MINISTERIAL REBUKE

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 287, 24 February 1928, Page 9

MINISTERIAL REBUKE

MR. HOLLAND’S COMMENT ON SAMOA JUDGE’S INTEGRITY ASSAILED (From Our Oicn Correspondent) TE AWAMUTU, Thursday. Charging him with seeking party advantage on the Samoan question, the Hon. A. D. McLeod, Minister of Lands, at his address here this evening, strongly condemned the attitude adopted by Mr. H. E. Holland, Leader of the: Opposition. THROUGHOUT the history of British politics, said . Mr. McLeod, party leaders were united on foreign policy, keeping - questions perhaps affecting the lives of those in overseas possessions above the level of party politics. Mr. Holland’s talk about Magna Charta and the rights of individuals was camouflage, declared the speaker, who instanced the Makura seamen quarrelling with a fellow wage-earner, and refusing to take the vessel to sea if a certain man remained even as a passenger. Sane, thinking people deplored such a travesty of British justice, yet Mr. Holland never publicly denounced the conduct of the seamen concerned. When a party leader challenges the integrity of men holding the highest positions in the Dominion by imputing that the Government was able to influence their findings, continued Mr. McLeod, he cannot leave it at that, for if the imputations are founded on truth then neither of the judges who formed the Samoan Commission is fitted in any way for the high position he holds. “I say,” he concluded, “that the statement should be withdrawn or proved unreservedly up to the hilt.”