CORRESPONDENTS' VIEWS

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIII, Issue 165, 15 July 1942, Page 4

CORRESPONDENTS' VIEWS

betrayal,

(To The Editor)

In spite of profuse evidence of the electors' strongest condemnation of their proposals, our self-appointed hybrid Government carries on and totally usurps the rights of the people, replacing our boasted democratic system by what is now, definitely, a dictatorship, even though it be proclaimed a "benevolent" dictatorship, and Mr. Fraser's alleged "safeguards" notwithstanding. It has created disunity, where there previously existed only an intense and patriotic desire for national unity. The additional salaries and expenses of the cumbersome new administration will far exceed the probable cost of a referendum or a general election on non-party lines. In plain English, the scheme adopted, with such brush-ing-aside of our common electoral rights and privileges, is a direct betrayal of those basic principles of true democratic freedom to which those who destroy it have rendered such loud and eloquent lip-service in the past . . . that freedom for which our men are striving and dying overseas to-day. Over 100.000 tentative electors, newly qualified by age for the franchise, together with all those who will attain electoral age during the war and a year thereafter, in addition to all our men overseas and those who have already returned, have now been deliberately and quite unjustifiably disenfranchised by these unsurpers, who have now "dug-in" as the de facto Government. What a travesty on common sense to still boast of ourselves as a democracy! G. HINTON KNOWLES.