MEMBER BOO-ED.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 177, 29 July 1938, Page 8

MEMBER 800-ED.

INTERLUDE IN HOUSE.

REFERENCE TO MR. SEMPLE. REPLY MADE TO ATTACK. (By Telegraph.—Parliamentary Reporter.) WELLINGTON, this day. The Minister of Public Works, the Hon. R., Semple, was attacked in the House of Representatives to-day by Mr. W. A. Bodkin (Xational, Central Otago), who spoke in defence of a woman member of the National party whose reported utterances to the inmates of a woman's hospital were referred to by Mr. Semple in the Budget debate last night. Mr. Bodkin said that Mr. Semple had made an attack on a respectable citizen from the shelter of Parliament because she belonged to a different school of thought to the Minister. Mr. Semple had not quoted from the report of the .speech made by the woman concerned, added Mr. Bodkin. The woman was criticising the philosophy of Communism and had told her audience what this ' doctrine had meant to the women of other nations, and it was one of the fairest criticisms of Communism that had been made in this country. I

Boos greeted Mr. Bodkin from the Government benches when he made the charge that Mr. Semple had shown himself in his true colours. It was an ancient Greek philosopher who had said "to find a man's true worth, give him power," said Mr. Bodkin.

There were Government cries of "No," when Mr. Bodkin said that Mr. Semple had not even quoted from a newspaper, but had placed his own interpretation of what the woman had said on hearsay evidence.