The Issue in Australia.

Press, Volume LXI, Issue 18507, 8 October 1925, Page 8

The Issue in Australia.

The Prime Minister of Australia has opened the election campaign with an appeal to law and order. The writs were issued on Saturday, and as polling will take place on November 14th the people have just six weeks in which to make up their minds whether they will remain free or surrender the direction of their lives to political outlaws. Mr Bruce makes no> secret of the fact that what he is asking for is authority to "' take all necessary " steps " to put extremists in a position in which their hatred of democracy will not be able to express itself in " chaos, misery, and class war." There is a little # platform rhetoric in the statement that " the country is at the •' turning point in its national history, " and on the eve of the greatest oppor- " tuuity ever offered to a free people ";

I but it is so far from being all rhetoric that the omission of a superlative | makes it almost literal truth. Nor does it matter, so far as the people's votes are concerned, whether the wreckers are many or few, or whether they are or are eot accurately described as Communists. The position is the same in Australia as it is here: moderate Labour either sympathises with what extreme Labour is doing, or it is afraid of it, or has lost any power it may once have had to* control it. Since the Government announced that it would appeal to the people the political leaders of Labour have protested that they have nothing to do with Communism; but they have said tlie same thing many times in the past and it has never prevented the Communists from making use of them when they wanted to do so. Mr Bruce's charge against the Labour Party is not that its leaders personally want chaos, misery, and class war: it is that they have not the courage, or the honesty, or the intelligence to suppress those whose tactics are producing these results, and wifuse delight it is to see them produced. The present strike was engineered by men who care nothing, and say that they care nothing, for Australia or the Empire, and who have done both incalculable harm; but instead of uniting with loyalists to suppress them Ihe leaders of political Labour have encouraged them both by what they have done and by what they have abstained from doing. The Leader of the New South Wales Labour Party, who happens also to be Premier of the State, has even gone so ,far as to resist the attempt of the Federal authorities to enforce Federal laws. The physical difficulties of covering so vast a country, added to the fact that the Melbourne Cup carnival falls in the first week in November, have made it necessary to delay the polling till the end of the second week, and this means that,the people of New Zealand will have made their political decision first. But it would be a serious mistake to ignore the obvious lesson of the Australian situation, and sensible voters here as there will accept Mr Bruce's advice to " declare for the rule of law."