NEW ZEALAND LEGION

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 84, 6 October 1933, Page 3

NEW ZEALAND LEGION

NEW PLAN COMMENDED

THE DUTY OF MEMBERS

A very successful meeting of the Karori Centre of the New Zealand Legion was held on Wednesday night. Dr. W. H. Blinman Bull, leader-chair-man of the centre, presided over an attendance of approximately two hundred. He. explained, that the particular object of the meeting was to have, the decisions arrived at by the Karori executive, dealing with the complete plan for governmental reform, confirmed by members. The speaker that evening had been requested originally to deal solely with the major issue of the necessity for reform in government, but in view. of the statement made by. Dr. Begg on the wider purpose which the Legion might fulfil, it -was the intention of Mr. D. M. Robertson (secretary of tho Wellington Division) to make some reference to Dr. Begg's plan. Mr. Robertson, who was enthusiastically received, dealt with the three views of the Legion development. While indicating definitely that the Legion was a movement designed to save democracy, lie pointed out that it required to.go a great deal further go far as the individual member was concerned before it could be considered completely successful. It required a regeneration in the thought of the individual. A rapid change was anticipated in public opinion, and the Legion's first plank, that of emphasising the necessity of change in the system of government, had become almost universally accepted. It was hoped that a complete plan would ■■ be forthcoming in a very short time. Members should give serious consideration to the plan which had just been published, indicative of the method by which happiness and prosperity could be assured, unemployment definitely removed, and poverty abolished. Mr. Robertson emphasised that New Zealantl could not pay and England could not receive payment of our National Debt. . It was questionable whether New Zealand could oven pay the interest or Britain receive the interest. Was it right that posterity should be left with a tremendous millstone, or was it not better that we should, by adopting a particular policy, seek to attain to the standard to which we certainly had attained in 1914, that of nationhood, be prepared to accept a'full''place*.in the Commonwealth of British Nations, and approach the Mother Country with a plan providing for the complete payment of' our own capital debt: and interest, and definitely relieving fie Mother Country of part of her huge burden of taxation, removing our own unemployment problem, and taking over and providing employment for a very largo section of the population of Great Britain. -Mr. Robertson'- emphasised that Dr; Begg's plan was a stupendous plan, but a profoundly, practicable proposition. It would-be'absurd to attempt it, however, under the present system of government and hence the whole question came back again to the original purpose and intention of the' Legion, that of awakening the individual elector to a full sense of his responsibility as an individual and then to the .insistence that government in keeping with our sicentific development was, an integral part of our system of expansion, designed for the purpose of making New Zealand self-supporting and giving her a national independence. '