.

Head put and agreed to.

Head No. 30.—“Miscellaneous Expenditure —Airways”, £26,245, put and agreed to.

The Committee proceeded to consider the Estimates of Additional Expenditure on Capital and Betterment Works.

Head No. 3.—“Rolling Stock”, £375,150, put and agreed to.

Head No. 5.—“Harbours”, £243,850, put and agreed to.

Head No. 7.—“Airways”, £11,000, put and agreed to.

Head No. 8.—“Aerodromes”, £70,000, put and agreed to.

Head No. 10. — “Unforeseen Works”, £50,000, put and agreed to.

House Resumed:

The CHAIRMAN reported the Estimates of Additional Expenditure to be defrayed from Railways and Harbours Revénue Funds without amendment, and the Estimates of Additional Expenditure on Capital and Betterment Work without amendment.

Report considered, and the Estimates of Additional Expenditure from Railways and Harbours Revenue Funds and on Capital and Betterment Works adopted.

Mr. SPEAKER appointed the Minister of Transport and the Chairman of Committees a Committee to bring up the necessary Bill in accordance with the Estimates of Additional Expenditure as adopted by the House.

The MINISTER OF TRANSPORT brought up the Report of the Committee just appointed, submitting a Bill in accordance with the Estimates of Additional Expenditure from Railways and Harbours Revenue Funds* and on Capital and Betterment Works adopted by the House.

I move—

An explanatory memorandum has already been issued in connection with this particular Bill, but I think I had better explain the main points briefly for the information of the House. It may be within the recollection of the House that the new Railways and Harbours Superannuation Fund was established in 1925 by Act No. 24 of that year. At that time the staff were informed by special notice of the conditions attaching to membership of that fund, and all members of the staff were given the option of electing within twelve months to join that fund in preference to the old fund of 1912. The vast majority of the staff elected to join the new fund. The conditions were rather better so far as the staff were concerned. For one thing, as hon. members know, instead of getting their pension based on the average for the whole of their service, the pension was based under the new fund on the last seven years of their service. But for one reason and another some members of the staff did not elect to join the new fund. Recently, however, there has been a very strong feeling amongst those members of the staff still serving—I think about 1,100 in number—they should be given another opportunity. This has so far been resisted by Ministers because it was felt if they failed to join when they had a chance they should not be given a second chance. But after looking into the matter very carefully, and with the usual sympathy one expects from the Government, the usual sympathetic understanding we have for our workers, I decided it would be an equitable thing now to give a second opportunity to those men who are left of transferring to this fund.

Is there any byelection on shortly?

No, the hon. member may draw any conclusions he likes, but as he knows perfectly well although it might influence him it would never influence me. I did not do this hastily. I appointed a committee of experts to examine the whole position. A great deal of the crédit, if I may say so, of my having been persuaded to do this, is due to the hon. member for Roodepoort (Mr. Allen) who, in season and out of season, has hammered home to me the need for this. My staff associations have also been supporting him in this demand and now, as I say, I have surrendered; and I recommend to this House we give this second option to those people who wish to do so to join the fund.

The second part of the Bill provides for raising the wage limit of the Workmen’s Compensation Act. The Workmen’s Compensation Act makes provisions in its terms for any employer paying anybody above the £750 level compensation, by agreement with the Registrar of the Act. It is felt, however, so far as the Railways are concerned, we do in fact pay compensation above £750, because with overtime payments and so on many of our engine drivers make over £750. We have many categories who make more than that, and who would, if we stuck rigidly to the Act, be debarred from any compensation except what they are entitled to under the common law. We have always recognised we are not stopped at £750, and we are prepared to pay the workmen’s compensation to anybody no matter what his wage. We feel that rather than come to an arrangement with the Registrar as far as the Railways are concerned, we should make it a statutory obligation on the Railways to do so, and I am therefore asking Parliament to give the Railways authority to recognise workmen’s compensation payments irrespective of the actual wage of the person injured. All the other provisions in the Act will apply.

Will the Minister of Finance extend the same provisions to the public service?

I would point out that the public service is involved in a much lesser degree than the Railways. I do not know what my colleague proposes to do, but I recommend the hon. member asks him. In any case, as hon. members at any rate on this side of the House will appreciate, the question of workmen’s compensation is far more serious for the railway workers than almost any other workers in the State. I think I have explained the second function of this Act, and the details can, of course, be considered in Committee if any hon. member wants either to improve on the conditions or is not quite clear what all the conditions mean.

