LABOUR PARTY’S PLATFORM

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLVI, Issue 2714, 29 March 1924, Page 4

LABOUR PARTY’S PLATFORM

ITS SOCIALIST AIMS. (Contributed by the N.Z. Welfare League.) Mr D. Sullivan, M.P., in addressing his constituents, complained that Mr Massey now referred to their party as socialists. How sad it is to be thus misrepresented. Of course Mr H. E. Holland and his colleagues, having their eyes on the Treasury Benches desire at this time !u be known as anything but socialist. Tn all their speeches up and down the country they are posing as the new Liberals and explaining anything but their real official platform. It is because they show such very great shyness about their actual platform that we have found it necessary to inform the public of what it contains. In previous articles we have shown that it aims at land nationalisation "which involves the abolition of all private land holding. This fact they arc doing their best to cover up as they do not want the farmers to understand their real objectives. They supply only what will catch votes.

From the Party’s official plat form we extract the following:— “STATE OWNERSHIP."

(1) The immediate establishment of a State Bank to the ultimate exclusion of private banking. (2) Establishment of State farms for the purpose of producing the people’s foodstuffs. (Where does the private farmer come in?) (3) State-owned shipping service. (4) State ownership of all branches of insurance. (5) The extension of public ownership of national utilities and the speedy national control of the food supplies of the people. METHOD OF CONTROL. This is what the platform affirms: “Where national ownership of an industry is effected all labour for such industry and at least half the Board of Control in each case shall be appointed by the union or unions affected.’’ There is one thing we have never been able to understand about this party and that is why it needs to particularise since at the head of its platform it states its objective to be: — “The socialisation of the means of production, distribution, and exchange.” In the face of such facts Mr Massey should he ashamed to call Ibis innocent thing socialistic. A POLITICAL FRAUD. We have named this Red Party “a plain political fraud” and we repeat it. For Mr Holland to use the names of Grey, Ballanee and Seddon by way of suggestion that he is carrying on the principle for which they stood, comes near to plain lying.

We should have some respect for this party if it stood forward openly in support of its own platform and announced the truth that it is socialist and nothing but .socialist. It would then be politically honest. It is the fraudulency of posing as Liberal whilst actually opposed to the fundamental principles of Liberalism that merits contempt. True Liberal statesmen in New Zealand have ever sought to widen the circle of private ownership so as to afford the mass ever greater opportunity. In contrast, this Red Party. which shrinks at its own name — Socialist —is seeking always to destroy all private ownership and substitute a State Dictatorship in place thereof. By its platform it should be known, not by the specious camouflaging that it is now using.