LABOUR AND COALITION.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 21037, 23 November 1931, Page 8

LABOUR AND COALITION.

It is only natural that Labour candidates should attack tho Coalition Government, and endeavour to make as much capital as possible out of what they think may be unpopular in its policy. These candidates want to win seats. Therefore they will use the weapons nearest to h;ind in their struggle to do so. Yet, in one phase of its criticism, Labour is curiously inconsistent with its own professions. There is a widespread tendency to represent formation of the Coalition as something sinister, that the very fact of its existence establishes a reason for voting against its candidates. The reasons why the Coalition was formed have been explained quite plainly and frankly, Mr. Coates having been especially direct in his statements on the subject. Believing the economic situation of the country to be so difficult that it called for combined efforts to meet the emergency, he and his colleagues agreed to waive the differences normally dividing them from the United Party, to subordinate all other considerations to the _ one objective of restoring the national finances and grappling with the insistent economic problems of the day. On that basis the Coalition was accepted by both parties. The Labour Party is trying tb represent this as something sinister when, as a matter of fact, it has long suggested that there should be a much more complete and permanent union between the two. Mr. Holland, in his opening campaign speech, said "the United Party had Surrendered to the historic enemies of the party led by Ballancc and Seddon, and tho last 'vestiges of the principles of the old Liberal-Labour alliance, so far as the United Party was concerned, had faded permanently into the shadows of political intrigue." Yet, in 1928, during the short session which followed the election, Mr. Holland said "he recognised there was no effective line of demarcation between the Reform and United Parties, and that the time must inevitably arrive when the two would come together." If Mr. Holland was right in 1928 everyone will not agree that he was —how can he stigmatise the Coalition now as "surrender" and use such terms as "political intrigue" in connection with it? Without endorsing Labour's contention that the two parties have been identical for many years, it is still possible to see the inconsistency, the desire to make i election capital, in the mock indignation with which the Coalition is now received.