Clause 5 of the Bill is a, very special clause. We have in our service a telegraphist who, as a telegraphist, comes under Section 8 of our Act in respect of compulsory bilingualism. [Interruptions.] I am rather anxious that members on this side should hear what I have to say. Mr. Langley has been unable to comply with the language requirements of Section 8 in consequence of defective hearing. He can only hear a voice at one yard, and because of his physical disability, he is incapable of possibly learning another language. His disability is due to the fact that in the war of 1914-T8 he sustained an un-united fracture of the left side of the jaw; in other words, his disability is due to a war injury. His work as a telegraphist has been perfect. For many years he has been kept on Grade 3 owing to his not being bilingually qualified, and I am asking the House to authorise me to raise him to Grade 2. There is a precedent. A similar case was dealt with in this way under Section 7 of Act 7 of 1928. A railway clerk in Pretoria who was wounded in the lower jaw—a very similar wound—was certified by the Railway Medical Officer to be incapable, on account of his wound, of pronouncing very simple words in Afrikaans. So I am only asking the House to do in this case what was done in 1928. I feel sure the House will not hesitate to give me the necessary authority.

What about the pre-Union stationmasters?

If there are any cases of stationmasters on a par with this one I shall be glad to go into them.

We on this side of the House welcome this small Bill of the Minister of Transport. We know that in 1925, when the new Superannuation Act was passed, greatly increased benefits were granted to the staff, and the officers also had a choice to remain under the old Act or to come under the new Act. Many of them transferred their rights, but a small section remained under the old Act, and the Minister now proposes to give that small group an opportunity to become members of the new fund. We welcome that. But, seeing that the Minister is patting himself on the back because previous Ministers did not give those people a second chance, I want to remind him that the new Superannuation Act which gave the workers those increased benefits was given to the railwaymen by the old Nationalist Party. If he wants to pat himself on the back for the thousands of men he is now allowing to join, then this side of the House can claim credit for the hundreds of thousands which it assisted in this manner. I expected the Minister to give us an explanation of the additional cost which this step will mean to the Superannuation Fund. I will tell you why I ask this. In 1939 there was an actuarial valuation of the Superannuation Fund, and it was found that the fund was insolvent to the extent of £6½ million. According to law, the Minister of Transport is obliged to deposit amounts to keep the fund solvent, and it was agreed that the Railway Administration would pay an annual amount of £441,000 into the fund for a period of 23 years. The Minister has now discontinued these contributions, although the fund is still insolvent to an amount of quite a few millions. The actuaries have now again made an investigation. I do not know whether their report has already reached the Minister, but I had expected that he would come here with particulars of the present position of the Superannuation Fund, and what the additional burden would be to be placed on this fund by the persons referred to exercising their choice. The House should know that. The Minister has stopped the contribution of £441,000, and I think that the Minister is just as convinced as I am that the fund is insolvent to the tune of more than £6 million. A serious deficit was caused in 1937 when Mr. Pirow added the responsibility allowance paid to Railway servants to their pensionable salary. That meant an amount of £2 million. The Minister did the same with his promotions and gradings. That caused a still larger deficit. The deficit must amount to quite a few million pounds. Now the Minister is adding further financial burdens on the fund, and we expect him to make a statement on the position of the fund. Under the law he has the obligation to keep the fund solvent, but at the moment it is bankrupt. Therefore, we should like to receive a full statement from the Minister. As far as the Bill itself is concerned, we welcome it. Then there is one further question. Since 1925 many servants have left the service who had not joined the new fund. What is their position going to be? I will give an instance. An ordinary labourer or ganger who would receive £7 10s. under the new fund now receives £4. They will claim a small compensation, because the other employees now get the opportunity to join the new fund. Since 1929 persons who did not join the new fund originally continually applied to have another choice. Representations were made continually. The reason why many of those persons did not join the new fund was because they had to pay in a certain amount in cash. Some of these people were not in a financial position to do so, and consequently they did not join. Afterwards they found out that the new fund gave them much higher benefits. They still tried to get in, but their opportunity had passed. Under this Bill we are going to give eleven hundred people an opportunity to join the new fund, but since 1925 there have been many Railway servants who have gone on pension and today receive a paltry amount on which they cannot live. The question occurs to me whether the Minister could not meet these people and also let them reap some advantage from this new amendment.

