CHANGE, NOT DECAY

Evening Post, Volume CXXVII, Issue 55, 7 March 1939, Page 10

CHANGE, NOT DECAY

The "fear of change" that, according to Shakespeare, "perplexes monarchs," has no terrors for Mr. Savage. It does, however, work confusion in the minds of some other people; and Mr. Hamilton at Palmerston North points out that phrases like "the money system must be changed," coming from a Prime Minister With ! oracular brevity and with complete lack of explanation, inevitably intensify lack" of confidence on the part of those people on whom the Government is calling for more production. The situation faintly resembles "Hamlet," with Mr. Hamilton cast as Hamlet and Mr. .Savage as the Ghost. The spectral appearance of the Ghost at Elsinore causes the apprehension that "something is rotten in the State of Denmark." Fortunately, Hamlet, after a desperate * effort in the way of cross-examination, elicits from the Ghost the information that the rot is present not so much in Denmark .as in Denmark's ruler. Of course this parallel cannot be pushed too far; but it is to be Hoped that our political Hamlet will draw from, our political Ghost something definite about the rot that now prevails, and which cannot be dissipated by platitudes and vague phrases.

If Mr. Hamilton can draw Mr. Savage to the same extent as Mr. Coates has drawn Mr. Nash, there is some hope, if only a faint hope, that New Zealand will be given some idea of the meaning of "the money system must be changed." Anything at all that would tend to divest such a phrase of its spectral character, and to give it a specific meaning, would be welcome, because the real thing (whatever it is) can hardly be so paralysing as is its vague outline. The devil one does not know is commonly worse than the devil one knows; and the ghost of change is more perplexing, as a rule, than the change itself. Confusion, destructive of confidence and of action, affects most "that section with which the Government," to use Mr. Hamilton's words, "must seek co-operation in its attempt to rebuild a nation exhausted by three years of boom-and-bust administration." The change which Mr. Savage has in mind is not the change which the hymn-writer has bracketed with decay; but decay must be the result if menacing phrases are left in their spectral shape, unfleshed. Surely the time has arrived when oracular utterance should be replaced by plain speech.