The New Zealand Times. MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 1925. MR BRUCE GOES TO THE COUNTRY

New Zealand Times, Volume LII, Issue 12248, 21 September 1925, Page 6

The New Zealand Times. MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 1925. MR BRUCE GOES TO THE COUNTRY

The Commonwealth Parliament is to be dissolved. Mr S. M. Bruce has decided to go to the country on the big issue arising out of the strike of British seamen. It seems an expensive and troublesome way of attacking a strike to hold a General Election on it. But the parties to the upheaval are apparently hopelessly at odds. Neither side has budged an inch from its original stand. The Prime Minister has asked for the deportation of the imported nuisances. The direct actiomsts are resisting. The shipping owners, oh the one hand, and the seamen, on the other, are as far apart as ever. Meanwhile, the gaols are glutted with strikers, and transport dislocation has become genuinely serious. So Mr Bruce has decided to give the electors the opportunity of expressing their opinion on the question. The primary issue, as he puts it, is whether Australia is to be governed by Parliament or by outside influences. The Federal Labour Leader, Mr Charlton, agrees, or professes to agree, that the people should be thus invited to state their views. Presently an exceedingly lively campaign will be afoot throughout Australia. The Prime Minister has taken the right course in throwing the onus of arbitration on the people. These costly and vexatious challenges of the extremists have grown increasingly reckless and impudent of recent years. Only yesterday, so to say, an attempt was made to force job control on the shipping companies in the Commonwealth. The resultant contest cost owners as well as the strikers tens of thousands of pounds. No sooner was that “drive-• thwarted, and the reactionists compelled to surrender, than another upheaval was engineered from the same quarter by the same crowd. The position called for defensive measures out of the ordinary. There is ironic amusement in the prospect of an Australian General Election arising out of a strike stage-managed by two non-Australians in the interests of non-Australian workers. “Solidarity” could scarce go further. If that sort of thing is to prevail, we may expect one of these fine days to see stop-work meetings convened in our big centres as a protest against the alleged victimisation of a member of the Bermondsey (Eng.) Hod-Carriers’ Union. Let brotherliness continue, though a whole nation suffer incalculable loss thereby 1 Probably there is a shrewd tactical expedient involved in Mr Bruce’s premature dissolution of the Federal House. No doubt he looks for a moral effect of some consequence from that step. It will serve to enhance his prestige as a champion of constitutional rights; at the same time it will convey to the enemy that the war is terbe a fairly protracted business. It may damp the fighting ardour of the direct actionists to know that they will have to wait at least two months before the electors record their decision. And two months is a long time, especially when it leads up toward Christmas. So far, curious to relate, our own Labour politicians have not broken silence in regard to the strike. They raised a nice fuss over a recent ham-and-eggs hero who went to gaol, as he deserved. Last week nearly a hundred convicted seamen, marched into incarceration, but the Labour Party said nothing (for publication), and has continued to say nothing. Possibly the nearness of the polls has something to do with this rather extraordinary phenomenon.