I wish to express my personal appreciation and that of members of this side of the House representing railwaymen of the opportunity provided in this Bill for members of the Administration who fall under the 1912 pension fund to transfer to the 1925 pension fund. Two years ago, when the proposal was made to the Minister, it was practically a forlorn hope, but after investigation the Minister said to a deputation of hon. members which waited upon him that if it could be proved that this measure would benefit the lower grade staff, he would favourably consider it. Enquiries were set afoot with that object, and it was confirmed; the Minister immediately took steps to implement his promise, and today it is an accomplished fact. I am sure that the Railways and Harbours servants will appreciate very highly the Minister’s action in this matter. I think it is due to the Minister to say that this action gives further evidence of the great interest he has evinced during the term of his office in the welfare of the employees, particularly of the men who have given long and faithful service to the country. This is another addition to the very fine record of service rendered by the Minister to the staff of the Railways, and I just rise to place on record my keen appreciation and that of my colleagues who have been associated with me in preferring the proposal to the Minister.

We also welcome this small Bill and are pleased with it. When one speaks of pension matters one cannot but always think with gratitude of the great work of the late Minister C. W. Malan, when he gave the railwaymen the pension scheme of 1925. One always feels an urge to extol his praise for the work which he did in regard to this pension scheme for railway servants. I would, however, have liked to hear the Minister give somewhat more information about this Bill. I do not know why he is so reluctant to give information. Every bit of information you want, you have to drag or pump out of him.

Did you not read the White Paper?

Did you? And if you read it, were you any the wiser for it? Did the Minister say what is to become of the old fund? Did the Minister mention the amount of the assets of the old fund? He did say that eleven hundred people are affected by it, but what is going to happen to those assets when these eleven hundred all transfer to the new fund? Surely we are entitled to this information. I am surprised that the hon. member for Roodepoort (Mr. Allen) did not ask this. There is a valuable asset. What is to become of it? What is the Minister going to do with it? The Minister is leaving us entirely in the dark about that matter. I should like to know what the amount in the old fund is and in how far the old fund is actuarially solvent and what the Minister intends doing with the old fund if all eleven hundred persons concerned transfer to the new fund. Furthermore I feel that the period granted to the people belonging to the old fund, in which they have to decide whether they want to transfer to the new fund, is too short. They are only getting one month in which to decide, after they have received notification. Originally they had a year in which to decide. Why should they be limited in this case to a month only? Why this great hurry? The people concerned in this matter are all settled people who have belonged for more than 20 years and some of them for more than 3Ó years to the fund. From a psychological point of view you should not be in such a hurry if you want to make a success of this matter. Why should this period be limited to one month if you want to do these people a good turn? Grant them a longer period. Many of the railway servants have to be in and out and out and in, in connection with their duties and a month has passed in no time. A man may be ill or on leave. I want to suggest that the Minister should favourably consider a small amendment which I am going to move during the Committee stage, namely a proposal to extend that period. That will assist in making a success of this attempt. I think that this Bill is not only a good measure for the staff, but I also believe that the Administration is grateful to get rid of the old fund and to close the final accounts and consider it entirely as a closed book. The Administration should, however, give these people a longer period of grace. There is a further factor of importance and that is that when the staff in 1925 had the opportunity to transfer to the new fund they were also granted the further privilege that if they had perhaps in their years of service a period during which they served in a temporary capacity, they could add that for pension purposes. The pension fund of 1912 only made provision for the fixed staff, but there were many people who had been in the service for two, three, or four or five years before being placed on the permanent staff. I do not know whether there are any people in that position amongst the 1,100 servants now to be given a second choice, but there may be such cases among them and I feel that they could be given that consideration. We should like to see that people who are in that position should also be allowed to add their temporary service for pension purposes. Seeing that we are dealing with this legislation, we might just as well make it good legislation.

At 6.40 p.m., the business under consideration was interrupted by Mr. Speaker in accordance with the Sessional Order adopted on the 31st January, 1946, and the debate was adjourned; to be resumed on 13th March.