A Labour Critic.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXIV, Issue 931, 29 November 1933, Page 6

A Labour Critic.

Dear Sir,—Mr E. J. Howard repeats his party’s parrot-cry about the M.E.D. being one of the best-managed municipal enterprises in New Zealand. What does it benefit us to get current at a lower rate than other towms when that benefit is dissipated, when the poorer workers have to pay fourpence per unit for current that costs only about a halfpenny per unit. Add to that the loss of reserve funds and the ridiculously high costs of management, for which the workers have to pay by going short of necessities. Mr Howard’s remark about Labour not being properly represented on local bodies is claptrap. Local bodies should be managed by local people, for their own benefit, and political parties should keep out of them. The only political party that wants to control local bodies is the so-called Labour Party. So far as real Labour is concerned, there are hundreds of working people taking an active part in local body affairs, and if it comes to the point, there are many in the Citizens’ party who have more real claims to the name Labour than those who trade on that word. There is a local body in the North Island which has over-borrowed and over-squandered, and has reached the limit of its rating powers and something in the form of a receiver has been appointed. The political Labour Party can’t make political capital out of that. The political party that has control of our city is heading for the same thing. They have increased the rates, enormously increased the debts, lowered the purchasing pow’er of the poor to increase the purchasing power of a small army of favourites. They expect and accept money contributions from the council employees to their party funds, and are in consequence incapable of efficient control. They are following in the footsteps of the Australian political Labour Partv which got control of Sydney municipal affairs and which brought fraud, corruption and waste into everything they touched, until the State interfered and appointed a commissioner. The same thing occurred in Dublin. There, the political party’s control was so bad that after having had three years’ control by a manager appointed by the State, the people were so gratified with the vast improvement that they asked that control by a commissioner ba continued.—l am, etc* CRITIC,