INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS

Auckland Star, Volume LXXV, Issue 308, 29 December 1944, Page 3

INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS

GREATER EFFORT NEEDED

APPEAL BY BUSINESSMAN

An appeal for greater effort towards the preservation of individual rights is made by the president of the Associated Chambers of Commerce, Mr. J. B. Stewart, in extending New Year greetings to the business community and the geneial public. "Although there is at present, we hope, only a temporary obscurity, he states, "the dawn of 1945 makes a much greater penetration of the shadows in the war zone than it does in those of the economic zone. "In the war zone, we are fighting for the independence of the nations the right of the individual nations, great and small, to think, to regulate and to act for themselves within their own frontiers. So, in the economic zone, we must fight to enable the individual and the legal entity to preserve their rights. These rights must be preserved within a structure regulating to support and assist, but not to repress and compete. "The passive acceptance by the people of State penetration into competition with and nationalisation of industry and commerce is the beginning of such a deterioration of the capacity and energy of the individual as would lead ultimately to economic disaster. Let us, therefore, m the coming year, assert ourselves by individual effort to improve and develop the spiritual, the political and the material sides of our lives, each as complementary to the others, and the result will be reflected in a nation our men will be proud to have fought for."