THE DEFENCE PROPOSALS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22368, 15 September 1934, Page 12

THE DEFENCE PROPOSALS

It was not to be expected that Labour members of Parliament would, in the case of the additional expenditure on defence that is proposed by the Government, forego their prerogative of finding fault. Whether it is a good or a bad principle, it certainly seems to be a fixed and unalterable principle on the part of the parliamentary Opposition to criticise any and every financial proposal of the Government. But the interjections to which one op two of the Labour members on Wednesday subjected the Minister of Defence indicated such an extraordinary attitude that it may be wondered whether the most ardent Labour supporters in the Dominion would be prepared in any considerable number to approve of it. The provision of something approaching an adequate defence organisation for New Zealand is scarcely a matter in which the Government has any option. Security can be assured only by the maintenance of what might be described as an emergency line of defence, and in recent years New Zealand has scarcely fulfilled the obligation of affording citizens protection of a reassuring nature. As a unit in the British Commonwealth of Nations, this country inevitably looks to Great Britain for moral and, if needed, practical support in defending its shores, but this ultimate reliance on the Mother Country strengthens the obligation of the Dominion to be prepared to take its own part in its defence. It is, as Mr Cobbe said, the least that New Zealand and Australia can do. The question-when the need may occur is one that cannot be answered, but the troubled state of Europe to-day far from encourages the hope that the possibility of war can be dismissed. Every Power is increasing its armaments—perhaps in all cases as a result of unfounded suspicion, and merely for the purposes of defence—and Australia and New Zealand must be guided by the example of Great Britain in this matter. That the Imperial exemplar is aggressively militaristic in her attitude not even a pacifist could allege, while it would be little short of ludicrous to suggest that the New Zealand defence proposals are inimical to the peace of the nations. Presumably the Labour parliamentarians would not suggest this. Their argument is apparently that no additional money should be spent on defence while any other work remains to be done in New Zealand that might conceivably be charged to the State. The fallacy in this negative process of reckoning is, of course, that if New Zealand had no security from attack, there would be no assurance that any such humanitarian schemes as it might undertake would be completed—or, if completed, peacefully enjoyed by the people of the Dominion. The degree of immunity of the world from war, and that of. New Zealand from attack in the ease of war, are not, unfortunately, problems which can be reduced to simple

figures. The fact is that the only reasonable guarantee which the Dominion can obtain that it will not become the victim of foreign aggression is the provision of a defence system .that will discourage ambitions in that direction.