NEWS from one hundred years ago: A SLUMP?

Bankers, business owners, coal mine owners, managers, farmers and landowners are trying hard to talk up the economy. New Zealand, along with Japan, the United States and a few other states that made money out of the First World War, are beginning to go into sharp economic recession. Britain and other Allied countries impoverished by the war are also going into recession. The voices of the political right in New Zealand say what they have said since the early days of colonisation: that the economy will grow so long as working class people work harder and longer for their pay. And take a pay cut. The Manawatu Evening Standard editorialises about it today. ‘New Zealand is in the happy position of being possibly the one country that has come through the war with the minimum of disturbance, commercially and politically.’ The country is ‘wonderfully prosperous.’ Responsibility for prosperity now ‘rests largely with the workers themselves,’ since the most likely cause of a slump is ‘waning confidence in the ability of the worker to make good, by increased effort and production.’
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Manawatu Evening Standard, 30 November 1920