As I pointed out before I reported progress, Deputy P.J. Burke of North County Dublin expressed extreme solicitude lest the proposal to provide interest-free loans for farmers to expand production on their own holdings, in consultation with the advisory services, would gravely embarrass the national finance. I am directing his attention to the fact that the Taoiseach proposed, as reported on Wednesday, 15th August, that interest-free loans be made available to western landowners to sell their farms to the Land Commission and buy land elsewhere. I wonder which members of this House consider the better plan—to provide interest-free loans to farmers in the west of Ireland to sell their land and move elsewhere or to provide interest-free loans to farmers in the west to stay on their holdings and expand production on them and get more out of the land committed to their care.
So far as my neighbours in County Mayo, County Monaghan, County Cavan, County Galway and County Sligo are concerned, we on this side of the House would far sooner give them a loan of money interest-free, if they undertook, in consultation with the advisory services, to expand production on their own holdings to a level which would provide them with a modest standard of comfort in their own homes rather than to provide them with loans to clear out and depopulate that part of Ireland.
We who live in the west of Ireland and in the north-west of the country do not share the Fianna Fáil view that the only prudent thing to do is to flee from that part of Ireland. We believe it is a part of Ireland in which our people can live comfortably and happily if they are given the chance and we would much sooner provide them with interest-free loans effectively to expand their production so that they could continue to live there rather than, under the Fianna Fáil scheme, to provide them with interest-free loans on condition that they clear out.
I think some of the Deputies, notably Deputy P.J. Burke who is himself a Mayoman though now resident in Dublin, ought to stop and ask themselves again which is the better policy—to provide these people with finance to live and prosper on their own holdings or to spread dismay and consternation amongst them and say to them: "The only basis on which you can get a loan, interest-free, is that you clear out of Galway, Monaghan, Cavan, Donegal, and so on." I think some of the Deputies from Mayo, Galway, Monaghan, Cavan, Donegal and so on, would need to go down and preach that doctrine in those areas to see how acceptable it will be to their neighbours. If they put the two propositions side by side and ask the people on which basis they would prefer to get interest-free loans, I think most Deputies who advocate the Famine proposal of clearing the people out will find that the vast majority of the people would prefer to stay put if they are given the opportunity of getting a decent livelihood in their own homes. I get worried by the fraud of Fianna Fáil. But that kind of fraudulent talk is fraught with great danger in this country and to that subject I propose to return before I conclude on this Estimate.
I direct the attention of the House to a grave social evil to which I have referred repeatedly in this House and to which I want to refer with greater emphasis now, that is, the purchase of agricultural land by foreigners. Every Deputy who knows anything of rural Ireland knows that that development is fraught with great danger for the whole social structure of our society. There is no use trying to sweep this whole subject under the rug and pretend it is not happening. We all know it is happening. The Minister said on a previous occasion that his estimate was that the purchases of land by foreigners were within £400,000. Within a fortnight, the Minister for Finance, his colleague, got up and said on his estimate, purchases amounted to approximately £1 million. I do not charge either of them with falsehood. The burden of my allegation is that neither of them knows and, for some mysterious reason, I think they carefully want to avoid knowing.
It seems to me that the Bill we introduced here for the purpose of dealing with this matter effectively was the right Bill. One of the sections contained in that proposed Bill was that every transaction in land which conveyed the beneficial ownership to a non-national would require as part of the conveyance that it should be registered with the Land Commission, in default of which registration the conveyance would be void. That provided an effective guarantee that every such conveyance which involved the transfer of a beneficial ownership to a non-national would be effectively registered because the man who paid his money for the land would take the appropriate precaution to ensure that his title could not subsequently be voided.
At the present time a wide variety of devices are employed to facilitate the passage of land into the beneficial ownership of foreigners. Some Deputies will ask why are they buying land in Ireland and, of course, Deputy Corry, in his simple way, quite unconsciously provided the reason. He recited a story here of how he wanted an estate in which he was interested somewhere in Cork acquired by the Land Commission 20 years ago; that somebody came in and paid something like £15,000 for the farm and he says now the same farm is being sold for £45,000. That is why foreigners buy land here. Deputy Corry does not realise that, of course, part of the activities of the Fianna Fáil administration has been to force up the cost of living, to depreciate the value of money, and, as the value of money goes down, the value of land goes up. Provided land is kept in reasonable condition, its real value remains static and, as money depreciates in value, the cash value of land steadily rises. Every money-juggler in the world knows that.
