The Dominion. SATURDAY, JULY 20, 1912. LABOUR AND FREE SPEECH.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1497, 20 July 1912, Page 4

The Dominion. SATURDAY, JULY 20, 1912. LABOUR AND FREE SPEECH.

Fresh evidence comes to us by cable to-day of the determination of the Australian Labour politicians to kill the liberty of the press if they can. Following up its intimidation Act, as the Electoral Act requiring all articles upon an election to be signed by the writer, has been styled the Federal Government has introduced a Bill to amend the Referendum Act, the whole purpose being to intimidate the public and the press. Organisations spending money in support of opposition to any law submitted by a Labour Government to the judgment of the nation must supply tho Government with an account of such expenditure; newspapers must "supply returns of advertisements and articles intended or calculated to affect the result of a referendum": and "all articles commenting on the issues involved must bo signed." It is not only to tin Federal Labour Caucus (Mr. Fisher and his colleagues do not exist as Ministers with souls of .their own), but to the Labour bosses throughout Australia, that there appears to be an advantage to trades union bossism in requiring editorial (and all other) political comment to be signed, We are personally quite unable to see how such a transformation of the_ whole business of political criticism can benefit Labour or anybody else; its only positive result will be the destruction of the most vital and valuable function of the printing press. But experience has taught us all to regard as suspect any cause ot any party or any politician who puts forward proposals of this or a similar nature. In New Zealand, happily, enough wholesqmeness has remained in public opinion to make impossible-the Seddon and Waed Governments' attempts directly or indirectly to stifle freedom of opinion and expr. ssion. Mr. .Laurenson was alone, we think, in his expiring snarl at the freedom of newspaper criticism.

_ The other day, obviously as a pre liminary to his friend Me. Fisher's Bill, Mr. Holman, the AttorneyGeneral in the discredited Labour Government of New South Wales, de livered a strange lecture upon anonymous journalism to the Australian Journalists' Association, "Politicians," ho urged, "took their political lives in their hands when they expressed any. definite opinion on a subject, but the anonymous leaderwriter, of the bona fides of whom thj public never had any guarantee, took no risks, _ and, man for man, thj leader-writer exercised more influence on the public mind than did the politician." Mr. Holman went on to say that at present leader-writers wero simply hired to write lies at the dictation of the business end of the paper-r-a misstatement that every journalist in Australasia will fiad too grotesque even to lend itself o criticism, But the case against the unsigned editorial is all contained ia tho sentence'we have quoted, and a consideration of its fallacies and sly slippings over fact will lead to the conclusion that Me. Holman is just as wrongas his challenging of tie whole principle of British journal? ism would in itself suggest. There is no analogy between the responsibility] of the politician-and the leaderwriter. The only analogy is betwesn tho politician and the newspaper for whom the leader-writer writes. A politician gains honour or falls into discredit according as his conduct, considered as a whole, is honourable or discreditable; exactly tho same is the caso with the newspaper. It is not the leader-writer who gets the credit or discredit of what it publishes. Here and there one may find a leader-writer who ia ready to write in any direction dictated—north today and south to-morrow-?but generally, one may say almost universally, a man writes for a paper because he is attached to the general doctrine of that paper. And no newspaper, having to choose between two equally able writers who hold opposite vie vs on a vital question of policy, would hesitate for a second in choosing for its writer that one who, to his skill, could add ardour and devotion to its cause. To say that the anonymous leader-writer is irresponsible is to make a statement at once untrue and irrelevant. The signature of the newspaper's representatives appears evory day in the imprint: tho imprint secures all the responsibility required. Tho glaring evil of the proposal to punish, with fine and imprisonment, the publication of unsigned political criticisms is exposed by Mr. Houian's reference to "Continental countries" as the example t~> be followed. Everyone knows the Continental method. As.the Sydney Telegraph says, Russia affords /a typical example of the regulation of the press, and the Telegraph' also noted that the power Mr. Holman and Mr. Fisher are demanding is the power "to seize tho authors of unfavourable criticisms and gaol thorn, not after trial by jury, but by thc_ vindictive vote of the political majority in Parliament, whom they criticised." Of course, the case for the Australian Labour Caucus's pro posal cannot standunless it is shown that the signed article is necessary in the public interest. But the Labour bosses of Australia have not even afcr tempted to show that the present system, tho system that is the fruit of the long fight for the freedom of the pn\s since tho publication of Milton's Areopagitica, injures the public interest, or is anything but good for every honest cause. There is really no ground that the Australian Labour boss can take from which ho cannot be dislodged, but to the ordinary man, and even to the ordinary trade unionist, the convincing argument is this: that insistence upon a signature to every expression of opinion in a newspaper in the public interest implies that the public is a collection of fools, incapable of knowing whether an argument is Bound or not in'itself. "Every reader of a newspaper," as the Sydney Tele graph points out, "is free to form his own judgment on the opinions expressed there, and the freer because under anonymity no personal influences intrude upon his consideration, and all that he weighs is the reasonableness — or otherwise -— of what he reads." We may leave there the general question, with the final observation that it is.very likely that tho Hipti Court, on the appeal by tho Argus, will find the Federal Electoral 'Act unconstitutional. One cannot help noticing the fact that the- clumsy attack of the Australian Labour bosses upon the freedom of the press —which covers tlie freedom of the individual—is only one of manv indications of the identity of modern Radicalism with tyranny and coercion. It wan tho mark of tha French Jacobins that they were ready to

guillotine, in the name of liberty, anyone who claimed the liberty to disagree with them. It is the mark of the Australian Labour boss that he is ready to urge the suppression of every workingman who presumes to have a oohscienco or an opinion antagonistic to their own. The men who havo forced Mil. Fisher and Mr. Holman into their latest attack upon liberty of criticism through the intimidation of individuals aro the men who have publicly advocated the assassination 01 non-unionists. They aro soldiers under the same banner the Waihi strikers followed: the banner of coercion, tyranny, and intimidation. So long as the AngloSaxon blood remains in the people of Australasia, no attack upon the fundamental liberties can uave any more than a temporary success.