JEREMIAD AND JUBILEE

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXII, Issue 22215, 16 September 1935, Page 8

JEREMIAD AND JUBILEE

Those whose- role it is, for political purposes, to pull a long face about the state of the country are having an unenviable task at present. The facts are against them, and, what is just as important, public sentiment refuses to be cast down. The jeremiads which Labour and Independent members have been delivering in the Address-in-Reply debate in order to discredit the Government and recommend themselves a 8 potential saviours have fallen unusually flat. The maudlin mood of yesteryear has passed and a new breath of hope is in the air. Prophets of doom find it thankless work trying to cloud in grey gloom a prospect which everyone else, with good reason, persists in regarding as brighter than for years. The Labour candidate for Bay of Plenty was disposed to quarrel with butter at 112s as political jerrymandering. In other words, better prices are one factor undermining the Labour platform, which—whether consciously or not—was built to exploit the country's distresses. It may be a sore mischance for Labour that recovery is removing its strongest lever, but a very good thing for New Zealand. Even the weather seems to have turned against the Opposition. The long winter, marked by an abnormal predominance of cold and wet southerlies, has lately turned to the friendly devices more native to Auckland Province. Sunshine has returned and with it, not the dour, cutting rain of damp memory, but the warmth and cordiality of the nor'easters that promote growth and multiply butter-fat returns. This new meteorological mood may also bo called political jerrymandering, although Mr. Forbes and Mr. Coates, more modest than some of their predecessors, might decline so much credit. Yet they and their colleagues, after taking all the blame and accepting the responsibility in the hard years, are entitled to view with satisfaction the improved markets for the Dominion's great staples, wool, meat and dairy produce, and the firmer outlook and increased activity the appreciation of prices has brought to town as well as country. It must also be a great relief not to havo to try to convince the country that doom lies just ahead (unless the electors vote Labour) and instead to share in the general renewal of confidence that is fast restoring New Zealand's young vitality.