MR KENT, M.P. AT KAIATA

Grey River Argus, 9 November 1949, Page 2

MR KENT, M.P. AT KAIATA

Mr J. B. Kent, M.P., continued 1 is election campaign last evening at Kaiata, addressing a fair attendance of residents, and dealing with the record of slump conditions in New Zealand. Mr J. Johnston presided, and, at the close of his speech, the candidate was accorded a vote of confidence, by the meeting, on the motion of Messrs Cuthbert and Eaillie. New Zealand, said Mr Kent, had bad a slump whenever the Tory element had, for any length of time, had control of its economy. Repeatedly had Governments in sympathy with the masses, had to dig the country out of much trouble. Yet the Tories had begun with a clean sheet, the provinces having formerly financed development to a great extent The West Coast, by its gold output, had also contributed largely. In the ’Eighties, the Tories brought the Colony to a state of grim poverty and it had been the Liberal-Labour Administration of the ’Nineties which stopped the rot—the immigration of people, the poverty, and stagnation. Then, in a new Tory interlude, the country had .the 1913 soup kitchens, and grave industrial discontent. After those had been allayed, tlMre was a further period of Tory rule, and it ended in the great depression that had been left for the Labour Government to clean up. If any people were now tempted to risk yet another Tory dose of retrenchment and reaction, they would indeed be gluttons for punishment. It was a case either of going ahead or going backward. The opponents talked to-day about “the slump lie.” Dare they aeny the slump? Not they. What they questioned was the way Labour had coped with it. They virtualy said it cured itself. They also said that ail the safeguards Labour since had established to keep away any return of depression, had nothing to do with present national prosperity, and could therefore be thrown overboard, to a great extent, in the name of economy. The Nationalist argument finally added up to a theory that prosperity did not pay. The fact was that the actual slump lie was this Nationalist allegation that we could neither prevent nor remedy nor end a slump, but must face the future with that fatalistic philosophy. New Zealanders, however, in the majority were not built that way.