The Advantages of Wool

Everyone knows the advantages of wearing woollen clothing. Its a naturally produced and infinitely renewable resource. It's fibres ace tough, springy, and resilient. It can be very soft and fine, or hard and course, depending on what sheep it came off. Its comfortable to wear — it breathes It's warm in winter, cool in summer. It retains 50% of it's warmth when wet. It is very suitable for safe, non-asbestos flame resistant cloth — hence its use in racing suits. But we can't get it.

Textile importers in their desire to keep us covered are forced to import polyesters and other synthetics like acrylics and viscose. These are produced entirely from oil. Over seas oil Manufactured overseas by Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, China and Korea. It doesn't breathe. It has a slightly shiny surface. It's not as resilient as wool and tends to pill and bag. But it is cheap enough for us to import and make up into our everyday garments.

Clearly, the situation is absurd! In our desire to promote self-sufficiency at all costs we encourage an inefficient industry to remain so. We add to the demand for oil and thus increase our dependence on a finite resource. We penalize the New Zealand consumers. We help to reduce the world demand for wool by our attitude to it, and thus diminish our own wool export earnings. The solution seems to me, to be quite simple.

(i)	Remove all import restrictions and taxes on overseas woollen products. They may have been produced overseas but its still our wool.
(ii)	Give 6 months notice of this to woollen manufacturers and give them a plant subsidy of 20% so that they can transfer to manufacturing carpets and blankets which are recognised internationally as being second to none. As this is an easy change for mills to make, they won't lose too much money, and workers' jobs will be protected.
(iii)	Put heavy import restrictions and taxes on all polyesters and acrylics with exceptions made for situations where there is no suitable alternative.

This should keep consumers happy, they will be able to buy good woollen products at a fair price. It will keep the farmers happy because New Zealanders will buy more wool overall — even though it is made up for us. Our dependence will shift from finite overseas resources to infinite local resources. New Zealand industry will survive in a field more appropriate to its expertise. No more blind subsidisation of industry!

John Penney.