The moment inflationary trends appear in the world, every money-juggler in the world rushes to buy two things—diamonds and land. The juggler who buys diamonds is the mobile juggler who wants always to be able to keep his wealth about his person. The land speculator is the man who wants to stash money away. He does it for two reasons: (1) he wants to preserve the value of his money; and (2) very often because he wants to conceal the fact that he has the money to stash. He does not want to put it in the bank; he does not want to put it into stocks and shares, lest the annual interest payment will turn up to put him on explanation as to where he got the money. If he puts it into Irish land, it may be forgotten and when he wants to realise it, the necessity for secrecy, he hopes, will no longer exist and in the meantime, money invested in Ireland in the present situation may very well expand in size—the money, the cash—because as money depreciates in value, the value of land remains static or rises if it is well looked after.
We all know that a great quantity of this money is funk money which is being stashed away in land. Some of this money is coming in as hot money and is being deposited in the banks or in other secure places. Some of the money is coming in and buying up the city of Dublin. There are millions of pounds being spent at present buying up buildings in the city of Dublin.
The plain fact is that, in order to maintain our balance of payments in the present situation of extreme imbalance of trade, we are selling the country. We are selling large lumps of this country for cash and glorying in the fact that this influx of foreign money is maintaining our balance of payments. To my mind, it is suicidal insanity but, of course, the full consequences of it will not be felt for four or five years. What we are actually doing is maintaining an adverse balance of trade of approximately £104 million per annum now by selling the lands, buildings and the furniture. Sooner or later, that will have to stop. Two consequences will follow: That source of cash will dry up and we will be confronted with our balance of payments problem without a continued influx, but, secondly, a large part of that investment is going to claim income from this country, which will further aggravate our balance of payments problem.
Leaving aside all these purely economic considerations, I want to put it to the Minister for Lands that there is a grave social evil here involved and it is a social evil which can have deplorable repercussions. Our people will not stand for the creation of a new race of landlords. That is in their blood and I am glad it is in their blood. Economists, theorists, may say that this is irrational, that this is not good, sound, economic logic. I do not give a damn whether it is or not. It is a sound social instinct and our people are right to say that the land our fathers fought so hard for is now not to be sold for cash when it was bought with our blood. I suppose that is, economically speaking, as irrational a proposition as it is possible to state and yet I believe the truth is on the side of that proposition and not on the side of those who say that they would sell anything if they got enough cash for it.
If this process continues, you are liable to get in this country a very vigorous and violent reaction against all forms of foreign investment in this country, and in my judgment, that would be a great disaster. It is in the interests of this country that we should welcome and encourage foreign invesment. I always remember, to the eternal credit of the late German Ambassador, Dr. Reifferscheidt, who fully understood this problem, that he stated publicly in Germany that he wanted to direct the attention of German industrialists and other potential investors in Germany to the fact that they were made most welcome in Ireland if their purpose was investment in industry or investment in residential property but that they must realise that in Ireland the acquisition of agricultural land by non-nationals was not welcomed. He understood the position but we cannot be certain that that position will always be fully understood and if you get a violent reaction here against the acquisition of agricultural land by foreigners you may very easily create misunderstanding abroad that the objection here is to foreign investment in any form. If that misapprehension should arise, it will be to the material disadvantage of the whole economic life of this country.
I urge on the Minister for Lands, first, to make it perfectly clear what is the total amount of land which has fallen into the beneficial ownership of foreigners over the past five years. Secondly, I urge on him to reassure the House that the Land Commission is not content with recording only those holdings which stand in the names of non-nationals but that he should also inform himself of lands which stand in dummy names, or the names of dummy companies, the beneficial ownership of which is vested in people outside. Thirdly, I urge on him most strongly to ensure that where these lands carry with them amenity rights to which the people have in the past ordinarily had access, either by the tacit or expressed consent of the previous Irish owner, effective measures will be taken to ensure that these amenity rights are not suspended by the new owner.
We have all heard cases, which we must not exaggerate, where people's traditional rights-of-way, which were never legal rights but which had been conceded for generations, have been closed off. We have heard allegations of access to river banks for fishing being forbidden. We have heard of cases of scenic amenities in certain areas being gravely abridged by structures which it is hard to imagine anybody who was born in this country would ever have thought of erecting. All these are matters which will give rise to a growing volume of ill-feeling, create a serious social problem and in regard to which it is a great scandal that the Government of the day cannot find effective means of control and prevention.
