“ NOT CONSULTED.”

Star (Christchurch), Volume XLIV, Issue 279, 24 November 1931, Page 5

“ NOT CONSULTED.”

Labour Leader’s Answer to Coalition. THE FUSION PROPOSALS. Per Press Association. PALMERSTON N., November 23. Mr H. E. Holland, Labour leader, spoke in the Opera House, which was crowded to overflowing, with a large audience in the street listening to a loud-speaker. It was undoubtedly the most enthusiastic Labour meeting ever held at Palmerston. Mr Holland said Mr Forbes was appealing to people to purchase New Zealand goods, but his*. Government had been busy importing both railway sleepers and coal from overseas while their own sleeper getters and coal miners were standing idle. Mr Forbes now said that the coal had been ordered from Australia by his Government as a stand-by against action by the miners. That statement was a flat contradiction of the Prime Minister's reply to the speaker when the imported coal was being ordered. At that time Mr Forbes telegraphed that only a small quantity of coal was being brought from Australia, and that it was being obtained for storage in open-air depots. An opposite announcement was made at the same time by Mr Veitch, then Minister of Railways, who declared that the coal was being imported because it could not be procured from the mines of the Dominion. Mr Forbes’s latest explanation was an emphatic contradiction of what Mr Veitch had said. Another misstatement by the Prime Minister to his Dunedin audience was that he (Mr Holland) had said that the speech made by Mr Coates at Dargaville had been broadcast. He made no reference whatever to Mr Coates’s Dargaville speech. What he said was that from Wellington some time previously Mr Coates had broadcast a statement of Government policy in relation to unemplovment, and that the speech so broadcast contained no ray of hope for betterment of the position of the unemployed. As to Mr Forbes’s repetition of his assertion that he put the matter of forming a National Government before the leader of the Labour Party, he now wished to invite Mr Forbes to make available for inspection his files with the communication which he claimed to have sent and the reply he claimed to have received. As a matter of fact, no communication ever had been sent to him by Mr Forbes, and consequently no reply could have been received by that gentleman. A vote of confidence in the Labour Party was carried amidst cheers.