I now formally move the motion. I want to call the attention of the House to the developments which have taken place during the past three years in respect of Employment Period Orders. This Order relates to persons who have holdings with a valution of over £4. In 1935 the Minister for Industry and Commerce made a similar Employment Period Order depriving such persons of unemployment assistance benefit for the period 17th April to the 21st May—a period of five weeks. He made a subsequent Employment Period Order in respect of the same class of persons, the Order to be operative from the 17th July to the 1st October of the same year, a period of 11 weeks. In all, the Minister's Employment Period Orders deprived small-holders with a valuation of over £4 of unemployment assistance benefit for a period of 16 weeks during the year 1935.
Last year, the Minister issued a new Employment Period Order of a much more extensive and comprehensive character than that issued during the previous year. The effect of the 1936 Order was to ensure that persons with a valuation of over £4 would be deprived of unemployment assistance benefit for a period of 34 weeks in 1936, compared with 16 weeks in 1935. For the year 1937 the Minister has issued another Employment Period Order, the effect of which is to continue to deprive persons with a valuation of over £4 of unemployment assistance from the 3rd March until the 26th October. Again, those persons are deprived of unemployment assistance benefit for a period of approximately eight months out of the 12 months.
On previous occasions I asked the Minister if any investigations had been made by him to ascertain whether employment was available in the areas in which those persons lived such as would ensure their being employed in a remunerative capacity in the period during which they will now receive no unemployment assistance benefit under the Unemployment Assistance Act. On that occasion the Minister indicated that no such investigation had been made, and, presumably, no such investigation has since been undertaken or has been specially made in connection with this Employment Period Order, so that we find, when we approach the consideration of this Employment Period Order, that it has been issued by the Minister without any previous investigation as to whether employment is available for those who will lose benefit during the currency of the Order. I presume that I am also right in stating that no inquiry of any kind has been conducted by the Minister, or by persons acting under his instructions, to ascertain the capacity of the land represented by a valuation of, say, £4 1s. to sustain a man, his wife and four, five or six children, during the currency of the Employment Period Order. The Minister, therefore, has made no investigation to find out whether employment is available, and has made no investigation to ascertain the capacity of the land to sustain a man and his dependents in those circumstances for the eight months which is prescribed in the Order.
The Minister, of course, must know —everybody who has any contact with the rural areas knows—that there will not be available in the rural areas during the period set out in the Order employment for all those, or even for a substantial proportion of those, who will be affected by the issue of this Order. If employment were available, the persons who are affected by the Order would not have to seek employment at the employment exchanges. They would not have to register at the employment exchanges and would not have to tolerate the degrading rotational system of employment which is being administered through the employment exchanges. We may take it, therefore, that so far as those persons are concerned, no employment is available to them in the rural areas. If it were, they would be only too glad to accept employment rather than to accept even the rotational schemes of employment which are being administered by the Minister's Department. So that the Minister, therefore, is not concerned whether employment is available or not. He must know, although, presumably, he is not prepared to admit it, that many of the persons concerned will not be able to obtain employment during the whole period covered by this Order. Many of them, in fact, may be able to get employment only for a fragmentary portion of the period covered by the Order
If the assumption of the Minister for Industry and Commerce is that persons affected by the Order are capable of sustaining themselves by husbandry on their own lands, we get a strange mentality in the attempt to justify the Order. The assumption, is, apparently, that a man with a holding of a valuation of £4 1s. is able to get out of his land, during the currency of the Order, after putting in labour and seed and manure into the land, a profit of £39 net. When you consider the kind of land that often carries a valuation of £4 1s., I think it will be obvious to Deputies who have contact with agricultural conditions that it would be quite impossible for a man with a valuation of £4 1s. to be able to make, each week, a net profit of about 14/- or 15/- by operating upon the land; and when we remember also that the man's house and piggeries and outhouses are taken into consideration in determining the valuation of his premises, we find that the actual land held by the man may be relatively small indeed.