I was very pleased to see the model house which was on display, at the Spring Show, I think, and is now on display outside the Library. Again, I feel these fellows have been searching through the Fine Gael policy and have determined this is another part of the policy they propose to adopt. We pressed last year, and again this year, in the policy we have laid before the country the urgent desirability of proceeding with the programme of rehousing our people to the point of enabling the small farmers to share in the benefits of housing. Our proposal was that any small farmer who wanted to build himself a new house, and there are thousands who urgently stand in need of such accommodation, should be entitled to go to the Land Commission and ask the Land Commission to build the house for him, to get from the Local Government Department the appropriate grant of £275, and the corresponding grant from the local authority, a further £275, which, taken together, amounts to £550, and have the balance of the cost of the house charged on the land annuity to be paid over a period of 30 to 40 years.
I gather that caused the Balbriggan widow great consternation, and Deputy P.J. Burke was thrown into a state of great excitement protesting against the extravagance of this proposal. But here is the house. I am told it is to be erected for approximately £2,000, with all sanitary accommodation installed, including a septic tank. That means that all the small farmer will have to find will be £1,450 and, if that is spread over 40 or 50 years, I imagine it would be well within the reach of the vast majority of small farmers and would enable us to say to every small farmer that there is now no reason why any man should continue to live in an inadequate house, or deny his wife and family the amenities of modern sanitary installations and running water because all they have to do is to bespeak from the Land Commission such a house and the Land Commisssion will provide it, and provide the credit at no expense to the State. That is the amazing part of it.
I am not proposing, and we have never suggested, that this should involve the State in 1d. expense. All we ask is that the State should provide credit as they did for the fathers and grandfathers of these small farmers to enable them to buy their land, letting the small farmer pay back over 40 or 50 years at the full economic price, which, I understand, would mean a charge of about 30/- a week on a house such as is displayed outside the Library and, at the end of the term, the house would be the freehold property of the farmer. If, in the meantime, he wanted to buy out the outstanding instalments, as his father did in relation to the land, he would be free to do so. If that facility is universally available we can say to ourselves with a clear conscience that the people who live on the land were not forgotten and that, while we were spending millions to provide housing in the towns and cities, we had put within the reach of those who stayed on the land the means to enjoy reasonable amenities in their own homes.
Mark you, we talk of the flight from the land and, on that, I want to say a special word today. There is no doubt whatever that in so far as the great number of women are concerned it does add very substantially to the triumph of raising a family in rural Ireland if minimum amenities by way of running water, adequate supplies of hot water, and ordinary sanitary facilities are readily available to a woman's hand. In that small house I see provided every amenity, I think, that a person could reasonably want, including a comfortable kitchen in which people can sit, and a parlour in front of it in which a woman can keep the family treasures and entertain friends if they should happen to call. In the modern days in which we live I think 95 per cent would much prefer a house of that type to some of the big gazebos in which some of us are shanghaied, the maintenance and conduct of which present an evergrowing problem.
While I welcome the appearance of this house, and though I do not doubt that shortly the Government will announce their conversion to the proposal we advance, I view without alarm the further adoption of the policy of Fine Gael by the Government Party. So far as we are concerned, so long as the thing gets done, that is what really matters. I deprecate, however, in that context the silly and mischievous blatherskite in which Deputy P.J. Burke, with the assistance of some of the more irresponsible members of the Government, engages when he begins to suggest that manifest and desirable reforms of this kind involve such gargantuan expenditure as to make them unthinkable.
That is what is wrong with this House; there are too many people in it with a Dublin mentality, too many people who think it is nothing extraordinary to spend millions in any city or town but, if you asked even the extension of credit to people living on the land, hands are thrown up in holy horror and the general attitude is one of "Who would lend money to them?" The people living on the land borrowed all the money that was required to buy out the landlords of this country and the record will show that they did not default .1 per cent of what their people borrowed. If every other category of citizen had as good a credit record as the small farmers of Ireland, we would be all a great deal better off than we are.
