SECRET ISSUE OF PEOPLE’S VOICE

Manawatu Times, Volume 65, Issue 187, 9 August 1940, Page 10

SECRET ISSUE OF PEOPLE’S VOICE

PUBLISHERS SOUGHT (By Telegraph—Press Association)' AUCKLAND, Aug. 7. Agencies in Auckland and Wellington are secretly distributing each week copies of a cyclostyled pamphlet called the People’s Voice, and a special branch of the police which deals, among other things, with subversive matters, is combing both cities to find the publishers and distributors. Two recent issues frankly subscribe to the overthrow r% constitutional authority, and some of the editorial comments encourage what is called “direct action.” The original People’s Voice was suppressed by the Auckland police on May 30, with the authority of the AttorneyGeneral, Mr H. G. R. Mason. All printing plant and material was seized and removed from headquarters in the city. A week later a new version—two ink-smeared cyclostyled sheets of inferior newsprint foolscap—was put into circulation. Support of the Communist Party, discouragement of the war effort and similar themes are featured. and, by dint of some ingenuity, an effort at display was made in one issue to enclose in a panel the names of Communists sentenced to imprisonment for making subversive statements. “All honour to them,” was the heading to the panel. While the original paper was printed in Auckland and sent to different parts of the Dominion, separate and different pamphlets called The People’s Voice are composed each week in this city and Wellington. Methods of publication and distribution are subterranean.