AWAKENING OF DEMOCRACY

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23637, 22 October 1938, Page 21

AWAKENING OF DEMOCRACY

TO THE b'OITOB Sir, —Now that the shouting and the tumult of the election have died away, and we are once more calm and collected, let us examine the reasons for the decisive verdict given by the electors. During former election campaigns, and by the Nationalists in the last elections, electors were asked to decide on methods of building the State as put forward by official candidates who knew as little about the economic or practical value of their particular formula as did the unfortunate electors themselves, The fiction was that the candidate undertook to think, study, learn, and labour for the public weal. The fact was that he speculated in popular favour to make out of it what he could for himself and for his masters whose mouthpiece he was. He placed himself in the pulpit when, in fact, he was in the market. Consequently. we have heard from our childhood days that democracy had failed, and when we saw the mess the world was in the average person was apt to agree. Democracy has not failed, for the reason that it has never been tried In national affairs.

Our dictionary tells us that " democracy ” is “ government by the people,” In the past democracy has been a sham. Our representatives gave us what they thought was good for us, or. rather, what the vested interests behind them knew was good for them. Such a system could only exist while the sovereign people allowed it to exist. In the last few years they have been awakened by the efforts of Labour speakers, monetary reformers, and personal sufferingcausing them to think furiously—to the knowledge' that famines are manmade and can be ended by man. They realise that the means are there to satisfy their demands and that they will only be satisfied when they unitedly demand that result. They know now that what is physically possible is and must be made financially possible. In 1935 they accordingly dismissed the type of politician who supported the scarcity myth, and placed in power a party pledged to serve the people and to distribute the existing plenty. They took courage from Shakespeare’s words. “ Every bondsman in his own hand bears the power to cancel his captivity.” As their confidence was not misplaced, they rewarded the Government with a further term of office. It has dawned upon every elector that when his local council, in response to a public demand, decides to build a bridge, the electors are not asked to vote on methods of construction. The truth is that the electors are not concerned with, nor are they qualified to express an opinion on, the technical questions involved. Neither do they expect their representatives to decide such questions. They have communicated their wishes to their representatives, and insist that they instruct the experts to carry out the people’s demands, limited only by available resources. Should the people’s representatives or the experts fall to do so, they would quickly be replaced. That is true democracy in action, and New. Zealand is demonstrating to the world how it operates when applied to national government, for we have now a Government pledged to implement the wishes of the electors with the aid, and not at, the dictation, of the experts, financial or otherwise.

During the 1935 and 1938 election campaigns your columns. Sir, were overtaxed with propaganda as to methods in an endeavour to obscure the issue as of old, but your efforts were ignored by the people on both occasions, and will in future be ignored, due to the changed conception of democratic government. The world is growing to a new birth. No one will deny that there is, in a scale as wide as the world itself, a remorseless crushing of the old order. Out of the new order that is arising, there comes the faint wailings of a new life. The area of the material possibilities of life will be enlarged beyond measurement. The imaginative comprehension of that enlargement is hopelessly lacking in the business world represented by yourself and the Notional Party. The human fact has outrun your party. Our fight to-day is not what is was for 1000 years—a fight against Nature. That fight has been fought and von. Labourious days and -hungry hearths are no longer the inevitable common lot. The philosophy men then made to protect themselves still lives on, and is a danger as potent as the scarcity he fought. We cannot to-day attempt to fit an overwhelming productive supremacy over Nature ii.to the needs of a philosophy based on Nature’s supremacy over us. Such an attempt can only bring famine. That it did bring famine in 1930 cannot be controverted. The creative energy of man must go on creating. It cannot be stopped because it has outgrown the imaginative scale of present businessbanker technique. Man as consumer is a necessity of our machine age; the machine must almost bribe men to consume its product as a condition of their both continuing to function; one without the other is a physical contradiction. Finance is the machinery of consumption. Finance must issue that bribe to assure consumption, as it issues the bribe to man to produce, under terms that impose only one obligation on man—that he uses it only for its legitimate object, in the buying and using up of the product. The idea that the triumphal progress of man shall stop at the command of his own method of making his own money tickets for the exchange of his own goods is shameful to our manhood ' Money is a method, we can change the method when and how we wish. It is the servant of man masquerading as a master, deceived by its own masquerade and served by lackeys similarly deceived. The fight is now on and to be unmoved by the magnitude of the struggle is to be emotionally dead—to be unconscious of its existence is to be cut off from reality. I charge you, Sir, and the National Party with both offences. We should hate poverty as a symbol of our self-elected suicidal stupidity, for national to-day is a national choice; we choose it when we might choose the opposite. N( w Zealand has declared that the consumption of the plenty shall be the paramount condition of our financial policy. It is common sense and good business, and no consideration shall be allowed to stand against it. Full consumntion of the full product is necessary for good business. Finance must instrument that full consumption as its first consideration. We wish to achieve only those rather homely desires which are the common desires of us all We would secure security and surcease from the unbearably mean anxieties of modern life. I trust that your efforts in future will be directed towards assisting the peonlo’s Government to achieve this desirable consummation.—I am. etc.. Democrat.