RACING IN NEW ZEALAND

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 79, 20 August 1912, Page 4

RACING IN NEW ZEALAND

——_ 4 t AN "UNMASKED LEAGUE." SOME HARD HITTING. Wellington, Yesterday. Before the sermon at the Vivian Street Baptist Church last evening, the Rev. J. J. North said: "I want to caJl your attention, as people who wish their country well, to the attempt being made to undo the restrictive legislation of > 1910 in regard to horse-racing. Some of j you may suppose that this subject is j remote from, the interests of this House f of Pravea-. It is not. Religion is concerned with morality. Whatever threatens or impairs the morality of the nation is the concern of the Church. I

saw a home, indirectly connected /with r this congregation, ruined last week by I gambling—the breadwinner a fugitive, and the wife bowed with car-e. Every facility for gambling spreads the , ruin which enters hundreds of New Zealand homes every year. In the stale name of sport, hundreds of innocents are massacred (morally speaking) every season. To restrict gambling to racecourses to make it difficult, to fix the brand of shame on its forehead, is the first <luty o.f all who love this land. Since the Act of the Ward Ciovmiriitirit 'in 1 !HO, 2000 horse races occur in this land every year to n population of one million. New South Wales has but 2400 to a population of nearly twice as large as ours (1,750,000). Yet rin attempt is being actively made to enlarge the gambling facilities of the country by adding thirty days, or 240 -races, to out alarming total. I am speaking in the name of 20,000. Baptists and c-f some -hundreds of thousands of other people when I say that wo demand that the Government of to-day risk everything to secure the defeat, of this retrograde proposal. If a Reform Government sacrifices the reforms achieved in the past, Its name will be hated bv the better paa't of this nation. This clamor for more gambling , is being fostered by a society whose false pretences have occasioned widespread resentment . The Sports Protection League pretended that its business was the defence of cricket, and football, and hockey, and very directly hoiseracing, I from somo imaginary -enemies. It was presently discov-ere'3 that the league was a subsidised ofl'-sll-oot of the Racing Conference. Its Auckland branch has clamored for the restoration of the bookmaker. Th® -whole league is now demanding, in numerous petitions, moTe

race days and the publication of totalisator dividends in the daily wapers. I have the report of the Waimate branch of the league. To it six men came; one left,- .presumably because of the mature of the petition they were asked to send to Parliament! another, after a vehement protest against the false pretences under which the league had been intro dueed Into the town, resigned and also left. The demands of this unmasked league, if they are assented to by Parliament, will, on the one hand, drench thirty fresh districts with gambling; and, on the other, through the publication of dividends, will 'resuscitate hundreds of bookmakers and make possible 5n every hamlet in this 'land totalisator gambling on every one of the 2250 races which they ask should run in this Dominion every year. I ask your active help in this matter. Make your protests heard. If gambling legislation is wanted, it is wanted in the direction of further restrictions. The proposition for further facilities is an unutterable anachronism. That citizen or politician is asleep, who is not startled by an wivestment on the totalizator of approximately three million pounds a year, or who is not ashamed that the efltire population of the largest of our cities should he contributing at the rate of 12 ner head for every man, woman and child within its bound for prize money for horse races in a twelvemonth. T repeat that we cull on the Government to exercise all its powers for the defeat of the T>rornc-ils which are being urged on the Horse."