GUIDANCE, NOT CONTROL

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVI, Issue 54, 1 September 1943, Page 4

GUIDANCE, NOT CONTROL

When he elaborated the policy of the National Party in Christchureh last evening, the Leader of the Opposition (Mr.' Holland) rightly emphasised the desire which exists in the hearts of most people to live their lives in their own way. The National Party, he said, believed that the people were happiest when most free from Government dictation and under a system which enabled them to live in their own homes and run their own farms and factories. That is not to say 'that the Government has no responsibility in the organisation of the country's economy or in safeguarding the prosperity and happiness of the people. But its part should be one of guidance rather than straight-out control and regimentation. Under the Labour Government there has been put into operation such a measure of bureaucratic control that practically every form of activity is circumscribed by regulations placing complete and extraordinary powers in the hands of Ministers of the Crown and civil servants and restricting the rights of the individual in almost every direction. Nor can war conditions be used legitimately as an excuse for what has happened. The war has made necessary many forms of control which otherwise would not have been tolerated, but long before the war the trend to bureaucratic control had become evident. The war has served to

emphasise the trend, and has, in some respects, been used as an excuse for strengthening the hold which all bureaucracies hope to impose on the people. As Mr. Holland suggested, the tendency has been for the people to become servants of the State rather than the State servants of the people.

There was no passage in Mr. Holland's speech that held out greater hope for the future than that in which he declared that the National Party subscribed to a system of competitive free enterprise, in which people who worked hard were better off than those who slacked, in which people liked to do , their own thinking, and where industry, enterprise, and thrift were virtues to be rewarded rather than being looked" upon as indiscretions to be penalised. This statement served to emphasise the clear line of demarcation between the policies of the two main parties. The National Party is offering the electors an opportunity of returning to the days when people were able to exercise their natural desire to express themselves in their own way. unhampered by all sorts of cumbersome and restrictive rules and regulations designed to make everybody conform to the one pattern. It offers a return to a system under which individual initiative brought its own return and thrift its own reward. On the other hand, the Labour* Party offers, in the words of Mr. Fraser, a continuation of the policy which has marked the past eight years, a policy which gradually but surely has made the State supreme and the people subservient to it and in many cftses dependent on it. • We believe that New Zealanders as a whole share the desire of British people everywhere to live their own lives in their own way, with a minimum of interfer-ence by the State. The essential differences in the policies of the National Party and the Labour Party present them with an opportunity of giving effective expression to that 'desire.