SELF-DESTRUCTION.

Franklin Times, Volume 14, Issue 192, 16 October 1925, Page 7

SELF-DESTRUCTION.

DECLINE AND FALL OF LABOUR.

DISRUPTION FROM WITHIN.

What a tyranny is fear! In the Labour Party it is a demoniacal possession as dread as it was in Palestine 2000 years ago. That hapless party is rent and torn by the "white ant" devil most cruelly. The contortions of its leaders were never more piteous than now (writes Benjamin Hoare in the Melbourne Age). This infliction has been going on with more or less intensity for 11 years, ever since 1914, the year of the war. Before that Labour was a fine, sturdy, fearless body of men, with expanding ideas. Led by men like Chris. Watson, Andy Fisher, and Billy Hughes, it was instinctively democratic and progressive. > It had given pensions to the old and infirm. it had given us a national bank and a national note issue, and generally it had shown vision, energy and courage.

It is true that it always had within it a smattering of fanatical extremists. But what great party has not? That is the inevitable accomplishment of a real party of progress. But this Labour Party grew and grew, always supporting Liberalism, under leaders such as Barton. Kingston, and Deakin, always gaining more and more of the confidence of the electors outside its own ranks, until the day came when it found itself strong enough to stand alone; first under Chris. Watson as Prime Minister, and later under Andv Fisher) and the live wire Billy Hughes.

The decline and fall of Labour is a story possessing quite Homeric features —how it soared into public confidence and power by the exhibition of noble aims: how it blew out its own brains by the deposition of its able leaders: how it wrapped itself in meshes of traitorous disloyalty, and clamoured for a German peace without cost to the invaders of Belgium; and how it fell like Lucifer amidst the execrations of the electors, till it had not a singie seat in the Senate. All that, of course, is ancient history; but it is history which throws an electric light on the hapless conditions in which Labour stands to-day. A few short words on that story. The general election which followed Munro-Fergusson's double dissolution took place on the sth September, 1914. It placed the Labour Party on the crest of the wave of power. , Labour had given pledges to prosecute the war "to the last man and the last shilling." Labour had won handsomely on that ticket.

Within a few months a fanatical section of the Labour Party demanded a modification of that ticket. The leaders refused to dishonour their pledges. Mr Fisher went to England as the High Commissioner; Mr Hughes went to confer on the war. Before going he was baited by the Bolshevist members of his party. He knew their machinations. He knew their strength. He knew who they were. They were Sinn Feiners, I.W.W. plotters, Clan-na-Gaels, Irish Republicans, Communists, Bolsheviks, and Pacifists. They were all alike enemies of the British Empire. As he was leaving for England, Hughes flung 'his defiance at them in phrases which have become historical: "There, between Syndicalism—and that is its name—and unionism and Labour, as we know it in this country, a gulf as wide as hell. If the world depended on the strength of the arms of these people, who speak as lovers of liberty, it would have been in chains to-day. These men sneer at patriotism, because the very sound of it*euis them to the quick, because patriotism is based on the sacrifice of self, and their religion is the apotheosis of self. Self is the beginning and the end of everything they have. These men know no nationality, religion or principle, and in the name of unionism and Labourism, I pass them out like devils." But he overrated his power. His exorcism did not work. They were not to be passed out. They were "white ants," and they did their work in the Labour Party to such purpose that when Hughes got back he found himself quite powerless to carry on the war according to his pledges. He was cast out of the Labour Party, and went to the country in 1917, with about a dozen of his old Labour colleagues, denouncing his late friends as enemies to the Empire. The result of that election, on May 3, 1917, ought to have burnt itself into the brains of Labour. The very same electors who in 1914 had given the Labour Party a triumphant success, were asked again to give their verdict. Labour had done two things in the interval. It had broken its war pledges, and it had denounced democratic Parliamentary Government. It was in favour of the One Big Union, which was to override constitutional Government, by means of several strikes, such as we hear of in Sydney to-day. It is now threatened that if the deportation law takes its course a general strike shall paralyse Australia.

