The Samoan Deportations.

Press, Volume LXIV, Issue 19213, 20 January 1928, Page 8

The Samoan Deportations.

We are afraid that the statement which the Prime Minister has at last made on Samoa •will please no one so much as his enemies. Mr Coates says, according to one report, that "there is no "need to be anxious about Samoan " affairs," and that may be true, though many quite friendly and -well-inten-tioned people are anxious. But Mr Coates refuses to see that the real point is not whether Samoa is safe, or even whether the deportations were justified, but whether the Government is safe in refusing to take the public into its confidence. Everybody who is not implacably hostile to the Government knows that it took what it believed to be " the right and only course," that it is the Government's duty to do what it thinks right itself and not what others may say is right, and that Governments as well as individuals can explain themselves too much. There is no objection whatever to " definite and "drastic" action when that is "the "only way to'bring back peace." The right of a State to protect itself against any individual who is a "menace to "peace and order and good govern"ment" is as clear, and ought to be as widely recognised, as its right to suppress crime or stamp out disease (though the necessity of exercising it is of course much rarer). We may even go so far as to say that most people in New Zealand already believe that Samoa will get along quite well without the deported men, and will not be surprised if it gets along better. But to concede all these things is just to add reason to reason why the Government should be more candid and more definite. Everyone has accepted the finding of the Royal Commission so far as it goes; but the Commission did not even enquire into the question (so far as anyone knows) of the wisdom or unwisdom of allowing the three deported men to remain in Samoa. It enquired into the administration of Samoa by the servants of the New Zealand Government, and it was simply a bomb-shell when the Government announced without any warning that it had approved of the Administrator's desire to deport the ringleaders of the opposition. The public are entitled to know what happened, if anything at all happened, between the visit of the Commission and the signing of the deportation order to justify this "definite and drastic" bid for peace.