GOVERNMENT AND LOTTERIES

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22405, 29 April 1936, Page 17

GOVERNMENT AND LOTTERIES

Sir, —Those who regard lottery tickets as the dolls and marbles of the grown-up are estranged from reality. There is no relation between luck and pluck. There is no relation between fun and the roulette wheel. Gamblers, by and large, are a dull lot. The social bond is strained, if it is not snapped, by the game of beggar my neighbour. Undeserved wealth and undeserved poverty are alike pitiful. On a world view lotteries are an epidemic fallen on a disgruntled age, a fever that is sapping its strength. The lottery is the tiger of the limerick. Those who write in its defence are young ladies of Niger. But they pack others on its back for the fatal ride. This nation is embarking on a political experiment of great scope and of great delicacy. Everything seems to depend on the steadiness of the Ministers and on the clear vision and unfaltering determination of the people. It is not dice that are being thrown on the floor of the House, it is not a belief or a practice of luck that will see this thine; through, with all the sacrifice that it will entail. It is clear-headedness that is wanted. There is no dope like the gambling habit to put the peoplo off the real issues, and to blind Ministers to the implications of their own declared principles. That is why there is a very widespread desire that this Government shall clear the decks of these abuses and give their own policy a chance. If any man desires to know whereunto the lottery craze will grow, that craze which the "art unions" are fostering every day, in every street, let him consider the football pools that- are alarming England. They were invented the other day, so to say. On the principle that you cannot catch your gambler too young they only ask for a penny investment, a penny a child won £7OOO, while the promoters lifted profits that- make oil companies look simple. Postmen stagger under impossible bags. The football authorities, finding that no game is now safe from bribery, are at their wits' end. And Government is legislating in a panic. We have for the first time in the Dominion a Government pledged to war on the unearned, pledged to relate wealth to work. It is not a Government that can look with apathy on this matter. It has still some pairs of running shoes in stock. Let them hand them out to the Wellington firm that runs the Government lotteries and in the name of good sense and fair play lei. the evasion of the law cease. J. J. North.