"TRUE LABOUR"

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIV, Issue 227, 24 September 1943, Page 6

"TRUE LABOUR"

DEMOCRATIC PARTY

WARRANT OFFICER'S CLAIM

"The Democratic Soldier Labour party is to be regarded to-day as the true Labour moyement," declared Warrant-Officer K. B. Ansley in an address to 60 people in the Waimauku Hall. "Our party's team of candidates and all our supporters are people who left the Labour movement because of that movements betrayal of the pledges made to the people in the last .two elections. The candidate said his party was interested in the benefit of the community as a whole, not just in certain sections of it. He also stated that he was associated with the previous member for Waitemata on active service and intended to carry on with the policy just where that democratic fighter, Captain Jack Lyon, left off. Had Captain Lyon been alive today, the candidate continued, there would be no need for himself or any other candidate to contest Waitemata. The result would be a foregone conclusion; and, furthermore, Captain Lyon would have been a member of the Democratic Labour party. He always maintained that Democratic Labour was the answer to broken pledges, against which he always fought in the interests of the people.

Rehabilitation Needs The candidate dealt at length wth the main plank of monetary reform, and said the public demand showed that control of currency and credit was required with control of production, distribution and exchange. That demand was still much in evidence and must be tried. Any policy that did not contain monetary reform as the main plank was doomed to failure as any other measures could only be carried out at the expense of the people through further burdens of taxation.

Intermingled with the question of a sound financial system was the present problem of rehabilitation, continued the speaker. Nothing practical had yet been proposed that was not more or lessthe old fashioned type of relief work. This was not wanted, and Service personnel would not have it under the title of rehabilitation. To put men into businesses or on to farms and saddle them with a debt or mortgage under the present financial methods at high rates of interest was not rehabilitation. Many of the proposals put forward were simply local body works or national jobs, and should be paid for as such. Dominion Development The country needed the development of land for settlement and the development of new industries. For this purpose a Ministry of New Industries should be established. Motherhood endowment was considered an important plank in the platform, said the candidate. It had always been in the policy, yet the public had swallowed this promise at two past elections and had had the rueful experience of being let down.

"Our population problem and manpower bungle have become a national puzzle," said Warrant-Officer Ansley. •'Not only politicians but the public as well must face up to cold hard facts and realise that in peace or war the mother is the most important individual to the home and the nation. Why should we be niggardly in any cause, that directly affects the -α-elfare of the country?"