The Dominion FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2, 1925. FROM SESSION TO ELECTION

Dominion, Volume 19, Issue 6, 2 October 1925, Page 8

The Dominion FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2, 1925. FROM SESSION TO ELECTION

The session of Parliament has concluded in circumstances on which the Government and those who have helped it to put through a varied programme of useful legislation are to be congratulated. hi three months of hard work under a leader who was untried in that capacity when the session opened, the Reform Party has given an excellent account of itself. <• t> <• No one who has followed the recent proceedings ot I. arhament at all attentively can doubt that with Mr. Coates at its head the Reform Party is in a position to proceed confidently to the next business, which is, of course, the campaign leading up to an early general election. It is clearly to the Prime Minister and us supporters that the country must look for an assured lead along lines of safe enterprise and progress. ■ . This being so, it must be regretted that the self-styled National Party is persisting in its pathetically ineffective efforts to suggest that it is still a factor to be reckoned with in our national politics. Each move this party makes serves only to demonstrate more clearly than ever that it is an unwanted accessory on the political stage.. It is a party which seeks to take a place already occupied. Yesterdav, for instance, it issued a policy manifesto. In this document there arc many excellent proposals, but the suggestion that these proposals are in any special sense the property of the National Party is calculated only to excite laughtei.. Apart from. innocuous generalities which nearly, everyone will endorse, and with one or two minor exceptions, the National manifesto deals only with things the Reform Government has done, is doing, or is definitely pledged to do. Unless they are accused by the Labour Party of political larceny, Mr. Forbes and his colleagues perhaps may be allowed to claim as their own the proposals relating to a State bank and to a State monopoly of accident insurance, but otherwise they might have obtained’ all the material embodied in their manifesto, and a. good deal more, from the recent utterances of Mr. Coates and his principal the manifesto serves any purpose it is that of confirming the opinion already widely held and freely expressed that so far as thenviews on general policy are concerned, the members of the 1-orbes Party should be fighting under the banner of Mr. Coates instead of attempting to maintain a precarious separate existence for which there is no justification in reason or in the facts of the political situation. . , , During the session of Parliament which has just ended, though not, of course, then for the first time, it was made abundantly clear that the battle of politics in this country is being fought out by the Reform Party and the extreme Labour Party. The Forbes 1 arty figured only in a negative role except when a few of its members attempted to cover up the weakness of their position by intemperate abuse and reckless accusation. In the campaign now opening, Mr. Forbes and his associates certainly cannot play any more useful or helpful part than they played in Parliament. There is unfortunately every likelihood, however, that they may do a good deal to confuse and complicate problems they cannot in any way assist to solve. The Liberal remnant on which the name of National Party sits so oddlv obviously has no prospect of taking anything else than a . poor third place in the coming election. The position has to.be faced, however, that it may do a good deal to confuse the election issues, embarrass moderate voters, and split votes. . . The policy of wisdom for electors throughout the Dominion is to take firm hold of the fact that the fight is between the Government Party and the extreme Labour Party. That the intervention of a third party weakly echoing the policy and aims of. the Government serves only to play into the hands of the Labour-Socialists by dividing moderate forces. . . . In view of the attitude of the Labour-Socialist I arty in the present shipping crisis it is all the more necessary that, support should be concentrated solidly on the Government. In times like these, the electors of the Dominion should have, no difficulty, in perceiving the imperative necessity of taking a united stand against men who have such a curiously warped idea of the obligations resting on them as representatives of the people that they are ready at any time to set the interests, or supposed interests, of a group above those of the community as a whole.