“LOOK TO NEW ZEALAND”

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 490, 20 October 1928, Page 7

“LOOK TO NEW ZEALAND”

MR. HOLLAND ANSWERS MR*. COATES PROMISES AND MAJORITIES Press Association DUNEDIN, Friday. “Let Mr. Coatefe look to New Zealand. We cannot solve the problems of Australia, and Australia cannot solve ours. Let New Zealand look after its own problems,” said Mr. H. E. Holland, Leader of the Opposition, who replied here this evening to the speech of the Prime Minister, who had referred to Labour in Australia. :Ur. Holland spoke to an audience which filled the Burns Hall. He was enthusiastically cheered. Mr. Holland said he noticed that Mr. Coates had said that in 1925 the Government set out with a clear programme, and no fanciful schemes*. Fanciful was not the word to describe the promises made in the huge advertisements which appeared in New Zealand papers before the elections. The Government had not divulged who had paid for them. Mr. Holland invited other parties to do as the Labour Party did, and publicly acknowledge contributions to its funds. When one went through Mr. Coates’s speech in Christchurch, continued Mr. Holland, one found that most of the promises which he had made in 1925 remained unfulfilled, notwithstanding the fact that he had such a huge majority. DRIVEN OFF LAND

Mr. Coates talked of forfeitures and surrenders, and said most of the settlers concerned in recent years had voluntarily surrendered their leases so that they could take them up again under a better tenure. Forfeitures and surrenders which had taken place showed the extent to which mem had been driven off the land by he Coates land policy. If the Prime Minister thought that figures would show his own policy in a better light, let him give figures. He had not done so up to the present. The Government had been cutting figures out of the Year Book since those figures had been used by their opponents. In connection with the total registered mortgages, a full page had been cut out of he 1928 Year Book, contended the speaker. The same thing appplied in the case of the Post Office Savings Bank. It was peculiar that this had happened since the Labour Party had made use of the figures. AFTER SIXTEEN YEARS

The Reform Party had been in office for 16 years, and it sajd that if it were given another term it would do things that it had promised' previously. After 16 years of office, it said the country was just turning the corner. In reply to an interjection, Mr. Holland stated that a Tory Government was in office in New South Wales. It had a bigger deficit and a bigger unemployment problemx than ever th« State had had under Labour. In reply to the Prime Minister’s references to relief works, Mr. Holland said the Labour Party did not think that there should be any relief works, but considered that, instead, necessary public works should be undertaken. If they were worth doing, the Government should pay the standard rate of wages.