BURIAL EXPENSES

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 79, 30 September 1938, Page 10

BURIAL EXPENSES

REPLY TO. MR. BARKER

"NO LACK OF SYMPATHY"

"To suggest that it was due to lack of sympathy on the part of the Prime Minister or the Minister of Public Works, in the face of my own personal Jcnpwledge of hundreds of instances of their sympathetic and generous assistance to those in distress, is ridiculous,'? said the Minister of Education (the . Hon. P, Fraser) today in reply to a statement made by Mr. W. L. Barker, National.candidate for Wellington East, that Mr. Savage and Mr. Semple had refused a request for burial expenses from a poor woman whose child was killed on the Hutt Road.. "I have no personal knowledge of the circumstances," said Mr. Fraser, "and therefore I am not in a position to make any comment except in a general way, but I will most certainly bring the statement to the notice of the Minister of Public Works, who, no doubt, will make a full reply to it. - Whatever the circumstances of the case, I know that neither Mr. Savage nor Mr. Semple is capable of a harsh and unsympathetic attitude to those in distress.. I can recall literally hundreds of instances where both the Prime Minister and Mr. Semple have personally shown the utmost consideration for, and given the greatest possible assistance to, those who have been in need. If any difficulty has arisen in the case quoted by Mr. Barker, it must have been, I can only conjecture, due' to a Departmental misunderstanding of the actual position of the unfortunate parents, or to certain legal difficulties that arose for the time being."