Reds Losing Help Of N.S.W. Unionists, Says Mr. Menzies

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 22916, 7 April 1949, Page 5

Reds Losing Help Of N.S.W. Unionists, Says Mr. Menzies

(N.Z.P.A.—Eeuter— Copyright.)

CANBERRA, Ap. 6.

“My tour of New South Wales has convinced me that the Communist is losing ground with the trade unionist,” said Mr. R. G. Menzies, leader of the Federal Opposition, who has travelled over 2000 miles and made more than 30 speeches in the past fortnight.

“I did not find anywhere that if the Communist got to work and started to put his case by interjection or question, he was getting any real support from the obvious trade unionists sitting around him,” he said.

“I think the unionsts are beginning to get fed up. "The tour represented an experiment as to whether you could talk to large numbers of people and present success-

fully a carefully reasoned argument on the basic principles of liberalism, socialism and so on.

“The experiment has been a great success. That is a good sign because one of the troubles in the past has been that people have thought about politics hurriedly every three years at election time and not much about it in the intervening, period. “Marked features have been the lack of interjections, the large percentage of younger people, who. attended the meetings and the intelligence of the questions put.” During the tour Mr. Menzies covered the coalfields and other working-class areas traditionally strongly pro-Labour.