CONFUSED THINKING

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22716, 31 October 1935, Page 8

CONFUSED THINKING

In their desire to discredit the Government, the exponents of the aims of the Labour Party make use of some curious ammunition. Its detonating quality must, we imagine, be distinctly unsatisfactory even to • themselves. That the party's case would be commended to anybody by the address delivered by Mr A. Campbell, the Labour aspirant for the Chalmers seat, it is indeed difficult to believe. It is many years since Deborah Bay was a torpedo boat station, and, though Mr Campbell on Tuesday night did his best there to explode various charges for the Government's undoing, he achieved only lugubrious results. Possibly for the peculiar illumination which he threw on Labour's great proposals for guaranteed prices for the farmer and for the nationalisation of credit the candidate should really be thanked. What could be more convincing than his repudiatien of the frightening suggestion by Sir Alfred Ransom that Labour would confiscate the savings of the people? For these savings, Mr Campbell has explained, are credit, and what is frightening about the nationalisation of credit? Of course, he may even be suggesting that the deposits, even to the tune of the £109,000,000 figuring in his calculations, do not exist, for between confusion of thought and misrepresentation on the subject there is evidently a choice. But the creation of credit on the lines advocated by the Labour Party becomes, in expositions such as that of Mr Campbell, the easiest, simplest, most beneficent thing in the world. It is almost a pity to have to offer the chilly reminder that it spells inflation, and that inflation spells depreciation of the currency and a reduction of purchasing power. By way of illustration of things which, as he asserts, Labour has got to fight and to "oust" when it gets into power, Mr Campbell narrated a tale involving a wharf labourer, a doctor and an insurance company, of which he invited his hearers to ponder the significance. But what this may amount to must remain still a mystery. Mr Campbell ranges curiously from strange premises to stranger conclusions, and from half truths to sheer fantasy. The arithmetic upon which he bases calculations in regard to commodities affected by the sales tax is definitely baffling. To the poor farmer, whose friend is Labour, but who is slow to realise how badly he needs such a friend, Mr Campbell did not neglect to address himself. The poor farmer who comes under the administration of the Rural Mortgagors Final Adjustment Act will be worse off, he is told, than the relief worker getting twenty-five to thirty shillings a week, for every penny he spends will be watched, and at the end of the period of budgetary control the mortgagee will be able to take his farm over. Regarded as a distortion of the scheme of final adjustment this is almost a bright effort on the candidate's part. It is neither here nor there, of course, that many farmers have actually been under budgetary control during the depression. We need hardly hail as original discoveries on Mr Campbell's part that the exclusion of children of five years of age from the primary schools has been brought about by " class legislation,", or that if everybody, employees included, were contributing to a national insurance scheme a ''huge result" would accrue, in lieu of the provision of old age pensions, which, he states, have now outlived their usefulness. But perhaps he achieved his supreme moment when he levelled against the Government and the press an accusation of suppressing the report of the Native Affairs Commission. Absolute nonsense is at least disarming. There was an undeniable touch of lively imagination in Mr Campbell's picture of copies of this report being consigned to the flames by zealous officials lest they should get into circulation. But those who desire to peruse the report will have no difficulty in finding it in the familiar bound volumes of Government documents. The part played by the press in this dreadful story was merely that of necessarily condensing a report which, covering over 150 printed pages, had necessarily to be summarised for publication, and was at the same time so unfortunately arranged that even a satisfactory abbreviation of it involved difficulty.