OPPOSITION DEMONSTRATION IN AUCKLAND.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXIV, Issue 13913, 22 November 1905, Page 6

OPPOSITION DEMONSTRATION IN AUCKLAND.

The Opposition demonstration in Auckland last evening appears to have been quite an imposing affair. All the Conservative candidates for the district were gathered in for the occasion, and in mere point of numbers the meeting must have been almost as large as the one which the Premier, addressed in the same place last week. But Mr Massey has little of the capacity for swaying great audiences which Mr Seddon possesses in such an eminent degree. His speech last evening was little more than a plea for some of the credit for the services which his opponents had rendered to the country. If the electors would only remember that he had suggested the removal of the duty from fencing wire a week or a month or a year before it was actually removed by the Government he could face the future, whatever might have in store for- Kim, with equanimity. It was true that he had opposed the old age pensions sohem'e, but away back in Ids political youth he had proposed universal superannuation, and now he was prepared to free the pensions from all restrictions. He had not been favourable to labour legislation, but the workers must not think that ho was opposed to their interests. Ho would not sweep away the laws his opponents had placed bn the Statute Book; lie would only amend them and improve their administration. He had not liked the idea of cheap money, but if the people would entrust him. with the management of their affairs he would go one better than the Government and give tneir local bodies unlimited loans at 8J per cent. This, and much more to the same effect, mad© up the great policy speech by which Ids’ friends were to be inspired to renewed efforts at the polls I Franklin was going to return him as its member, he said—an announcement which must have come as a relief to his more,timorous supporters—and he would do his best to exercise a little more restraint in the future than he had done in the past upon the “bullying and bribing’’ of the Government. The tone of the speech was not exactly what w© might have expected from the leader of a great political party on the eve of a general election, but apparently neither the leader nor the party has heart left for anything more heroic. The policy , of the Opposition consists at the end of the campaign, just as it did at the beginning, of nothing more than wild and persistent misrepresentation.