Labour Relations

The promises here, though cautiously guarded were clearly that Labour was closer to the workers and would favour them in disputes, and not the bosses as the National Government did. But the experience so far has been the opposite—rather the Government has pressured the workers to give up their demands and used the Federation of Labour's right wing to this end. This has been the case with the airport crash firemen, the paper factories engineers, and a number of others.

We could deal with other promises—unemployment, the supply of doctors, taxation, women's rights—but the picture is already clear.

The writing is already on the wall. Labour's pretence that it can alter the quality of life for the working people without ending monopoly capitalism, without organising the people for a socialist transformation of New Zealand, and without breaking with American imperialism is already being exposed for what it is—a pipe dream. The final cold awakening from this dream will come with the first cold douche of economic adversity for New Zealand, now riding the waves of bumper overseas prices. Then the working class and youth of New Zealand will really need to draw the correct economic system and the measure necessary to solve their pressing problems.

As that well known professor, John Roberts, concludes; "Truly a Government of dynamic caution".

(Reprinted from "M L", a broadsheet of Communist views, published by the Wellington Marxist-Leninist Group, P.O. Box 6069, Wellington.)