EMOTIONAL APPEAL

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 506, 8 November 1928, Page 6

EMOTIONAL APPEAL

HOW REFORM GOT LN MR. MASON EXPLAINS “We were told last election, ‘Vote for Coates and Confidence/ and the women’s emotions were so played upon that : t was practically their votes that returned the Reform Party to power/’ said Mr. Kells Mason, the United candidate for Manukau, at the Royal Oak last evening. “It was the biggest confidence trick ever perpetrated on a nation of people”, he said. “The women believed that Mr. Coates was the only man in the country capable of leading them out of the morass. They now realise to the full the deception that had been practised upon them, because to-day they find themselves still deeper in the mire.” He drew a picture of Mr. Coates and Mr. Holland walking arm-in-arm into the same lobby to vote for the Dairy Control Bill, a measure that cost the country two millions sterling, the principal loss having fallen on the Waikato farmers. Referring to taxation, Mr. Mason declared that New Zealand was the second highest-taxed country in the world to-day, and challenged Mr. V. H. Potter to disprove it. Germans, who had Tost the war, were paying a taxation of only £ 5 a head of population. but New Zealanders who were on the winning side were being taxed to the enormous extent of £l4 a head, which meant that every breadwinner was paying no less than £26 2s 4d a year. In 1923 the Government had remitted one million sterling to the wealthy landowners, while at the same time it increased the Customs duties by two and a-quarter millions, and cut down the Civil servants’ salaries by 10 per cent. If placed in power, the United Party would adopt a vigorous policy for attracting tourists. Canada, he said, had picked up last year £27,000,000 from its tourist traffic, but the Reform Party was so utterly devoid of progressive ideas that Sir Francis Bell had recently said that he did not want to see New Zealand made a country of waiters. A Voice: What about the Labour Party ? Mr. Mason: Labour’s policy is a will o’ the wisp policy. It was revolutionary red yesterday, Socialistic pink today, but nobody can say what it will be to-morrow. He reiterated his statement that' a sum of £25,000 had disappeared from the amount collected as petrol taxation, and added in an ironical vein that he would not be so bold as to say that it had found its way into the Reform Party’s coffers.