MR. FRASER’S DEFENCE OF LABOUR POLICY

Wanganui Chronicle, 4 May 1948, Page 5

MR. FRASER’S DEFENCE OF LABOUR POLICY

FREEDOM FROM WANT AND FEAR OF WANT (P.A.) Dunedin, May 3. “Our liberty, which is the sum total of all our freedoms, is greater today as the result of the Laoour Government’s legislation than at any time in New Zealand's history.,” said the Prime Minister (Mr. Fraser), in the course of his address at the Labour Party conference toaay. Mr. Fraser affirmed that the concept of human freedom today had broadened to include freedom from want. This had been achieved in New Zealand, through such measures as the Government’s wage policy, social security and full employment. In fact the whole economic policy of the Government, designed to further the maximum welfare of the whole Dominion, was conditioned to ensure that want, and fear of want, would not return to New Zealand. Mr. Fraser recalled that Lord Beveridge last week referred to some words of John Stuart Mill, in his esysay on liberty, in which he said that nearly everything that made life worth living for any man depended on imposing restrictions on others, and, Mr. Fraser added on, himself, but the Government would only interfere with individual freedoms in one direction—if its action increased the individual liberty for the majority in another.

“It is by these principles that Labour has guided its policy,” Mr. Fraser said. “It has a progressive attitude to liberty, sharply distinguishable from that of the National Party, which looks back to the day when there was untrammelled economic freedom for a few, while the many were bound hand and foot by unemployment and poverty, and the fear of these evils. The constant protesting of the National Party against controls is fundamentally due to the desire to put the clock back, to subtract from the economic freedom of many and to enhance the freedom of the privileged.” The myth that they would spread was that controls were the negation of freedom. The truth was that freedom cannot exist unless all were willing to surrender some or it. The need for traffic controls and public health regulations, no one would dispute. They restricted some of the freedoms in the interest of the freedom of everyone to go on living safely. The Labour Government insisted that the people should also have economic freedoms to go on living' without feat and penury. Measures it had taken were to establish full employment and maintain living standards. The import control stabilisation policy had directly imposed regulations on some people's activities, but no one could dispute that the sum total of freedom in New Zealand had greatly increased through the bringing of prosperity to all people, and security to every home. “And let it always be remembered,” said the Prime Minister, "that the Labour Party stands for Parliamentary democracy, or government by consent of the governed, the greatest bulwork of all our freedom.”