TE AWAMUTU COURIER. Printed on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. FRIDAY, 30th OCTOBER, 1936 MORALS AND GAMBLING.

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3827, 30 October 1936, Page 6

TE AWAMUTU COURIER. Printed on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. FRIDAY, 30th OCTOBER, 1936 MORALS AND GAMBLING.

THE Minister of Internal Affairs candidly admits that if he had the statutory privilege to do so, he would inaugurate a national sweepstake in New Zealand. Perhaps his statement is intended to test public opinion because it is obvious that if the desire is genuinely considered favourable to the national interest the Minister has at his command a sufficient Parliamentary backing to secure whatever legislative reform is pre-deter-mined by Cabinet. Perhaps, also, the Minister seeks to awaken activity in circles which do not maintain pressure on the political machine, since he almost offers the taunt that other sections are constant in a claim for the suppression of gambling. “I get a lot of criticism from the churches,” Mr Parry admitted, and it could be logically inferred that he is left to play a lone hand in his desire “to improve and correct sporting activities in New Zealand.”

It is true, as the Minister admits, that the anti-gambling crusade is persistent, and it is equally true that, however insistent the claim for legislated facilities may be in purposeless discussions, little, if any, constitutional representation is made. Governments in the past have yielded to directed pressure, but the Minister of Internal affairs to-day seems bent on a more positive approach. He invites public opinion to organise itself and find its constitutional expression in Parliament. Nobody can condone gambling. But before it can be sweepingly condemned, the necessity arises to attack so many systems which surround and survive in modern life. Difficult indeed is the task of defining gambling as it actually exists because it enters so largely into the commercial and even the domestic codes. The'remarkable inconsistency arises that many who lead the anti-gambling campaign are themselves deeply involved in “respectable” speculation in which the fate is more determined by hazard than by ' effort. Ethically there is no clear line- of demarcation between the hazards of a speculative market than the fortunes of a spinning wheel. The difference is of method rather than of morals.

To suggest, as is maintained in some quarters, that a forbidding law prohibits gambling, is to be blind to •.ctual facts. The morally correct citizen who fancies that law can control the public conscience only succeeds in acting ostrich fashion, elevating himself to a fool’s paradise, and finding solace in a make-believe. All that is gained by such methods is to drive a traffic underground, and to thereby encourage its most undesirable and objectionable influences. Not so many years ago, a deputation from the Council of Churches went to the Attorney-General in Tasmania to advance a plea that Tattersails should be declared illegal. The deputation met a Ministry which considered only the practical side. It was revealed that without Tattersails’ revenue, Tasmania' could not endure the burden of taxation and would cease to exist as a sovereign State; that, also, many and various church organisations had been liberally as-

sisted by substantial donations from Sweepstake funds. Strangely, or perhaps naturally, the revelation of these facts dispelled moral objection. Actually, there is more pious humbug talked on the subject of gambling than on almost any other topic. Inconsistencies arise whenever the question is raised. It reaches to the standards of all human conduct as we know and accept them in our modern society. Speculation is only another name for gambling; it is a matter of method or degree and not of principle. To condone and legalise the elements of speculation on the one hand, and to condemn and make it punishable on the other hand is not, to say the least, practical politics. Governments, so far, have pandered to false beliefs, have lacked sincerity in the processes of enforcement, and have done little more than persecute victims who were mainly guilty because they did not exist sufficiently underground to avoid detection. Every child in every village can point to underground channels where gambling which is legislatively taboo exists—that is, of course if the children are not blind to realities.

Gambling, it is evident, cannot be condoned. But is there logical reason why it should not be controlled? It certainly needs no encouragement, and it will not be encouraged if it is brought openly into the accepted highway. Because, while it is hidden and obscure, it develops most undesirable tendencies. Like any illicit traffic it breeds corruption, deceit, cultivates cunning, and, in a moral sense, it turns evil into epidemic disease.

Mr Parry admits a desire to build up the people’s health. “With the proceeds from sweepstakes I would be able to get a long way toward that goal,” he says. Admittedly New Zealand is contributing largely to the revenues of another State, and might well retain the wealth for more healthful circulation in this Dominion. But by dragging a traffic up from the cellars, and placing it under disciplinary control and direction, Mr Parry would, in one stroke, do more for the moral health of the community than revenue assistance to physical health can ever attain. For he would put right the evils of years of humbugging legislative restriction and prosecution—years which have simply destroyed moral character by adding to the evils of gambling the further dangers of deception, cunning and fraud.