The Dominion. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17, 1942. A USEFUL CONTRIBUTION

Dominion, Volume 36, Issue 19, 17 October 1942, Page 6

The Dominion. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17, 1942. A USEFUL CONTRIBUTION

A wholesome contribution to the no-confidence' debate during its closing stages was the speech delivered by the member for Hurunui, Mr. Forbes. It was by no means the most fluent, but it had in it a note of sincerity and dispassionate earnestness conspicuously absent from some other speeches. It went .-right to the point at issue, the vital importance of principle in democratic government and it exposed very clearly attempts which had been made to cloud that issue by a distortion of the facts. Like others, Mr. Forbes found difficulty in understanding why Mr. Holland should have been attacked by the Prime Minister for not following the about-face of other members of the War Cabinet. Very justly he pointed out that it was not Mr. Holland who had deserted the policy laid down by the War Administration and members of the domestic Cabinet in dealing with the Waikato strike, but that the desertion had been the other way round. There can, in fact, be no question on that point. The ActingrPrime Minister and his associates, Messrs Webb and Semple, in vehement terms denounced the strikers with whom they declared there could be no compromise. They were described as wreckers, Fifth Columnists and worse, and their challenge against law and order, it was declared, would be taken up and the public were appealed to back the Government in its action in upholding and enforcing the law. All this, of course, is familiar history now and it is still fresh in the <public memory that the Leader of the Opposition loyally stood by his then, colleagues in the War Administration and publicly announced his determination to support them to the uttermost in ensuring that the law was observed. In his recital of these and other facts the member for Hurunui made it abundantly clear that the Government at the outset had recognized the vital importance of upholding the law at any cost and had expressed its determination to see that this was done. But faced with a difficult position the majority of the members backed down and capitulated to the strikers. For those responsible for this ignoble abandonment of their obligation to uphold the law, to seek to blame Mr. Holland for refusing to follow their lead, will strike the great majority of the public as it struck the member for Hurunui as not only unjust but absurd. The value of Mr. Forbes’s telling analysis of the position lay in the fact that he made the reason of Mr. Holland’s apparent isolation in Cabinet so convincingly clear, namely, the complete abandonment bv the Labour Ministers of the stand they had previously taken. And when the Prime Minister gravely asserts that his refusal to do what the others had done constituted an attempt to impose an individual’s will on the Cabinet, and really negatived the democratic system of government, the only result is to make people wonder how the conclusion is reached that a majority vote, no matter how big, can alter a principle or convert right into wrong.