SEDDON PARTY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 145, 21 June 1934, Page 15

SEDDON PARTY.

AN OUTLINE OF LIBERALISM. TOWN HALL MEETING. An outline of the policy of the Seddon Liberal party was given in an address by Mr. A. Hall Skelton in the Town Hall on Tuesday. Mr. D. Donaldson presided. Liberalism did not take sides with capital or with labour, nor with the importer or the local manufacturer, but stood for social justice, said Mr. Skelton. Toryism was selfishness, the policy of inflating land values and the piling up of mortgages and interest iat the cost of the rest of the community. "When a party acts against the sovereign rights of the people, by extending their life another year," said the speaker, "it is time that a Cromwell brought them to tlieir bearings, as he did the famous Long Parliament." To meet the cost of maintaining hospitals and pensions, the Seddon party had set aside great endowment lands, but the Reform party sold them to their friends at a fraction of their value, and the income from that source having vanished, it had now to be' raised by taxation.

"Cheap land and high ivages" was the foundation of the Seddon policy. It meant that mortgages were few, rents low, and rates low, and the people had tlieir due share of the national income. Having the spending power, the people put the money back into rapid circulation, and retail business boomed. Rises in however, made the worker no wealthier, if by taxation and banking trickery, the . purchasing, power, of his money" was more thai proportionately decreased. A resolution was carried supporting the Seddon Liberal party, and demanding an. election this year.