THE COMING FIGHT

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23517, 3 June 1938, Page 14

THE COMING FIGHT

MR SEMPLE APPREHENSIVE A VIGOROUS SPEECH PLEA FOR CLEAN CAMPAIGN (Special to Daily Times) WELLINGTON, June 2. “ It is going to be a severe and dirty fight. ‘ Whispering campaigns,’ slander and vilifications, and every conceivable trick that can be played on the Government and its supporters will be played,” said the Minister of Public Works and Transport, (Mr Semple), when referring to the coming general election campaign in a public address at Johnsonville tonight. Mr Semple said if the people were going to be side-tracked by slandermongers and character-assassins they would deserve all they would get. The political life of the nation, he said, ought to be kept above slander. Fights ought to be clean fights on fundamental political issues. He had many friends in New Zealand who were Tories. He admired them as citizens. They looked through different spectacles, but that was no reason why he should go and defame their names behind their backs.

“ I would never do that,” Mr Semple continued. “It is only a cur, a reptile in human shape, that will do that. There are only two types of people in this world I despise. The first is the man who will/steal a woman’s honour and throw her into the gutter. The other is the man or woman who sneaks through the door when a man is away and tells stories about him.” The Minister. related a story which, he said, had been told to a friend of his in Christchurch by the National Party organiser when he was in Australia, to the effect that he had absconded with £50.000, and that when he got there it had worried him into an asylum from which he would never come out. There was a lot more of that sort of thing, he said, against other Cabinet Ministers, and even against the Prime Minister himself. “ I have met some wonderful men and women in my time and I have never met a more kindly man or a cleaner living man than the Prime Minister of this country,” he added. The Minister said he had been in public life for a good while. Sometimes he felt he was getting tired of it and felt he would like a rest. “But,” he stated, “every speck of energy I possess will go into this fight to keep out of office the people who caused poverty and tears to the people of this country when they were in power, and I say that the man at the head of them to-day is the hardest of the bunch. If you want him you can have him.” Mr Semple reviewed at length the work of his two departments, and explained a film showing the work being done by the Public Works Department. The Empress Theatre was full, and at the close of his address the Minister was accorded a vote of thanks and confidence without dissent.