I should like to inquire from the Minister as to what he visualises will be the position of those affected by the Order during the period of its currency. Up to yesterday, the 2nd March, persons in the category set out in the Order were entitled to unemployment assistance benefit, and the bulk of the persons, of course, are in the rural areas where the maximum unemployment assistance benefit is 12/6 per week. It is on that miserable pittance that they have been endeavouring to sustain themselves during periods of unemployment. One can imagine, in those days when the cost of living is so high and when it is continuing to soar, the plight of a man endeavouring to sustain himself and his wife and family on an income of 12/6 per week. However, that represents the income of the persons concerned up to the 2nd of March. It may be, of course, that the Minister will say that the man had some land, but even if he had land, he was not getting 12/6 a week. The fact remains that he could only get that amount per week according to the valuation of his means; but if the valuation of his means was 10/- a week, 3/6 is all the unemployment assistance benefit he would get. However, on an all-in income represented by a maximum of 13/6 a week, these persons were expected to sustain themselves up to the 2nd March.
On the 3rd of March the Employment Period Order becomes effective, and that person, if he had a valuation of £4 1s. 0d. or over, is deprived of unemployment assistance benefit until the 26th of October next. How is it expected that that person can sustain himself in the meantime? What is going to happen on the 3rd of March? What is going to happen in the second week; what is going to happen in the third week or the fourth week of this Employment Period Order? If the land is capable of sustaining the man, presumably he is expected by the Minister to set about and plough the land and even, presumably, to set about and sow it; but ploughing and sowing land are not operations that bring in cash. They represent expenditure, not merely of labour, but of money for manures and seeds, and instead, therefore, of being precipitated into a period when he can get some other source of income from the land, the man is really compelled to forgo his claim to unemployment assistance benefit at a time when, in fact, his expenditure is higher and will tend to be higher if he is to operate on the land which the Minister, presumably, expects to sustain him. So that, if those persons who are affected by the Order in the main are expected to live by tilling the land, the actual tillage operations will cause them further expenses and, during the period that that expense must be met, there is no income in the form of unemployment assistance benefit provided under the Act.
I said on a previous occasion that these Employment Period Orders had been issued without any thought, without any consideration for the hardships which would be inflicted on those who will be the victims of the Order, without any investigation as to the availability of work in the areas to which the Order applies, and without any proper regard to the conditions under which small farmers are living as a result of long continued unemployment followed by a current Employment Period Order of this kind, and the fact that the whole of the rural portions of the country are affected is the clearest possible evidence that the Minister, in issuing this Order, has issued a blanket Order, hoping to catch everybody in the blanket, and not concerned at all with the particular situations which exist in particular areas. This year there is a special reason, in fact, why, if any Employment Period Order is issued, it should not be made as effective as in former years. Everybody is familiar with the widespread flooding which has taken place all over the country. As a result of that flooding, land which might be available in a normal season is not available for tillage this year. Yet, notwithstanding the flooded condition of their lands, small farmers are now expected to be content with the position where their unemployment assistance benefit is withdrawn from them and where they can look upon flooded lands to sustain them for the eight months during which the Order will be effective.
The whole atmosphere surrounding this Order is conclusive evidence to me that it is not so much an Employment Period Order as an economy Order. The whole object of the Order is not based upon any evidence that work is available or upon any evidence that there is no actual need to provide unemployment assistance benefit for the persons affected by the Order. In my view, the underlying motive for the issue of an Order of this kind is to save money to the Exchequer, and the Minister this year is continuing the Order for a period of eight months, which is the same period over which last year's Order operated. That period, this year and last year, represents an increase of well over 100 per cent. in time from the standpoint of the currency of the Order. Although the Minister has spoken at many functions recently. we have not had any indication from him that it has been found unnecessary to provide unemployment assistance benefit during this period of eight months for persons with a valuation of £4 1s. and over. We had no indication from the Minister, and certainly no evidence from him, that it is unnecessary to provide benefit in the areas affected by the Order and to the persons in the categories prescribed in the Order.
This motion, therefore, has been put down in order to protest against that blanketing kind of Order by the Minister, and to give me an opportunity of explaining to the House how persons who are affected by this Order are expected to sustain themselves during the eight months which is the period covered by this Order. The Minister has not previously explained to the House how it is expected that persons of that kind can sustain themselves. We ought to know from the Minister, and the persons concerned ought to know, what exactly they are expected to do during the next eight months in order to make good in some form the unemployment assistance benefit which they are going to lose, and I hope we shall hear from the Minister on what grounds he seeks to justify an Order of this kind.