NO CREDIT TO HIS PARTY

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 19846, 21 May 1927, Page 6

NO CREDIT TO HIS PARTY

The split in the New South Wales Labour Party, which has been widening day by day for weeks past, seems now to have reached the dimensions of a gulf which there is no bridging. The two factions have each put up a candidate for a by-election and each declares its intention of seeing the fight through, so apparently the difference is irreconcilable. It is not difficult to lay a finger on the spot whence all the trouble emanates. State Premier Lang is the head and front of all the disturbance. His dictatorial methods, his vindictiveness in the face of opposition, and his curious ideas as to the right and the wrong course to pursue have alienated the majority of his own party. A less self-sufficient man would before this have taken the decent course of retiring from the leadership. But Mr Lang is determined to sit tight and, if he cannot get his own way, seems to prefer the wreck of his party. Mr Theodore, of Queensland, one of the most prominent men in the Common wen Ith Labour movement, was evidently referring to Mr Lang when, in a speech on Thursday, he said that there were some people in high positions whose over-weening pride made thorn think they were the whole movement. Certainly the New South Wales Premier’s record has shown that he has a Czar-like temperament. His latest act was to try and hoist a protege of his own into a comfortable billet at £1750 a year which his Cabinet colleagues, already in mutiny against him, objected to and which the Governor referred back for reconsideration. When a man in Mr Lang’s position cannot get on with his own colleagues, when he is at variance with his own party, when almost bis every act is opposed by his own friends, there can be only one ending to such a situation. Mr Lang will probably postpone the inevitable by hanging on to office till the next, election, but it will take something like a miracle to save him then. The best possible thing that can happen to his party is to be rid of him. While he is in it, even if only nominally, he is worse than a calamity to his party; he is a calamity to the whole of his State.