GOVERNMENT IN BUSINESS

Hokitika Guardian, 21 August 1928, Page 4

GOVERNMENT IN BUSINESS

PROFESSIONS AND PRACTICE

(NineA' n Twontv-Eigbt Committee.) The Hon. H. A. Wright did well last week in reminding the members of the Labour Party in the House of Representatives that the Labour Government of Queensland bad discontinued its attempt to socialize the industries of the country and had decided to leave these industries in the hands of the people already engaged in them.

“Mr 11 dland’s views,” the Alinister of Education said, “ are now out of I date and do not meet with the support of his friends in Australia. Queensland has frequently been held up as an example to New Zealand by the Labour Party; but the Premier of that country now declares that its State enterprises have failed and have boon abandoned because the workers gave them inadequate social service. If experiments of this kind have been tried and failed in Queensland, how can they be expected to succeed in New Zealand?” Air Wright’s deductions are perfectly b-gical. The Queensland Labour Government started out upon its socializing experiments with a substantial majority behind it both in Parliament and ill the country. The Conditions generally were favourable for the gradual development of its various enterprises; hut from the first the old inevitable difficulties—lack of experience. lack of ambition, lack of emulation. lack of social service and the rest—began to arise, all culminating in the Labour Government's determination to return tlie ventures it bad appropriated to the hands of private enterprise. PRECEPT AND EXAAIPLE. But while Air Wright is to lie complimented upon bis effort to bring the Labour Party in New Zealand to the same conclusion as the Labour Party in Queensland lias reached, it is, to say the least of it. more than a little incongruous that be should stand, with bis colleagues in the Dominion Government, for the very policy lie denounced. He implied when congratulating tlie Labour Party in Queensland upon its return to economic sanity that it bad adopted the policy of New Zealand in this respect; that New Zealand was tlie place of all others that gave freedom and assistance to private enterprise, and so lortli and so on. Him surely bo must have known,- as every other politician knows and every other business man knows, that the New Zealand Government to-day is competing with private enterprise at least as actively as the Queensland Government did before its recent repentance and reform. This is not to say that the

present Government is responsible for all the excursions of previous Governments, Liberal, Reform and Nations I, into business; but Mr Wright and bis colleagues must accept the responsibility for maintaining one day longer than is absolutely necessary a state of affairs in this country which after a fair and friendly trial in Queensland lias been roundly denounced by the Labour Government there. It is for the present Government to say whether New Zealand is to continue bearing the reproaches thrown off by the Australian State. Wellington, August 17th, 1928.