AUSTRALIAN ELECTION

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVI, Issue 30, 4 August 1943, Page 5

AUSTRALIAN ELECTION

COMMUNISTS HELP LABOUR

(Special P.A. Correspondent)

SYDNEY, August 3. The attentions of Communists arc proving an embarrassment to the Australian Labour Party. The election slogan of the Communist Party is: "Elect Communists—and strengthen the Curtin Government." Official Labour has denied any alliance with Communism, but religious papers have attacked such an association and demanding' a forthright repudiation by Labour of the Communist intrusion into the campaign.

In one New South Wales electorate the Communist Party, which originally had 17 Federal Parliamentary candidates, has withdrawn its nominees and advised, its supporters to give their votes to the official Labour Party candidate.

Election campaigning is now in full swing. While the Opposition makes the formation of a National Government the theme of its policy, Labour concentrates on its record of wartime achievement, coupled with the personal prestige of the Prime Minister, Mr. Curtin. Opposition candidates have had to face stox*my meetings, and have made accusations of "organised disruptionist tactics," pointing to the fact that Labour speakers have not been subjected to the same abusive heckling. Commenting on this method of muzzling free speech, the "Sydney Morning Herald," in an editorial, says that "the Labour Party would be badly mistaken if it assumed that such disturbances enhance respect for the party which claims that it alone saved the country." Some commentators credit these disturbances with being organised by Communists, and suggest that Mr. Curtin is being even more embarrassed by them than the candidates at whom they are directed. LEADERS ARE VICTIMS. Prominent among the victims of this rowdyism has been the Opposition Leader, Mr. A. W. Fadden, and the United Australia Party leader, Mr. W. I M. Hughes. At some meetings, the Communist salute of the raised clenched fist has been in evidence. At the Prime Minister's first Sydney meeting the only hostile interjections came from soldiers. Opposition candidates and supporters in Queensland, where polling results may decide the outcome of the election, are resentful of a four-page Labour leaflet headed, "This might have happened here." Illustrations show corpses of men, women, and children following a Japanese air raid on Chungking. Detailed descriptions are given of Japanese barbarities in China, and the pamphlet adds: "These and many other dreadful things could have happened here. The peril of invasion was so great that 50,000 Queenslanders, mostly women and children, were evacuated from their homes. Because of the defence policy of the Curtin Government, Queensland today is safe from invasion and the evacuees have returned to their homes."

Answering the pamphlet's charge* that the Menzies Government h/d been prepared to abandon Queensland to the Japanese, Mr. Hughes said that these were "monstrous distortions of fact." Australia had been spared the horrors of war not because of anything the Labour Government had done, but m spite of the Labour Party's efforts for years to strip the Commonwealth of every vestige of defence.

MR. CURTIN ANNOYED

Rec. 1 p.m. SYDNEY, August 4. Resentment at suggestions that the Australian Labour Party is dominated by Communists has been expressed by Mr. Curtin. Communists, he said, were not allowed to join the Labour Party and were, in fact, opposing some of the most loyal supporters of his Prime Ministership, 'including Mr. Scullin.

The Communist Party had no relationship with the Labour Party.

MR. MENZIES HECKLED

PERTH, August 3. One of the most turbulent meetings of the present Federal election campaign was that of the former Prime