The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News and The Echo. FRIDAY, DECEMBER 29, 1922. A LABOUR APPEAL.

Auckland Star, Volume LIII, Issue 308, 29 December 1922, Page 4

The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News and The Echo.

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 29, 1922. A LABOUR APPEAL.

For the cause that lack* assistance, For the wrong that needs resistant, F*r the future in the distinct, An* the good that «m om 4m.

Long before the Australian Federal elections were held it was predicted that Labour, in spite of its great universal strength, would find itself severely handicapped at the polls by the extremists, who have been preaching violent revolution and endeavouring to prepare the way for aoniHhinjj closely resembling a Dictatorship of the Proletariat on Soviet lines. These predictions were largely veritie-J; for the Federal and State Labour leaders, in ;i manifesto which thej have jusi i.-nuea , . admit that the response to their appeals has been unsatisfactory, and thai, taking Australia a> a whole. Labour "has fsiilwl to take advantage of the favourable conditions

offering." "Considering the extent to which the anti-Labour vote was split between the Nationalists, tlif Liberals,

end tlio Country party, it might reasonably have bepn expected thai Labour, by virtue of its •■solidarity," would have

carried all before it. ami won a sweeping victory. But the Labour party, as it* leaders now frankly confer, failed to

secure the support of that large floating body of voters which is sympathetically inclined toward the wage-earners and indisposed toward conservatism, and which yet refuses to march blindfolded along the road to devolution and industrial despotism. down which the extremists an- now guiding tiieir infatuated followers. And as that section of the peop> which virtually holds the balance of political power threw its weight into the conflict against tho. extremists. Labour lias lost a great and unique opportunity. All this, if, must bo remembered, is the opinion vci.-ed not by the Conservatives but by the leaders of the •Labour movement in Australia, and it carries with it a moral which applies quite obviously to the case of New Zealand Labour as well. But it is most interesting and instructive to observe that the Labour leaders responsible for this manifesto attribute their party's failure largely to a cauee which can be remedied or removed by the members of the party itself—"the unsatisfactory control of Labours organisation." According to the document from which we have quoted, what is chiefly needed to improve -Labour's political pro-spect throughoiit the Commonwealth is "■* change in the method of appointing the executive to control the movement." The manifesto points out that the present method of electing the executive "does not inspire confidence in the electorates." Aβ is generally known, the executive of the Australian Labour party is not appointed by the direct vote of the members of the movement tout indirectly by the various local in-

dustrial organisations. Professor Meredith Atkinson has pointed out in hid interesting analysis of "The Australian Outlook," that the organisation of "The Workers' Industrial I'nion of

Australia' - with its elaborate "distribution of control" among various councils and committees, was "copied with slavish imitation' , from the programme of the American 1.W.W.: and eucii a system lends itself very effectively to the purpose \ihich it was meant to achieve —the domination of the whole movement by a practically irresponsible body of officials who. though in a minority, are thus enabled to exercise complete control over the party organisation. Thie is the kind of system which the recognised leaders of the Australian Labour Party now condemn, and

what they advocate is a reversion to more democratic methods of government within the limits of the party itself.

Naturally enough, the "Sydney Morning Herald" and other Conservative

organs have greeted this appeal as an open confession of Labour's political failure. But there is no doubt about the strength of the Labour party in Australia if once its forces were united and harmonious. The impoitaiue of this manifesto lien in it* straightforward admission that tlio present system of party organisation is wholly

unsatisfactory, and that if Labour i» to become once more '"a driving moral

force in the community." it must have recourse to different methods of man-

agement and propagandists Nuthing that we have read or heaTd about the political situation in Australia brings out so clearly as this appeal the vitally essential fact that the real social and political conflict in which the workers are involved is not the fight of Labour against Capital, but the struggle of Freedom against Tyranny. The great m-aas of the wage-earners, as the re-

sult of a pernicious fivsteui which allows the few to monopolise power at the expense of the many, have boon compelled to stand idly by and see their policy distorted, their principles sacrificed, and their purposes defeated 'by « handful of extremists who. having once gained control of the party

"machine." here been able to use it for their own ends without any further

reference to the opinion? or wishes of the majority.

anything like Democracy is already sufficiently notorious. But the workers of Australia and Xew Zealand do not seem yet to have rcaJised clearly what Lenin and Trotsky have done in Russia; and it is at least encouraging to find that there are leaders of the Labour movement in the Commonwealth who have been forced in time to understand that what the extremists are endeavouring to establish is not Liberty but an irresponsible tyranny with themselves as self-appointed despots at its head.