M.P.’s HECKLED

Dominion, Volume 24, Issue 105, 28 January 1931, Page 11

M.P.’s HECKLED

Invited; Then Attacked

NOISY UNEMPLOYED

Hostile to All Parties Dominion Special Service. Auckland, January 27. There was a noisy termination to a meeting at the Town Hall Concert Chamber when 800 of the unemployed were addressed by five members of Parliament and several speakers of the Auckland Unemployed Association. After heckling the M.P.’s for nearly four hours, the association’s executive submitted a motion which expressed lack of faith in all United, Reform, and Labour politicians, and called upon the Government to reduce their salaries by 50 per Cent., a motion which Mr. M. J. Savage, M.P., declared vehemently to be the most unfair he had ever seen in his life. The motion was put to the meeting amid a good deal of excitement, and, because of noisy interruptions at the time, only a handful of people voted. The chairman, Mr. G. Devereaux, declared it lost by about 30 votes. .

Demonstration in Street. The defeat of the motion created considerable resentment, and a crowd which afterwards gathered outside the hall demonstrated vigorously against those who, it was claimed, bad not voted. A dozen policemen watched the noisy doings in the street, and mingled with the angry crowd to see that order was kept. The members of Parliament had been invited to address the meeting by letter, but a strong feeling of hostility to them was made manifest at the outset, the first speaker for the association, Mr. Malcolm Brown, blaming the Labour Party as wfell as the other two parties for the unemployment crisis, and warning the unemployed not to put their faith in politicians, “for in them there is no salvation.” “I must take exception to that remark,” said Mr. W. J. Jordan, M.P. “When you invite a guest to come along and speak to you it is not customary for someone to get up and say a thing like that.” x Unemployed’s Good Sense. When the motion was declared lost Mr. Jordan said: “I congratulate the unemployed on their good Sense In turning down this resolution.” Renewed uproar followed. Mr. M. Riley, secretary of the association, said that anybody who offered a solution of the unemployed problem •under a capitalist State was merely using rhetoric and making promises he could not fulfil.