I was amused to hear the Minister explain in the course of his statement all the things he hopes to do under Section 27 of the 1950 Land Act. Deputy Blowick is too modest. He does not bother to recall the past as exhaustively as I like to do. I was going through the debate here when that Act was passing through and the views of the Fianna Fáil Party are amusing to read. Deputy Corry was prophesying that this legislation would put land out of the reach of all the plain people in Ireland. He did not know at that time that he would preside in the Party over the conveyance of that land to people from the four corners of Europe. His anxiety in 1950 was that Deputy Blowick's proposals would make it impossible for the plain people to buy any land at all. The criticism varied from that extreme down to the point of saying that there was no value at all in the proposals adumbrated by Deputy Blowick. I am glad to say, as so often happened in the past, Fianna Fáil are coming to discover that the proposals contained in Deputy Blowick's Act of 1950 were good proposals, useful proposals, workable proposals and proposals which made good work by the Land Commission possible which had not been possible before.
I view with satisfaction another conversion of the Fianna Fáil Party to a proposal which has been contained in our programme in the past several years, that is, our proposal to establish a game council or board to co-ordinate the activities of all those concerned with the preservation of game. At page 8 of his speech, the Minister says:
My repeated appeals for unity in the game movement, at national level, have not so far met with a satisfactory response. I am determined, however, that the planning of game development on a national basis must not be held up indefinitely by a spirit of faction and mutual suspicion on the part of some interests. The question of the most appropriate and effective measures to be taken, in the prevailing circumstances, is at present under examination in my Department.
The Minister is right to press forward with concerted action in regard to that matter and after powers of persuasion have been exhausted—I hope it will not come to that but if it does—he should come to the House with suitable legislative proposals to make possible an effective policy for game protection.
Now, I want to turn to the broad question of land tenure. I have travelled to a good many international conferences in Europe in my time and it is interesting to trace to the international bureaucracy, who are becoming quite a race apart, a queer kind of theoretical conclusion that the proper development of the world demands a general clearance of the people off the land, that they should be herded into large urban conurbations and there disciplined into automated industries having as their sole object an expansion of the gross national product, and that all other considerations should be subordinated to that aim.
You will get that kind of talk and that kind of approach very largely in the big industrial countries of Europe where there is a chronic shortage of labour as a result of political developments since the war. I can understand their approach to these problems. They have passed under the harrow of war. They have seen immense physical destruction. They have seen the obliteration of vast accumulations of wealth. They have seen relatively well-to-do populations reduced to the lowest level of destitution with a very high percentage of these populations utterly dependent on industrial employment for their very survival.
These people have become obsessed and fascinated by the proposition that the havoc of war must be redressed and that the incomes of their people must be restored to pre-war levels or better, and in passionate pursuit of this objective, their whole mind has been concentrated on the expansion of industrial employment and the increase in its monetary return. What happens to the individuals caught up in this vast machine becomes a matter of irrelevance.
I have myself seen hordes of proletarians being "hooshed" into huge factories and subjected to the industrial discipline of a great expanding industry, earning high wages with almost unlimited overtime accessible to them. For those who are prepared to work 12 and 14 hours a day, there is a large monetary income with abundant amenities of one kind or another—dancehalls, beer cellars, cinemas, television and every other purchasable amenity— readily available to their hand not only to purchase but to tempt them to greater effort in order, each one, to keep up with the Joneses.
I want to ask this House: are we to accept the validity of that philosophy in Ireland? I do not, and I think we are all chasing a complete chimera. I remember going to Australia 25 years ago, that is, before the war. I remember that at that time the great social problem in Australia was the tendency of the people to leave the land and go to the big cities on the seacoasts. Everybody then said that Australia was mad to allow that to proceed. I remember pointing out to the Australians at an international conference in Sydney that they were mad not to increase facilities in what they were pleased to describe as the backwoods, because if the whole population moved off the land of Australia into four or five cities scattered around the coast, the economic situation would be precarious.
There were very few people then in the world who were not prepared to agree that this tendency to urbanise the whole population of the country was fraught with immense danger for the future welfare of the country. Everybody realised that one of the most stable elements in any society was the farmers of the country living on their own holdings. It is since the war that this whole madness has been generated in the minds of these international bureaucrats to whom I have referred. We were immune to the poison of this kind of thought, which is not by any means shared on the Continent. The President of the French Republic, President de Gaulle, resisted it strongly. Chancellor Adenauer was strongly opposed to it. However, there is all the time operating this queer new race of men, the international bureaucrats, who are fascinated by this concept and who are pumping out propaganda in favour of it continually.
