Liberal Party Methods.

Press, Volume LXI, Issue 18347, 2 April 1925, Page 8

Liberal Party Methods.

On Monday last we gave the local Liberal newspaper an opportunity to withdraw a most unfair attack upon the Government, and although it endeavoured yesterday to justify some of the absurdities in which its attack was embedded, it made no attempt to defend or to withdraw its denunciation of Mr Massey's Government. Our readers will rcineinber that it used some remarks by Lord Jcllicoe upon New Zealand's need of land-workers as the occasion for declaring that the present Government cannot be expected to give fair-plav and assistance to the secondare industries. Everyone except that section of the public which tho Liberal paper addresses knows perfectly well that the Government has done a great deal for the secondary industries. It has striven, and successfully, to reduce the direct taxation which is a burden upon secondary -production, and it has armed these industries with an import tariff which is as high as they can reasonably desire, and higher than many people think necessary. And the critic who has chosen to ignore these facts is peculiarly unfitted to criticise the Government. For it has given encouragement, for party ends, to the Radicals and Socialists who are opposed to a reduction of taxation, and it has constantly condemned, as a cruel imposition upon the masses, ihe very import duties which the Government imposed in the interest of the industries which it blames the Government for neglecting! We might without overpassing the limits of fair expression have condemned more strongly than we did the reckless malevolence of the party spirit animating the Liberal paper. It is deplorable that any newspaper should allow its hostility to the

Government to urge it into such irrational expressions of ill-will, but the spirit of diehard Liberalism in its decadence is incalculable. The newspaper to which we have referred thought- fit to mark the unhappy news of Mr ,\lassey\s grievous illness, which is a cause of special sorrow to his colleagues and to the Reform Party, by making a spiteful and mendacious charge against Mr Massey's colleagues, declaring that "a good deal of joekev"ing" has been going 011 amongst them in a scramble for the leadership. Our readers will find it difficult to believe that a Liberal newspaper could show its sympathy with Mr Massey and his friends in such a'manner, but the fact is so. If Sir Joseph Ward is intending to lead the Liberal Party again —and it is not yet quite clear that he does so intend—his first task might well be to supply its spokesmen with standards of taste, feeling and veracity different from fhose which seem to guide them at present.