"Our Free Land"

Street meetings have now been banned in Wellington. As Mr. A. C. Barrington said in Court (July, 1948), "The City Council has a duty to . . . facilitate assembly and discussion", but they prefer to ignore it.

While they are sweeping discussion off the streets, the political police are sitting in on meetings of organisations which they consider, apparently, to be "dangerous."

Thus last February the present writer had the unpleasant duty of removing a plain clothes man from a meeting of the local branch of the Peace and Anti-Conscription Federation. Peace, I believe, is in the interest of this as of any other nation. Conscription is to be submitted to a referendum of the people. How, then, can the gestapo claim that this organisation is seditious? And if they don't, what prompts the honour of such visits?

Loudly Mr. Fraser screams about "police States." Yet in his own Prime Minister's Department he has set up the nucleus of an S.S. that would nail down the very coffin lid of our already declining liberties.

Student Congress passed a resolution in January opposing all attacks on civil liberties and intellectual freedom and to police interference with political, religious and industrial liberties. Truly, NZUSA Annual Conference has let the student body down badly by falling to support this resolution. But that must not stop us students from giving it the support of our action now.

Remember Thomas Mann's words. And remember, too, that fascism is just as bitter in its attacks on the universities, as bastions of reason and independent thinking, as it is on the very trade union movement itself. Don't fool yourself. It can happen here.

"God defend our free land." sings our national anthem. But remember. God helps him who helps himself. Wake up, New Zealand!