FIRST SHOTS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 11 March 1943, Page 4

FIRST SHOTS

IN FEDERAL ELECTION CAMPAIGN FIRED BY OPPOSITION LEADER. SOCIALISATION DENOUNCED. (By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright) (Received This Day, 12.40 p.m.) SYDNEY, This Day. The first shots in the Federal election campaign, which is to be held at the end of this year, were 'fired by the Leader of the Opposition (Mr Fadden) in an address to the annual Country Party conference. Describing the Curtin Government as “dangerous,” Mr Fadden said the coming election would probably be the most important in Australia’s history. The issue to be fought would be socialisation, which the people would be invited by the Labour Party to accept as a basis of post-war reconstruction. The Opposition took the view that private enterprise and ownership should be defended. While it regarded as essential a proper system of price control, and favoured safeguards against exploitation, it considered that enterprise for profit and reward should not be suppressed, and should be freed of doctrinaire Socialist restriction. Unless the electors removed the present Government, socialisation would surely come. Mr Fadden said the Government neglect of primary industries had been shameful. The entire edifice of primary production had been shaken because of manpower difficulties and the discrepancy between production costs and selling prices. A resolution adopted by the conference included a clause: “That the freedom of the individual be reaffirmed as a national ideal, and that the party wage unrelenting war upon every effort to introduce, under cover of war necessity, restrictions which cut down that liberty and run counter to the exercise of full democratic rights.”.