The Press SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 1937. No-Confidence Amendment

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22201, 18 September 1937, Page 14

The Press SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 1937. No-Confidence Amendment

The no-confidence amendment moved by the Leader of the Opposition early in the Address-in-Rcply debate is not to be considered a frivolous or time-wasting party manoeuvre because it is certain to be heavily defeated and was moved in that expectation. It is a correct and necessary use of the best occasion the session offers to concentrate public attention on the Government's faults and failures as a whole, to argue them in detail and to challenge an explicit defence; and the fate of the amendment in the House is of no consequence at all compared with the judgment of the electorate, which is already in a good position to judge. Evidence has been piling up for 18 months; and the eight points of the amendment, four’or five of them particularly, are impressive, more than for any other reason, because they are not of abstract interest but directly touch the life and livelihoods of the people. The very obvious threat of a restored Government railway monopoly in the field of transport, for example, is raised by the first point and cannot be dismissed by any section except the small one upon which monopoly would confer the immediate benefit of security. The failure of the Government to reduce the unemployment figures significantly, except at the immense cost of public works schemes, is by now fully apparent. The Government declared its complete ability to deal with unemployment: its failure is measured in the millions yearly expended through the Unemployment Fund and on public works. That rising costs of living have become a problem much more serious than the Abstract of Statistics indicates is acknowledged from end to end of the country; and the housing scheme admittedly holds out no prospect of such relief from the burden of rents as the Government rashly promised. These facts, which can be discounted only in a very partial estimate of the Government’s pledges, opportunities, and performances, sustain the second and fourth of Mr Hamilton’s points. Against the third, that the Government has failed to make good its promise to give the dairy farmer as comfortable a standard of living as his neighbour, the Government may with the indulgence of cynics and sentimentalists alike reply that it has lately engaged some men of science to explore the cow-country and find out what this promise really meant.' Any other defence will be less plausible. But it does not appear that the Government is fastidious in choice of defensive arguments. The Minister for Education, for instance, in replying to the last charge in the amendment—that the Government pledged itself to abolish the sales tax and has not abolished it—actually snatched up the Prime Minister’s happy thought in Christchurch: “The sales tax was “imposed by the Coalition Government.” It is - quite true. It explains why the Labour Party promised to abolish it. But it does not explain why the promise has been broken. The Acting-Minister for Employment, again, in defending the Government against attack on its failure in his temporary province, pleaded that the position had been found to be much worse than his party knew. 11 this is a confession of avoidable ignorance, it may be accepted as such. If it is an assertion that his party was somehow misled or deceived, Mr Webb should illustrate it with facts and figures. The impossible will not be done. If there was any deception, it was the Labour Party’s deception of itself, in which it succeeded in persuading a great many electors to share. The division on the amendment and on the Address-in-Reply motion should not encourage the Government to fancy that they remain in the same hopeful and approving state of mind.