Reshuffle created a new mood—Mr Gair

Press, 22 April 1986, Page 8

Reshuffle created a new mood—Mr Gair

A new mood exists in the National Party since the reshuffle three weeks ago, according to the party’s new deputy leader, Mr George Gair. “There is a new spirit of reconciliation, a significant turnround in attitudes within the party and throughout New Zealand towards the party,” he said in an address to the annual meeting of the party’s Rangiora electorate last evening. Mr Gair went against rumours of an early election to predict that Labour would leave an election as late as possible to the third Saturday of September, 1987. He called on the party to mobilise to win that election. “If this Government had not been so hell-bent on doing everything at once, they just might have had a second term. We cannot afford now to give them a second term,” Mr Gair said. “The deeper the hole the Labour Government digs, the more difficult will be the task of recovery.” Mr Gair attacked the Government’s record on several fronts, saying that while there has been good news recently on unemployment and inflation, it had omitted to mention a net migration loss of 20,000 while inflation re-

mained the third-worst among O.E.C.D. nations. Company bankruptcies were running at the highest levels since 1954 and individual bankruptcies the highest this century. Mr Gair said that last year’s wage round had “all the hallmarks of disaster.” The private sector held wages better last year than the Government did itself and the Government had been less than fair in accusing the private sector of lacking restraint. Mr Gair also spoke on the downturn in the rural sector, which had earlier

been the subject of a remit that the electorate will take to the party’s Dominion conference. He said that an equally disturbing trend was the way more and more New Zealanders were becoming dependent on the State. In March, 1984, there had been fewer than 100,000 families receiving benefits; now there were well over a quarter of a million, he said. The Government was “extending the web ofdependence across more and more New Zealand families and locking them into the cycle of robbing Peter to pay Paul.”