"A BARGAIN COUNTER"

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 73, 23 September 1938, Page 11

"A BARGAIN COUNTER"

LABOUR GOVERNMENT

COMMENT ON POLICY

(By Telegraph.) (Special to the "Evening Post.'')

DUNEDIN, This Day.

Commenting on the Labour Party's policy, the "Otago Daily Times," in an editorial, states: —

"It Is Mr. Savage's good fortune not to realise the irony in his enunciation after three years in office of a programme from which so many major determinations of previous pre-election manifestoes have been ignominiously dropped while so many undertakings then given are again put forward as original and blessed contributions to political thought. It is not the way of Mr. Savage to tell electors where the intentions of the Labour Party lead. His personal part in the campaign is to promise the people anything, everything, and the ultimate in free services and halcyon conditions of employment. His principal contribution to the science of government is the assurance that if the people support the Labour Administration the Labour Administration will support the people. The Government has become a bargain counter on which the electors are invited to scramble for promised benefits, forgetful of the bargains offered in the past which proved expensive or illusory when brought within reach.

"Yet Mr. Savage had a flash of acumen to acknowledge in his speech that the present campaign is one of plain facts, not personalities. In other words, the question on which the election must be decided is one of policy. It is apparently being studiously left to the Prime Minister's colleagues— gentlemen who are notoriously free in their speech and radical in their view —to provide the country with the suggestion of the essential trend of the Labour policy. Sad remembrance of things past is the most useless exercise in which the New Zealand public can be asked to indulge in the coming ,weeks. "It is a staggering significance of things of the future if the country enchains itself for a further term to the Socialist machine which is crushing individual enterprise and subordinating prudent government to a

lavish dissipation of the wealth of the State—and distribution of promises— that must be weighed and must be judged on election day."