NEW ZEALAND AND ITS PROBLEMS.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXV, Issue 2017, 28 February 1907, Page 4

NEW ZEALAND AND ITS PROBLEMS.

' Mr J. Ramsay Mac,Donald, M.P.,’ has contributed an interesting article to the London Daily Chronicle on Now Zealand politics. He found during his brief visit to the colony that the break up of the personal regime with the death of Mr Seddon made it specially difficult to forecast what is going to happen. There is, ho says, no real political organisation hero ; there is no well-defined public opinion and party standpoint as we understand the expressions at Homo. There is the country party pacified hitherto by the magnificent services done to it by the State in the shape of cheap capital, road, and railway development, and access to land. A multitude of men who desired to own land have been pitted hitherto against a handful of men who held land, and the multitude has won. That was the Seddon and the McKenzie regime Now a multitude of men in the towns who do not want to own land, but wlio do want to enjoy some of the benefits of the land, have come into conflict with the system of multiple landlordism which New Zealand land legislation has created, and that is the problem which Sir Joseph Ward has to face. To the country party the richer men and the manufacturers’ associations will rally in all probability. This party will not undo anything that has been done. It will make freeholds secure, it will continue the policy of public works, it will retain existing labor laws, but it will slacken the efficiency of administration, and use the law courts to weaken the Statute Book. For some time it 1 will have little trouble with protection, for though the fiscal interests of its two sectiqns are opposed, the manufacturers would be able to inaugurate a regime of high tariff walls. Away at the extreme of the Progressive party stands Labor, inspired by our own recent successes, and determined to copy the Australian organisations'. Hampered as a political force by the Arbitration Acts, pacified by the labor legislation of the late regime, weakened by the Civil Service and other political appointments which its leaders of capacity always received, the trade union and labor movement in general is as yet totally unequipped for political fighting. . . Sir J oseph Ward’s problem, therefore, is: Can he maintain a Liberal party with a centre of gravity % to the right of this Labor movement, or is he doomed, like the .Liberal leaders on the Continent and in some of the Australian States, to be crushed between Labor and reaction? Sir Joseph appears to be fully aware of the nature of bis task. He has included Mr Millar,late secretary of the Seamen’s Union, in his Cabinet, and for the time being has retained the sympathy of the LiberalLabor section in the trade councils of the country. Some men, like the Hon. John Rigg, the leader of the Independent Labor movement, who were drifting into conflict with Mr Seddon, think that the new Government' may bo more sympathetic than the old, and are “holding a watching brief.” But at any moment a serious split may come. . . Thus, the old order vanishes hero. Sir Joseph Ward will be tempted to carry it on and to keep intact the old Seddon party. That will bo tlio most fatal blunder which he can make. Mr Seddon took his party and his time to his grave with him.