LABOUR AND PARLIAMENT.

Maoriland Worker, Volume I, Issue 6, 20 February 1911, Page 9

LABOUR AND PARLIAMENT.

Dear Editor, —If anything was needed to convince the meanest intelligence of the need of a live Labour Party in New Zealand standing for the interests of those who labour with hand or brain, the proceedings of the present session furnish the proof. The Government of Sir Joseph Ward is wholly in the hands of the employing classes. This must be evident even to the blind. There has not been a single Labour measure that has not either been strangled in committee by adverse amendments or killed outright, and, more ominous for the workers who up to the present have been voting for a bogus Liberalism, solely in favour of the capitalist landowning class, only a few days ago there appeared on the floor of the House a powerful lobby, and. the spectacle was presented of the Minister for Mines, Hon R. M'Kenzie, openly consulting the mine owners' ambassador regarding amendments to the Mining Act. That organised Labour is powerless to meet such a combination at present is only too true, and it is a disgrace to the New Zealand workers that this is so. In every other colony except New Zealand there is a compact Labour Party in

Parliament. Let us hope that the next elections will see a change, and that we shall have a strong Labour Party in Parliament, and an end for ever to the bogus Liberalism of Sir Joseph Ward.— Yours, etc., F. W. BURKE.