I believe we were immune to this poison in Ireland until relatively recently and I think the Minister for Transport and Power is one of the people very largely responsible for introducing that poisonous kind of thought into this country. In some unfortunate moment, somebody unloaded him on the Department of Lands and because he is a silly man —I do not want to apply any other adjectives to him—he lives in a kind of crazy world of twisted statistics with which he can persuade himself to believe anything. He started this strange philosophy in this country that we must get the people off the land, that everybody knew people were leaving the land everywhere and that the sooner we swept everybody off the land, the better it would be for all concerned. It is a poisonous fallacy; it is complete delusion to imagine that everybody in rural Ireland wants to leave the land and it is fantastic nonsense to think that everybody living on the land lives in a state of misery and destitution.
I have lived all my life among small farmers. It is true that they do not enjoy a great many of the amenities available in Dublin city but they do not want them. And they do enjoy a great many amenities in their own homes that the citizens of Dublin will never know. One of the principal amenities they have is that they are their own boss and, thank God, there still survives a strong residue of independence in our people who set a very high value on being their own boss in their own home and working for themselves. Is that good or bad? I think it is a very good thing. In all the stress and strain that affects peoples and countries all over the world, there is no greater guarantee against the aberrations to which so many people have fallen victim in recent times than the presence of a property-owning, rural community such as we have in Ireland.
I can well understand a man like the Minister for Transport and Power, who is as remote from the people of rural Ireland as the Empress of China, being wholly unable to understand the mentality of people who are happy and comfortable and can make a reasonably comfortable living by diligent work on a holding of 30 acres in rural Ireland. The fact is that they can and do and those who live there all their lives have seen college presidents, archbishops, doctors, lawyers and all the rest, raised on small holdings a damn sight better than they would be raised in any house with an approximately similar income in Dublin city or Cork city. If I were to look around my neighbours at present, and that after living through six years of Fianna Fáil ill-administration, with all the misfortunes that has involved for them, I would say the bulk of them had a better life than the tradesmen in Dublin. They have not as big a monetary income but I am convinced they have a better life. They do not work as short hours but I am convinced they have better life. Some of them work long hours; some not so long. Would I shock the House if I said that I think the most precious amenity they enjoy is that they are entitled to take their reward in the form they want it? Some work 14 or 15 hours a day and set more value on putting £100 in the bank than on their health. Others do not work more than nine or ten hours. They could earn more money but they deliberately elect not to do so. They say: "I could earn more if I worked night and day: I do not choose to do so." They have the right to make that election.
There are some enthusiasts here who would say that any man who does not work himself into the grave is a traitor to the nation. I do not believe that. I am concerned to secure for our people a good life and concerned that our people will undertake the real purpose and obligation of life, that is, to accept the gifts God gave them and thereafter be too proud to do less than their best. But I reject, consciously and deliberately, the idea that the only purpose for which men and women were put on earth is to expand the gross national produce in terms of some daft economist's conception. That is talk which people may hereafter describe as revolutionary and contrary to the general trend. I make the statement with full deliberation. I welcome the expansion of national wealth but at a prudent and proper cost. I reject categorically the proposition that the whole social background of our society should be ruthlessly torn to pieces for no other purpose than that we should be able to say that the gross national produce has become greater than it was.
I see a horrible danger in a mentality like that of the Minister for Transport and Power that it will become part of the conscious policy of the Department of Lands to sweep the people off the land. The next step we shall have is that from the Shannon west the proper way to handle the land is the way advocated by Lord Lucan, the great exterminator. This is not a new doctrine. Lord Lucan had a plan for the land of Mayo and Donegal and Galway. His plan was to sweep all the people off the land as a preliminary operation, level all the houses and all the walls and then divide the countryside into 500-acre lots. His plan was to bring in Scottish factors and put a Scottish factor in charge of each 500-acre parcel of land and then hire back what he described as the peasants. He said: "Instead of their maintaining the illusion that they have tenant rights or anything like that, I will give them a wage. They will work under a Scottish factor and they will have a larger money income which will be much better for them."
