THE NOLAN CASE.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 210, 5 September 1928, Page 6

THE NOLAN CASE.

We have protested so often and so strongly against the economic injustice and personal cruelty involved in the Government's immigration policy that we run no risk of being misunderstood when we say that if the secretary of the Waitomo Labour Party, referring to the Dominic Nolan case in the London Press, wrote that "the incident was only one of many of a like nature which had occurred recently," he expressed himself very wrongly. Only two cases of death by starvation in New Zealand have been reported in the past few years, and in one of these the victim was a New Zealander. The case of Dominic Nolan was inexpressibly sad, but there is not sufficient data to enable a final opinion to be expressed about the man himself. He may have been, as was suggested, a misfit, a man who should not have sought his fortune in this neAV country. How far he may have been a victim of over-coloured propaganda will never be known. The point is, however, that to suggest, as has been done in the columns of the "Daily Herald," that it is common for men to die of starvation by the roadside in New Zealand, is to be guilty of wild and defamatory exaggeration. It is quite likely that the "Daily Herald's" correspondent meant nothing more than that a number of men were walking about New Zealand unemployed and hungry, but this is not what he is reported as saying. It should at once be made clear in the English Press that while there is distress here, no man need starve, that apart from private charity, which is as bountiful as anywhere in the world, there j is State help for those in trouble. I