The Country Party

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31866, 19 December 1968, Page 16

The Country Party

The progressive withdrawal of all protection for New Zealand secondary industry and the diversion of considerable tax revenue to private schools are two of the more startling proposals of the New Zealand Country Party, which hopes to contest some of the rural electorates at the next General Election. The separate planks in the party’s election platform, however, are less significant than its general philosophy, which reflects the organisers’ concern over what they consider to be the unwarranted growth of “bureaucracy”. But the nineteenth-cen-tury economic liberalism which seems to be the nostalgic aim of the new party is practised in no enlightened country in the world today. The Welfare State is here to stay; this must be recognised by any political party which genuinely aspires to govern —not just to hold a temporary balance of power between two more substantial political forces—in New Zealand, or in Britain, America, Australia, or non-Communist Europe.

In the unlikely event of its winning enough seats in Parliament to hold the balance of power between National and Labour, the Country Party would hope to secure from a National Government the enactment of a considerable number of Country Party measures in return for the Country Party’s support of such Goverhment legislation as it might approve. Substantial erosion of the Welfare State in a single term of such a Government would be enough to put Labour into power with a big majority three years later; and any farmer attracted by the Country Party’s philosophy should ask himself if the prospect of a long Labour tenure of the Treasury benches would be in his interests. He might not have to wait three years. Vote-splitting in a few marginal electorates next year might be enough to secure the return of a Government to which the fond principles of the Country Party would be anathema.