Spirit of the Press

Northland Age, Volume 3, Issue 12, 15 December 1933, Page 8

Spirit of the Press

INVESTIGATION REQUIRED The Prime Minister yesterday gave the House of Representatives some information concerning the further investigation proposed regarding Native land development and Maori unemployment funds. The whole of the facts are not yet available and audit inspectors are still pursuing their investigations. Until the examination is complete it would be premature to offer any comment upon the position so far disclosed. Whether a Royal Commission of Inquiry is preferable to Audit Office investigation is a matter which the Government must consider ; but it is beyond question that a thorough investigation by one or other of these methods must be carried out. The Government will realise that the matter cannot be allowed to rest where it is. Also, whichever method may be adop+ed, there must be full public disclosure of the findings. This is essential, both because the expenditure of public funds and the control of public affairs are involved, and in justice to persons who are not culpable but may be under the general cloud until all the facts are made known.—Wellington Post.

THE MENACE OF JAPAN Japan . . . will first subjugate the East, unless the Powers step in. It will be no open warfare immediately. It will be a repetition of Manchuria. Already she has signed a treaty with

China for a nominal peace. . . . Next she will be signing, openly and secretly, rights, concessions, special privileges, with different lords of the Chinese provinces. She will, probably by force, prevent the Kuomintang Army of the South, which is the Nationalist Party, from moving into the northern parts of China. She will claim that her sole object is for the maintenance of peace or the protection of her nationals.

I accuse her of signing these rights for the sole purpose of manufacturing some pretence for the resumption of hostilities when the time is ripe. She knows that many Chinese will still boycott her goods, her people. She will then once more move her troops into that particular area. I accuse her of deliberately fermenting trouble in China, with the one view of conquest.— Mr. T. O’Conroy, late Professor of Keio University, in The Menace of Japan.