MINISTER AND CANDIDATE

Taranaki Daily News, 11 October 1928, Page 9

MINISTER AND CANDIDATE

MR. W. J. POLSON’S REPLY. In the course of his address at Stratford last night, Mr. W. J. Polson dealt briefly with the attitude of the Hon. A. D. McLeod towards him and with open letters appearing under the Minister’s name in the Taranaki Press. “There is absolutely no foundation in what Mr. McLeod has written and said about me,” said Mr. Polson. The whole of the six charges the Minister had made had been entirely disproved, not only by the speaker but also by the officials of the Farmers’ T ’’ion. Mr. McLeod had then withdrawn these charges, or had appeared to, and had substituted others. These were just as easily disproved, and the Minister had now gone back to his original arguments. Mr. Polson ventured to say it was hardly worth his while to go on refuting such futile attacks. (Cries of Hear! Hear!) However, went on Mr. Polson, there was one matter -that (Nil require attention. Mr. McLeod had said that the following statement made by the speaker was incorrect: “In his Budget speech in 1925, according to the Lyttelton Times report, Mr. Stewart is reported as saying, ‘I wish to emphasise again the danger of outside borrowing on a large scale, while there are signs that the excess of exports over imports is not sufficient to cover our charges for interest payable overseas.’ “All I can say about the matter is that if Mr. Downie Stewart did not make the remark, ho must have got someone with the same name at the same time to do it, because it was reporter verbatim in the Times and also appeared in the Exporter,” said Mr. Polson. “I have never heard Mr. Downie Stewart repudiate the speech,” he concluded.