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Salient. Victoria University of Wellington Student's Newspaper. Volume 31, Number 10 May 28 1968

Wrong Side

Wrong Side

Sir—Mr Gager on the Labour Party Conference makes me believe he is now so far to the left he is in cloud-cuckoo land on the right.

Gager has made himself the doyen of right wing political circles. He has cohabited quite happily with such denizens of the University Campus as P. J. Wedderspoon.

He graces the living room of far right wing Councillor McGrath, delighting the assembled advocates of the market economy with his criticisms of the Labour movement.

He comes back from National Club Little Congress virtually aglow with pleasure that Uncle Tom Shand had placed his big ex-workers' mit on his shoulder, in a gesture of acceptance of Owen Gager, independent critic.

Gager and Mr Logan are two excellent examples of the operation of psychopathoiogy in politics. Both believe that it is impossible for the socialist movement in this country to make any progress without it being a reaction in disguise.

That is why Gager chooses to believe the reason branches choose to be represented by students at the Labour Party Conference is they are too apathetic, rather than that they really want to be represented by articulate young people with forward-looking ideas.

If Gager had actually been at the conference and not outside the doors of the Town Hall picking up snippets of gossip, which the peculiar workings of his mind further distorted, he might have realised that branches represented by their own members, university delegates and progressive elements of the trade union movement for the first time, were able to command a majority of this conference.

The universities were playing a very significant role in shaping the policy of a major political party.

Of course, it served Logan's interest as a member of the National Party to have Gager launch a child-like attack on the leadership of the Labour Party and deliberately ignore the very significant issues raised by this Conference.

It now seems to be the policy of the Student Executive to appoint members of the National Party to editorship of Salient—Mr Rennie, Mr Saunders, the two immediate past editors— belong to that unholy alliance of trade and peasant.

Owen Gager is Publications' Officer on the Student Executive—funny appointment, Logan's for a "socialist?"

Gager is wedded to the politics of personalities and it is his own ego that always peeps life a half risen sun, through his writing.

Could the reason for Gager's attack on Professor Chapman be that Gager was never accepted by the Auckland academic establishment?

It was, of course, Gager who spoke against supporting a trade unionist and watersider for Eastern Maori by-election—peculiar middleclass view, that, for one who accuses Labour's youth movement of trying to perpetuate a class system.

Gager is everything that the National Party member likes to imagine a "socialist" is— a professional student who bites those in a movement with him, harder than those who prevent the achievement of ends he professes to believe.

Unlike Gager, I believe the ideals and policies of the Labour movement are far more important than its personalities.

However, I deny that I have ever claimed to be a Trotskyism but take pleasure in reaffirming my belief in anarchism.

My ideal is a society in which all forms of authoritarian control no longer exist and anarchism offers progressive alternative policies in industrial organisation and education.

Labour will begin a movement towards this type of society when it passes a remit to abolish the Security Police at its next conference.

It began this movement by implementing a policy of Trust Control at its 1968 Conference.

Murray Rowlands.