REFORM AND UNEMPLOYMENT.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 103, 3 May 1930, Page 8

REFORM AND UNEMPLOYMENT.

We congratulate Mr. Downie Stewart on the fair and sensible comments that he offered the Parnell electors last night on the subject of unemployment. Mr. Stewart admits that the United Government should not be blamed for not solving this problem, and he confesses quite frankly that he is not prepared to say that the Reform Government could solve it. After all the" nonsense that has been talked and written by Reform orators and Reform newspapers about the "failure" of Sir Joseph Ward to settle the unemployment difficulty, and the ability of the Reformers to dispose of the whole trouble summarily if only they were in power again, Mr. Stewart's remarks come as a welcome relief to the very large number of men and women who feel that honesty and sanity ought to play an important part in our political life. What the extreme "right wingers" of the Reform Party really think about unemployment may be gathered from a recent editorial in the Christchurch "Press." Our Reform contemporary holds that "there has been far too much talk about unemployment everywhere, and far too much space devoted to it in all the newspapers," and it appeals to everybody not to "exaggerate either. the number or the hardships of the unemployed.. Possibly if those who profess these sentiments were even temporarily placed in the position of the many hundreds 01 "worklc-s workers" in New Zealand, with families close to the border line of destitution and even starvation, they might feel that neither the numbers nor the hardships of the unemployed could well be exaggerated. But \ve need" hardly assure Nr. Stewart that we dissociate him entirely from such stupid .and ignorant conservatism as this.