This, of course, if it could be accomplished, would be the end of Parliamentary Government. All Parliaments henceforth must operate subject to the direction of industrial syndicates. However, Australians who knew how to storm the heights of Mont St. Quentin in 1918 can smile at this sort of bluster now. The Soviet brag which subjugated the Russian peasants and turned them into crouching slaves does but quieten Australian independence. The people spoke in 1917, and to, some purpose. TheV spoke with the Anzac spirit. They struck every Labour member, good and bad, out of the Senate, and decimated their ranks in the House of Representatives. It was a great uprising of democracy which respected itself, scorching with ignominy a party which had betrayed its own promises. No one who remembers that wonderful 1917 verdict ought to doubt about what the great heart of the Australian people will say in 1925 if it be called upon to judge Labour afresh for a new perfidy against public freedom.

It is true that we have no German war on hand just now, as we had then. Then Labour was proclaiming that Australians should quit—that we had done enough. That is now only an unsavoury memory. We would gladly pass it into the region of halfcondoned offences.

But we are not permitted to wipe the sponge over the old political slate. The very same "white ants" who then sought to compel "peace negotiations up a basis of no annexations and no indemnities," are now proclaiming an-: other kind of war—a war of strikes and job control. Democracy is to be damned; the British Empire is to go hang; constitutional law is to be flouted; industrialism is to be at the mercy of every malcontent; arbitration courts are to be defied; judges scoffed; and the mob unionist and the Bolshevist agitators are to be the monarchs of misrule.

That is the issue. And the official Labour Party standing trembling: on the brink of the chaotic gulf, expouses the public enemy now as it did in 1916-17. It has no word of denunciation for those who are making disastrous war upon the public peace; but a turning all its silly unshotted guns on the established government of the country which seeks to maintain the law against internal rebels and agents of foreign revolution.

It is quite wonderful how very closely history, is repeating itself. Rather, I should say, it would be wonderful if we failed to recognise that the same men and the same causes are operating now as then. The year 1925 has within it the "white ants" of Bolshevism quite as destructive as had 1917. • And its grip on official Labour is as tentacious now as it was then.

No doubt there are thousands of good Labour men who would give much to be free of the falling slavery. But they are too feeble to break their shackles. They go clown before the tyranny of job control, and before the claims of individual unions to fight each for its own hand and to break all laws and agreements. The new cry is: "The Law of the Protetariat." And venal Parliamentarians are shamefully bowing to that cry, which is one for their own extinction.

Every denunciation of the law of the Commonwealth is a cry for the law of the Bolshevist. There is no via media. We cannot serve God and Mammon. We cannot maintain the integrity of the judges of the laws, and permit the agitator to be king. There is no tyrant so tyrannical as the self-appointed mob dictator who cries: "We'll hang Havelock Wilson," or any other opponent. The stark idiocy of the situation is that we hear official Labour challenging the Commonwealth Government to go to the electors against the supremacy of the law and virtually for the rule of anarchy.

Surely the Labour leaders ought to have remembered the verdict of the law-abiding electors of 1917. It was then a choice between Chaos and Democracy. The challenge against democratic rule is quite as pronounced now as it was then. . . . '

What we all marvel at and regret is the obliquity of vision which so constantly blurs the leaders of the Labour Party. There is in it a puerility which amounts almost to imbecility. There is a great section of the electors constantly on the borders of Liberalism, and which would gladly support a Labour Government which had brains and courage to guide a Slate amidst the shoals of anarchy. But the Labour leaders have no vision, and their courage against the "white ants" is that of the hare against the hounds. The Bolshevist element in the Labour Party openly proclaims its contempt for "Democracy," which is declared to be dead. It is also equally against arbitration laws and agreements with capitalistic concerns. It wants unrestrained job control, and the abolition of most forms of property. The Labour leaders deny that they want these things, but they ways support the party that does want them. They try to join with the wolf and be friends with the hunters. They are nearing another struggle, that must crush them as before. The \ustralian electors are neither fools nor cowards. We may safely trust them to vindicate in 1925 freedom and good government as they did in 1917.