Thank God, the proposed victims of that reform, which I believe commends itself to the heart of the Minister for Transport and Power, rose up and ran Lord Lucan out of the country. His son came back, a very much chastened man and acknowledged the error of his ways and sought to ingratiate himself with the children of the people his father evicted. He had learned wisdom, to his eternal credit, be it said. Are we drifting into the position of adopting to-day Lord Lucan's methods of land reform which our grandfathers categorically and emphatically rejected? I think there is grave danger we are and it is time somebody said: "Let us come down to tintacks and see what is really in our minds."
My conviction is—and I know whereof I am speaking and I have some experience—that the land of Ireland can give a good living to the people of Ireland who live on it if they are given a chance. I believe it is infinitely better to provide them with credit to remain living on their own holding than to give them credit on condition they abandon their holdings. I specifically join issue with the Taoiseach. I do not want to lend them money for the purpose of abandoning their holdings but I do want to lend them money to expand production on their holdings so that they get a decent living in their own homes and I believe it is perfectly practicable to do it.
I do not want to lend the money to induce them to build houses in cities or enter into residence in flats. I want them lent the money to build houses on their own holdings where their old houses are not adequate in modern conditions. I think that is practical and desirable and believe that in the long run, whatever the cost may be to provide credit for these things, it will be most abundantly rewarded by an expansion in the gross national product. But it will be an expansion purchased at a proper and reasonable cost, not at the cost of usurping the whole of the society in which we were all born and reared.
As I am saying these things I find myself in the extraordinary position of wondering if I am saying something very crazy in defending the existence of the social pattern in which we were all born and reared; and when I listen to some of the buckos in Brussels, Amsterdam, in Bonn and Paris lecturing me on how we should run this country, I begin to ask myself are we all daft. When I hear some fellow being hawked in from Sweden to survey us all and after three weeks presenting us with a report in the name of OECD or OOOO or some other such body on how Irish society should be organised, and being told we must bow down and accept this again as the gospel because it was written by an international bureaucrat, I begin to ask myself again are we all crazy.
None of us who has spent his life dealing with these affairs would have the impudence to go to Sweden, or Norway or Switzerland, spend a month there and then claim the right to report on how they should run Sweden, Norway or Switzerland; nobody except these men who are going mad in this pseudo-international omniscience would dare atempt it; no one but a weakminded man like the Minister for Transport and Power would suffer himself to be so deeply affected by these superficial kinds of assertion from abroad.
I do not want to assert in any Chauvinistic way that our way of life is better than that of anybody else but I do say deliberately that our way of life is a good way of life. I believe that in our way of life as it exists at the present there is a better and truer appreciation of real values than exists in any of what we are urged to believe are more advanced and progressive communities. Our way of life produces a society here in which, though we have poverty, we have no destitution and we have no plutocracy. How many other societies can make the same claim?
I admire America; I love her people and respect her position in international affairs. I regard her leaders as leaders in the free world today. She is held up as the pattern of affluent society. There is more genuine destitution and poverty in every State of the American Union than there is to be found in any part of Ireland. I do not deny that there is more wealth to be found in any single State of the American Union than in the whole of Ireland but nobody would be more astonished than a citizen of the United States of America if you said that to him; and yet if you led him by the hand to Harlem or to the mountainous parts of Tennessee or into the poorer areas of Oklahoma, he would be bewildered.
I heard Mr. Wirtz, the American Secretary of Labour, discussing this question in a television interview recently. He was asked if grave destitution existed in the United States and he replied that, of course, it does. He was asked what was the reason for it and he assigned a reason. He was asked why were the people not more concerned about it and he said they did not know that one of the great tragedies of an affluent society such as that was that those things can exist and that those people who do not experience them do not know about them.
I glory in the fact that in the society to which we belong the presence of a hungry or destitute individual is such a source of concern and embarrassment to every Deputy in this House. I remember an American correspondent who had sat in the Press Gallery here coming up to me in the Restaurant and expressing surprise that I, as Leader of the Opposition, had been pressing the Minister for Social Welfare about the rights of a woman whose husband had deserted her to get a widow's pension. I asked him what was odd about that and he said he had been in a lot of national assemblies in his day but he had heard no one else discussing such a problem and at the same time commanding such universal interest. It struck me that was a very useful illustration for the Government of the kind of society we have and of the kind we are exhorted to have by the disciples of the gross national product in the affluent State. That may strike Deputy Tully as being far removed from the Department of Lands——
