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Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 30, 29 July 1911, Page 4

NEW SOUTH WALES POLITICS. Tories of the bluest dye there are in sunny New South Wales who, when the Labor Government assumed office, declared that "beggars on horseback would ride to the devil.' l ■ The Labor Government, as a matter of fact, showed no intention of doing anything so sulphurous, and the steadiness with which the Cabinet of the Mother State tackled the problems of Government made even the squattocracy smile in partial friendship. Mr. Wade (known in New South Wales as "The Iceberg")' has persistently used his great knowledge and his powers of frigid calculation to show that the Labor Government has been a poor substitute for his own. But the most powerful weapon leading to the resignation of the Government has been its own internal dissentions. As in the Federal House, so in the New South Wales Lower Chamber, the men unused to government have violently squabbled. One is unable to judge just how much the Government of New South Wales was guided in refusing to adhere to its own expressed land policy by individual and personal considerations or the necessity of pandering to class passions, class selfishness and class prejudice. There is no doubt that the chief plank of the Labor Government's policy when it took office was to smash the squatters and to divide their estates. Indeed, early in its short career the Government did resume some big holdings, but quite failed to adequately settle them. It made a pretence, too, of attacking the iniquity of "dummying" by which the big land kings ate up the surrounding country and added it to their holdings. Whatever means were taken by the squattocracy to close the mouths of the Government, it is certain that they were closed, and that resumption ceased and "dummying" ditl not. Events political in Australia show that Labor is in an unfortunate position, especially after Mr. Fisher's exceedingly unwise and selfish anti-Im-periaT diatribe. There is indeed every reason to believe that Labor has dug its own grave in a political sense, both in the Federal Parliament and in the Mother State Assembly. In South Australia there arc the same elements for disunity as there are in Melbourne and Sydney, and unless Labor carries on quietly without internal dissention and revolutionary tactics the pendulum will swing back. Mr. Fisher has done an irreparable injury to the Labor cause in every State of Australia, and it will be reflected in the conduct of the people at the next general election, or before.