Disarmament call by Mr Lange at P.W.O.

Press, 7 June 1982, Page 5

Disarmament call by Mr Lange at P.W.O.

NZPA staff correspondent Washington

The Deputy Leader of the Opposition (Mr Lange) has told a conference of Parliamentarians in New York that legislators world-wide must find solutions to disarmament to avoid being overtaken by protesters in the streets. He and the Eastern Hutt member of Parliament. Mr T. J. Young, are attending a conference at the United Nations of Parliamentarians for World Order, a group formed two years ago which now has some 600 members from 24 countries, a majority of them from the Southern Hemisphere. Mr Lange said that almost

all Labour members of Parliament in New Zealand were members, as well as some National members of Parliament.

The meeting. which precedes a major United Nations conference on disarmament .which starts on Monday, will continue until today, when delegates will lobbv ambassadors to the U.N.'

Mr Lange said that P.W.O. had been, attacked in New Zealand as Marxist-oriented, but that he had found the delegates in New York basically conservative thinkers. In his speech, he said that it was obvious from the scale of the peace movements around the world that people did not have faith in the ability of their political structures to bring about a scaling down of nuclear confrontation.

The danger, he said, was that as they became more frustrated they would seek

their objectives by violence, and if that was effective they would get the message that political institutions did not work but that violent protest did.

As a New Zealander, he said, he was particularly conscious of this because of “the events of last winter."

Political institutions must offer solutions otherwise they were doomed, he said. The conference heard from a delegation of five — from Canada, . India. Nigeria, Britain and Mexico — who visited Moscow and Washington to see Soviet and American leaders and plead for arms reductions.

The P.W.O. is seeking a freeze on production of nuclear weapons, followed by verification controls and then a retreat from the present level of “destructive capacity." About 50 delegates are attending the New York conference.