POLITICAL LEADERS

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 67, 20 March 1931, Page 6

POLITICAL LEADERS

(To tho Editor.) Sir,—l should like to reply to the points raised by Mr. P. D. Tait in answer to my letter appearing. on 17th March. In the first place I, hasten to say that I did not mean to use the word "outsider" in a derogatory sense. Being perfectly clear in my own mind that I meant merely a person born outside "New Zealand—there being apparently no other "portmanteau" word to express the idea I wanted—l presumed that my meaning was clear to other people also, but apparently it was not.

Then Mr. Tait suggests that Mr. Forbes is acting on the advice of Sir Otto Niemeycr. But is he? Nobody knows whether he is or not, and even if he were, I would point out to Mr. Tait that accepting advice from anyone is different" from acting at their bidding, which was the phrase I used in my first letter. As a matter of fact, Mr. Forbes has been to England himself since Sir Otto's visit, and has seen a great many other people— people whose advice is of the utmost importance to New Zealand. Whether we like it or not, the fact remains tliat the prosperity of this country—oiir standard of living and all the rest of it—is absolutely dependent upon the ability of the overseas public to buy our" produce, and their willingness to lend us their. money. To consult the men who attend to these things for us, and if necessary take their advice—men who know much more about world finance than Mr. Forbes does, and infinitely more than the average New Zealand elector—is not sacrificing our interests, but safeguarding them. Then your correspondent refers to Mr. Seddon, Sir Robert Stout, and others who were born outside New Zealand, as all our leading men necessarily were at one time, and asks if they did not have the interests of the country at heart. Of course, they had, but then they were here more at the beginning of things. They saw the country in the making, and helped to make it, and therefore, it seems to me, they thought more o£ its welfare as a whole and less of the interest of one class, than Mr. Holland does. It was seeing references to the birthplaces of one or two of the leading men in the Labour movement that set me looking up some of the others, and it struck me aa very odd—and it still strikes me as odd—that nearly all of them should have come from outside New Zealand. The cause of this is not any lack of native talent, for public work or private enterprise, as is shown by the increasing preponderance of those of New Zealand, birth among the leading men and women in the country—rather it looks as though the best brains among the native-born were not attracted by the ideas and, the methods of the Labour Party, and preferred to put their talents to other uses. -I ««•• «*«•. NATIVE-BORN. p S.—There was a slight error in my original letter. I did not mean to say "men of interests outside New Zealand, but "acting at the bidding of^men or interests outside New Zealand."