GENTLE SATIRE

Hokitika Guardian, 19 November 1931, Page 8

GENTLE SATIRE

SOMETHING FOR EVERYBODY

The Leader of the Labour Party renewed. in Christchurch last night all the glowing promises made in Wellington ten days earlier. Even rlio slump exists only in the evil imagination of the Prime Minister, who has .magnified it by some hundreds per cent, after enforcing such economies on the Statistics Office that the real facts cannot be discovered. Mr Holland, however, can do without statistics. The Dominion’s income is £l5O millions—probably far more—and all that the slump has done to us has been to reduce our income over the last three years by about .£4 millions annually. It is ridiculous to. be walking off farms, winding up businesses, losing our jobs, and even entering unemployment camps, where we are only 2.6 per cent, worse off than we were five years ago. Labour would stop this stampede by the “rehabilitation in industry of all who are now unemployed or working part-time,” and pay them all high enough wages to provide a “reasonable standard of living.” It “believes” (a. strangely hesitant word in the circumstances) that this is the “only solution of the unemployment problem,” but knows (doubt has left it this time) that “strenuous endeavours will be made of certain elements among its opponents to precipitate an industrial upheaval before polling day.” For the capitalist—if we may still use a word that Labour has carefully dropped—rcan play the donkey when it suits him, as well as the wolf and the shark. He has been pretending to be poor for two years, too poor in hundreds of cases to pay . his debts and retain his factory or farm, and now he is going to pretend to have a grievance against his innocent employee and pick a quarrel with him. This will give him the election if it does not bring hack his business, but since the election is the “most momentous yet held in New Zealand” it will be wonderful to win it even at such a cost. Because then Mr Forbes will be able to pack his bag and live in London, Mr Coates will be able to reduce the pensions of all the wounded soldiers who fought with him in France. Mr Downie Stewart will be able to prevent the mortgaged farmer from getting,, a further loan, and no one will be able to prevent America from driving the Union .Tack from the (Pacific.

And if this is not the time Labour gospel it is as fair an interpretation as Mr Holland hopes his words will receive from the majority of his own followers. It is a monstrous libel to present the Coalition as a. gang of political half-wits and ruffians pressed into the service of rich landowners; and when Mr Holland is not doing this he is pretending that what Labour has failed to do in every other part of the world it could, and would, achieve in a month or two in New Zealand. No one knows better than he does that the situation is far too grave for these vindictive attacks and ridiculous promises. It has never been so urgent since the Great War that old enmities should be forgotten, and that those who cannot slip port the measures proposed for the national safety should abstain from merely opportunist obstruction; but Labour seems determined to learn nothing and forget nothing.