PARTY POLITICS

Waipa Post, Volume 42, Issue 3314, 25 June 1931, Page 5

PARTY POLITICS

THE POLITICAL GAME GOES ON.

BUT WHAT OP THE COUNTRY?

(Contributed.) Ardent Reformers in the Empire City have just been entertained, and I trust, ediiied by an address delivered by Mr C. A. L. Treadwell, one of the city's most versatile solicitors. The ocacsion of this deliverance was a gathering of members of the "Wellington Reform Club who have a happy knack of associating their politics with a generous measure of social amenity. Mr Treadwell appears to have devoted the greater part of his address to a wholesale denunciation of the Prime Minister's '■'party fusion proposal," which he cheerily imprecated as an "astute political move," and at the same time "ludicrous and an insult to the intelligence." Whose intelligence was confronted he did not say, but it probably would be easy enough to inuicate the sufferer. It surely would have been only fair, in any case, to have admitted that Mr Forbes made his suggestion in pei-fect good faith without any obstructive reservation.

Mr Treadwell as he warmed to his subject recalled the developments of 1928 and of the years that followed. "It had become unpopular for a number of reasons, the chief of which was the financial programme," he said of the Reform Party in its declining days. " That programme had been shaped as it had been because Mr Coates had seen the clouds that were now bursting over New Zealand and had tried to shorten sail accordingly, a procedure which did not meet with the approval of the man in the street."

It is quite true that a tight hand was kept upon public expenditure when Mr Downie Stewart took charge of the Treasury in the declining years of the Reform Government; but Mr Coates. to his credit, would be the last to expect personal applause for the achievements of his gifted colleague. Mr Treadwell must go further afield for an explanation of the debacle of his party three years ago. It is all in the party game, of course, that so staunch a Reformer as Mr Treadwell is should attempt to saddle on to Mr Forbes the mistakes of the Prime Minister with whom he was associated. He goes back two and a half years to misconstrue the intentions of Sir Joseph Ward in regard to that seventy millions loan, and lays all the misconstructions of a sick chief on the shoulders of a loyal colleague who has stepped into his shoes. To sluggest at this stage that the United Party nearly three years ago had turned away from the Reform Party in order that it might embrace the Labour Party is to misinterpret the whole position as it is to-day. The Labour Party now, as Mr Treadwell knows full well, is simply aching to join forces with the Reform Party in ousting the United one from office, and this may be a denouement of the near future. His allusions to the sanguine plans of Mr Forbes' predecessor in office were scarcely worthy of so cultured a gentleman as Mr Treadwell is—away from politics, and the suspicion he would cast upon Mr Forbes' bona fides concerning fusion was inexcusable. " One of the most significant things to me about the fusion proposal," he told his audience, " was that it was not made when the House was sitting, when everyone was there and the pros and cons of it could have been discussed. It was not made till the House had risen and everyone had gone back to the electorates. That alone is enough to cause suspicion as to the sincerity of the offer-whether it was not merely a political stunt." On the extreme outskirts of political society such a suggestion might be excused or even expected, but addressed to a company of club men it surely was utterly out of place.