HOW TO GOVERN.

Auckland Star, Volume LXXI, Issue 159, 6 July 1940, Page 8

HOW TO GOVERN.

On Monday morning the employees' of three State mines ceased work' because an employee at one mine had been dismissed, and not reinstated. That same evening the Prime Minister declared that the miners' action was : a breach of the war regulations and that compliance with the law would be insisted upon, even if it involved closing the State mines. His was a strong statement, indicative of resolute determination. What followed? On Wednesday, the strike! still continuing, the Prime Minister j was questioned about it in Parliament, j

In reply, he deprecated any "attack"' on "any section oF the community." as this was a time for solidarity. No one made the obvious retort that the i strike was an attack by a section jot' the community on the whole. On j fhursday the Minister of Mines was i "earnestly appealing" to the minerto go back to work. On Friday, the question being again raised in the House, the same Minister declared that lie "took his hat off to the miner- ' as a whole, and also announced his discovery that it was not a deliberate strike as strikes went, but "'a stoppage." He thought the men's action "indefensible, and not in keeping with unionism or. common sense." Apparently he failed also to remark that it was not in keeping with the law, which he as a Minister of the Crown has sworn to uphold. Meanwhile, the. strike continues—some five hundred men, in war time, withholding production of coal, for a reason which the Prime Minister himself, on Monday, described as "grotesque." But the Minister of Mines, on Eridav, declared that the Government had done "everything to bring about an amicable settlement." The time for talking of "'amicable settlements" with law-breakers is long past. W hat is needed is a demonstration to the commufiity— the same community which has been asked to support an "all-in" war policy, to "pay or perish"—that this Government which is in office is also in power, that it ha.s the will to enforce its own laws.