The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News and The Echo. THURSDAY, DECEMBER 10, 1925. A LABOUR DEBACLE.

Auckland Star, Volume LVI, Issue 292, 10 December 1925, Page 6

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

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 10, 1925. A LABOUR DEBACLE.

For the cause that Jacks assistance, For the wrong that needs resistance, For the future in the distance, And the good that toe can do.

The completed returns for the Australian elections have now been published, and the result is an overwhelming defeat for the Labour party all along the line. During the earlier stages of the contest, when the results of.various polls pointed ominously toward a Labour defeat, Mr. Charlton and his colleagues endeavoured to reinspire their followers with confidence by assuring them that the tide would speedily turn in their favour even in the House of Representatives, while in any case any losses that they might sustain in the Lower House would be more than compensated by the seats that Labour was certain to win in the Senate. But neither of these predictions has been justified by the event. In the House of Representatives, so far as Labour was concerned, things simply went from bad to worse, and the final results show that the Labour party, having lost six seats there, now numbers only 23 members in a House of 75. But in the Senate the defeat that Labour has suffered is even more disastrous. The Australian Upper House consists of 30 members, a proportion retiring at intervals in rotation. At the recent elections there were 22 vacancies to b<! filled, and Labour, even during the polling, was confident of securing the majority, if not the whole, of these. But the returns now show that all the 22 seats have fallen either to Nationalists or to members of the Country party, and Labour is thu3 left with a hopeless minority of 9 sitting members in a full House of 30.

Naturally these remarkable figures have given rise to a great deal of comment and speculation in Australia, where on every side it is admitted that this is the worst reverse that Labour has ever experienced during the twentyfive years' existence of the Commonwealth. In 1914 Labour had an effective working maj6rity in both Chambers — 41 members out of 75 in the House of Representatives, 31 members out of 36 in the Senate. But during . the war period, what with industrial troubles and manifestations of disloyalty by the "Left-wingers," public opinion turned against the Labour party, arid in 1917 it received a severe warning. Only 22 Labour members were elected to the House of Representatives out of 75, and Labour lost all of the .18 seats which were then vacant in, the Senate. ' During the past eight years Labour has been steadily regaining its lost ground, largely through its- elaborate organisation and the assurances constantly offered by the official leaders of the party that it has no sympathy .and no connection with revolutionaries of the "Red" or extremist type. By 1922 Labour had so far recovered that it secured 11 out of the 19 vacant seats in the Benate, and 29 out of 75 seats in the Lower House, where . the cleavage between the Nationalists and the Country party virtually left the balance of power in Labour's hands. But the results of the recent appeal to the people, as we have shown, not only provide- a striking contrast to the figures for the previous elections, but indicate a revulsion of public feeling against the Labour party unparalleled in so democratic and so highly industrialised a country as Australia.

The most impressive illustration of this reaction against Labour is naturally to be found in the Queensland returns. Even in the dark days of 1917 Queensland elected 4 Labour members to the Senate, the Nationalist vote for the Senate exceeding the Labour total by less than 10,000. But at this last election, as we have seen, "hot only did the Queensland Labour party fail to secure a. single one of the senatorial vacancies— it returned only one member to the House of Representatives, and Mr. Theodore, the ex-Premier, probably the ablest man in the Australian Labour party, was beaten. For the Senate the Ministerial votes exceeded the Labour votes by over 50,000, and this certainly means that in the State in which Labour has been supreme for the past 10 years, the general public has pronounced emphatically against it. As the "Bulletin" —no mean judge of public sentiment in Australia—has said,-the people of Queens land are "absolutely fed up with Labour." This, of course, does not mean that the population of Australia have suddenly been transformed into antidemocratic Conservatives. But it does mean that recent events have severely .shaken confidence in the intentions of Labour, and more especially in the ability of the recognised leaders of the party to restrain or to repudiate successfully the Communists and other incendiaries who have been "white-anting" the Labour organisations. No doubt the recent strikes and the truculent attitude assumed 'by Walsh, Johnson, and Garden and their supporters, must have told heavily against Labour. And the natural consequence is that the people of Australia, intensely democratic but tenaciously attached to the idea of safe and sane" and well-ordered ' government, have turned away from the Labour .leaders and have given their confidence' and support to their opponents. If Labour is wise it will take this lesson seriously to heart, not only in Australia, but in NewZealand as well.