On the Platform

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 387, 22 November 1946, Page 7

On the Platform

HE _ sensationalists were about the election campaign, and deserved to be. Although there is time yet for a change, the speeches of most candidates have been almost as decorous as addresses from the pulpit. Mud-slinging, as most candidates know, captures no votes. Neither do personal feuds and inside stories. We enjoy the diversion, but don’t usually support the man who provides it. In any case this is 1946 — three generations and two wars too late for appeals to passion. The shrewd candidate knows better to-day than to try to thump his way through on a tub, and the average elector knows what to do with him if he does try. It is in fact astonishing that it was ever different-that the kind of oratory we reproduce on page 18 not only put men into Parliament but kept them there, off and on, for the rest of their lives. Disraelis eloquence was no more, often, than calculated vindictiveness. O’Connell’s was more wholesome and honest, but no one who laid about him in that manner today would keep out of jail. It is not so much that the age of oratory has passed, but that we are no longer interested in the inflated oratory that smells of the lamp. Not even radio will re-establish that, and it is possible that it was radio which finally killed it. It is almost certain that one reason why most candidates have not really got going during this election has been that so many of them have been talking to the public for three years. Only the new candidates, the men and women whose voices had not been heard before, have been able to arouse curiosity

about themselves, and it may be that what we have been seeing this month has been a return from speech-making in Parliament to debate and quiet discussion. The most serious criticism so far made of Parliamentary broadcasting is that it changes the House from a committee to a public meeting. Perhaps that lesson has now been learnt.