PARTY POLITICS

Waikato Times, Volume 193, Issue 22204, 25 November 1943, Page 4

PARTY POLITICS

NEGOTIATIONS COLLAPSE DELEGATES WALK OUT DEBATE IN AUSTRALIA (Special Australian correspondent) (Received Nov. 25, 1 p.m.) SYDNEY, Nov. 25 Negotiations for the formation in New South Wales of a new Liberal Democratic Party have collapsed. It had been intended that the new party should become a Common-wealth-wide coalition of all nonLabour political interests. As a beginning the new party, representing a merger of the United Australian, Liberal Democratic and Commonwealth parties, intended to contest next year’s New South Wales State elections. New South Wales at present has a Labour Government. Supporters of the original Liberal Democrats walked out from a conference after a heated debate on the United Australia Party’s demand that its paid party staff be temporarily retained. The United Australia and Commonwealth Party delegates have agreed to merge and form a new organisation, to be called the Democratic Party. The Liberal Democrats will continue as a separate organisation.

Most political commentators blame the United Australia Party, which provides the bulk of the opposition in the New South Wales State as well as in the Federal Parliament, for the failure of the negotiations. No Surprise at Collapse

“No student of the Malaise which has afflicted the United Australia Party will feel any surprise at this collapse,” says the Sydney Morning Herald editorially. Obviously if a genuinely new start was to be made the question of the control of the new party’s organisation involved the relinquishment of certain vested interests. The delegates of the Liberal Democratic Party could hardly be expected to accept a plan which would virtually have installed the discredited United Australian Party machine as the organising medium for the new party. “The breakdown of the conference is disappointing to all who hoped it would lead to the birth of a muchneeded virile and progressive political movement and confirms the belief that the building of a new party must begin from the ground up and not from the top down.”