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Hokitika Guardian, 31 October 1928, Page 4

There is a Labour candidate, Mr R. Harrison, contesting the seat for Dunedin West, at present held by Hon W. Downio Stewart. Mr Harrison is very candid about Labour’s land policy, and lie reverts very frankly to the “usehold” policy of earlier pronouncement, which prominent Labour leaders are not featuring now to such special attiom As a Dunedin paper points out, Mr Harrison does not apparently regard himself as bound very closely by the platform upon which his party is contesting, the present election. Ho reverts more or less to earlier platforms in which the party’s real aims received more frank and less ambiguous expression than it is considered expedient to give them on this occasion. In his reference, for example, to the land question he said the Labour Party “had great faith in its land policy because it thought that an instrument of production such as land.should he common property.” Mr Harrison has been perfectly candid in emphasising the importance atached by the Labour Party to its policy in relation to land as part of its general objective, which is the socialisation of the means of production,, distribution, and exchange. It is as well to hear in mind that private ownership of the land is not, of course, confined to the well-to-do landed proprietors, sipce it is enjoyed by all members of the working class who by their industry and thrift have become owners of a property, however small, of their own. But Mr Harrison speak* ing for the Labour Party, says that 'Hie important to of land from the standpoint of human welfare necessitates its transfer from private ownership to community ownership. In speaking in these terms, he puts the aims of the Labour Party in a clearer and more definite light than does the party’s severely diluted election programme. The ultimate effect of the party’s policy would be, as has been already' pointed out, that everyone would become a servant of the State, and that nobody would produce anything that he could confidently call his own, and it is difficult to see what rights as an individual would he left to anyone. The whole policy is to a degree’illusory and Utopian. For the rest Mr Harrison’s speech was not free from wild statements on points of fact, as illustrated in his foolish declaration that the Reform Administration had arranged for a large influx of people into the Dominion to provide cheap labour without l-egard for the consequences to the people, and when approached for advice had tjold the people “to hike it out in to the country” and “to go and scratch for a living.” It is certainly of intei’est to have the Labour land policy so plainly detailed, and the man on the land struggling to make 'a home should study a policy which in the 1925 Labour platform was defined to the effect that “privately owned land shall not be sold or transferred except to the State.”