“NEW MOVEMENT OF THE PEOPLE”

Southland Times, Issue 23990, 4 December 1939, Page 8

“NEW MOVEMENT OF THE PEOPLE”

MINISTER SCOFFS AT MEETING “JUST ANOTHER ATTACK ON THE GOVERNMENT” (United Press Association) WELLINGTON, December 2. Commenting in ironic vein on the “new movement of the people,” and its first manifestation' in Wellington in a meeting on Tuesday night, the Minister of Finance (the Hon. W. Nash) says his objectives and the declared objectives of the “unseen organizers” have so much in common that he wonders why he did not receive one of the prized invitations to attend. He scoffs at the meeting being held by invitation, and wonders if the audience “really represented every class of the community.” If so, why the necessity for invitations? “But why woiider?” he adds. “This is just another attack upon the Government and the Government’s policy, just another spanner thrown into the national machinery at a time when the needs of the Empire call for co-opera-tion instead of obstruction. I cannot believe that any loyal body of men would purposely hinder the country and the Empire in their war effort; yet that would be the result if Macaulay’s laissez faire programme were put into practice.” BENEFITS SINCE MACAULAY Mr Nash says the world has travelled a long way since Macaulay. He would have found fault with every New Zealand Government of the last 50 years and would have stigmatized as meddling by the State, pensions, factory legislation, industrial conciliation and arbitration, public hospitals, State advances, free education and equal opportunities in life. Did this new voice of the people, when it became articulate, propose to scrap all those benefits? He summarized their attitude as: “We must not allow the Government to impede New Zealand’s war effort so let us wreck the Government’s policy and, if we can, smash the Government.” That, at a time when the chief end of the Government’s policy was fighting and winning the war, and when the whole of the Government’s energies and resources had been placed at the disposal of the British Government and the King. That was a curiously perverted form of co-operation to say the least of it.

Mr Nash said he did not object to criticism but “when we and our opponents are in agreement on the dominant political issue of the day—the conduct of the war—we do not expect to be hampered in our efforts to wage the war successfully. Instead, we hope for co-operation and help. At the barest minimum we are entitled to demand a cessation of the pin-pricking, irritation tactics which some would-be politicians pass for constructive statesmanship.” When people spoke they did so without preliminary planning behind closed doors, Mr Nash declared, and added that the people had spoken in the last three months clearly and resolutely and that it was the duty of the Government to heed their voice and spend itself

utterly in the cause to which the Empire was committed. By what authority and in what right did hidden groups seek to embarrass and hinder a Government engaged upon its simple duty.