NATIONAL UNITY

New Zealand Herald, Volume 79, Issue 24243, 8 April 1942, Page 6

NATIONAL UNITY

OPPOSITION AIM LABOUR CHARGE DENIED "POLITICAL HUMBUG" (P.A.) CHRISTCHURCH, Tuesday "The charge that I and others associated with me in Parliament have never lost an opportunity of creating political disunity with all the venom and viciousness at their disposal is nothing less than a political slander," declared the Leader of the Opposition, Mr. S. G. Holland, commenting on the report of the Labour Party to the annual conference. "A more untruthful account of the wartime activities of the Opposition has never been framed. The report was endorsed unanimously by a 'yes-man' conference and that is all the more disgraceful because the Prime Minister, who* was present, knew that the executive was throwing dust in the eyes of the delegates." No one knew better than, the Prime Minister that the charge made was atrocious political humbug of men who were determined that their elect, politically, should retain office and absolute control and despise the offers of others to assist in conducting an "allin" war effort, said Mr. Holland. The public knew that the failure to create a National Government was solely the responsibility of the Labour Party. All the members of Parliament knew that Mr. Fraser was personally in favour of the united conduct of the war effort, but that he was restrained from carrying his convictions into action by influences inside and outside the Parliamentary Party,

"The travesty of truth perpetrated by the executive of the Labour Party in framing its report to the conference has raised another obstacle to the Prime Minister bringing about the formation of a National Government, which he knows deep in his heart would assist in a more vigorous and 100 per cent prosecution of the war effort. While Cabinet exhorts everybody else in the community to make sacrifices, its individual members, backed by a coterie which speaks for big industrial labour, are not prepared to make any sacrifices politically to ensure that the* Dominion gives of its maximum war effort." Before and after his assuming the leadership of the National Party, he had consistently and openly and without qualifications urged the Government to have an "all-in" Government for the duration of the war, said Mr. Holland. The record of the National Party to secure nnitv was known to all, but the politically blind at the Labour conference would not see through the poisonous smoke-screen set up by the party's executive.