AGRICULTURAL LABOURERS' ACCOMMODATION.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXIX, Issue 14693, 26 May 1908, Page 5

AGRICULTURAL LABOURERS' ACCOMMODATION.

10 TUB EDITOX. Sir,—Will you accept an apology from me for making an attack upon, you when you did not deserve it?. Your sins of commission are many, but I agree that castigation is undeserved.' when the sin is not yours, and I therefore apologise. My excuse i's that I misread a statement' of Mr /Bagger as being one of your own. Hut I want everything I said about the administration' of the Farm Labourers Accommodation Act to apply to that gentleman.

As proof of my statement that the Act was not being administered by the Government, I might tell you that on Saturday last I received a reply from the Minister to the second communication I have addressed to him on the subject.. The reply stated that “the regulations were being drafted, that the matter was being oarefully considered by the Cabinet?’ and that when tlie regulations were completed the Act would be put into motion. Those blessed “regulations,” and tnat stereotyped “ careful consideration ” might appear to a job-hunting Labour leader to be good and sufficient reasons for the non-administration of the Act, but to anybody with ordinary vision they look, to be nothing else but a wretched excuse for a politician’s inactivity. If this Act is not immediately put into operation, 1 can only take its existence on the Statute Book us such another trick of political bluff as the 'gazetted intended (in, the future) reduction in tlie weight of grain carried 'in comsacks. It seems to me that in passing this Act the Government was animated by tbe idea that as town workers were delighted with a diet of legis-

lativo flapdoodle, the country workers would be also, and that the Act, once passed, would work-as a kind of decoy duck to attract the votes of the workers. At any rate, this is the inevitable conclusion from the slothlike movement of the Department, and it is the conclusion that many farm labourer* have long since come to. i My advice to the country worker, and I feel sure you will help, is to agitate until not only th© provisions of this law are enforced, hut until something like privacy and the satisfaction of human cravings are recognised in legislation as the light of country worker.—l am, etc., JAMES THORN, _ SocTetary Farm Labourers’ Union,