| <headline><p> <Making the Government Wiser. Significance> 
| <of the Swan Contest. Labor's Challenge to All Comers.>
| </p></headline>
| <p> The contest for Swan will mark with definiteness the 
| change in public opinion since May, 1917.  It is 
| inconceivable that any candidate should expect to secure 
| election on an alleged platform of win the war phrases 
| and other loud-sounding platitudes about everything in 
| general and nothing in particular.  Whoever or how many 
| go to the poll in the name of Nationalism, they have 
| either to stand as political supporters of the 
| Hughes-Watt Government or confess at once the validity of 
| Labor's case against the Cabinet and the party which 
| keeps it in office. </p>
| <p> There are no half-way houses in contemporary 
| politics.  What happened to Mitchell and Pilkington in 
| the State Legislative Assembly the other day is what 
| would assuredly happen to any insurgent Nationalist who 
| happened to win Swan as other than a direct addition to 
| the number now sitting dumb behind a group of Ministers 
| whose statesmanship is only another name for mud.  In 
| every department of the public requirement the policy so 
| loudly declaimed at the general elections has been 
| proved a sham and a delusion.  Outside of a stupid 
| muddling in administration and never-ending speeches 
| which produce nothing except further speeches Hughes and 
| his cohorts have signally failed the country. </p>
| <p> We know it could not have been otherwise.  They 
| brazenly won to office on a hurricane of lies. Their 
| promises were preposterous because every sensible person 
| knew the things requisite to their realisation were 
| anathema to the interests of predatory privilege and 
| money-grasping which controlled the party machinery of 
| Nationalism. </p>
| <p> Let each elector in Swan demand from the anti-Labor 
| candidates at the coming election the manifestos  
| circulated among the overseas troops sixteen months ago.  
| Let there be a comparison made between the things Hughes 
| told the troops were to be done with what has now been 
| accomplished.  Let somebody ask where is the policy of 
| anti-profiteering in war time which the world was told 
| would be an early accomplishment of the silver-tongued 
| apostles of win the war with words.  Let there be a 
| stock-taking made of what the Government has done and 
| has not done.  Labor and its candidate will abide the 
| issue. </p>
| <p> Ships and wheat could, for a start, be closely 
| examined.  How comes it that even as late as the day is 
| practically nothing has yet been vouchsafed us except 
| talk.  Had the Government not been in the grip of the 
| shipping cormorants there would have been more attention 
| paid to the organisation of ship construction as an 
| urgent business vital to the war essentials of the 
| Allies and the economic security of Australia, and less 
| attention to the gazettal of regulations provocative of 
| national disunity, culminating in factionism and 
| bitterness of spirit as between one citizen and 
| another. </p>
| <p> But this Government never had a policy with which to 
| fashion constructive purposes.  The frazzle it has made 
| of the meat supply in Eastern Australia is only equalled 
| by the licence it has given every buccaneer of 
| capitalism to levy toll on the national substance.  
| Proof overwhelming has been advanced by every 
| conceivable inquiry that jobbery is rampant in the 
| circles of Big Business.  Goods are sold and re-sold 
| time and time again with no other object than to enable 
| speculators <to> boost prices so that out of the 
| consumers' pockets may come the cash which fattens the 
| boodling suckers of Flinders Lane and Pitt Street. </p>
| <p> Electors of Swan need only consider the question of 
| bags to prove this allegation beyond any vestige of 
| doubt.  In every capital there exist highly organised 
| groups of business men for whom the war has been like 
| manna from the skies.  In fact if the great struggle 
| were to cease now it would be a difficult problem for 
| the pirates to show wherein they have lost a thing as 
| the price of its awful incidence.  Yet despite the 
| solemn assurances made to the soldiers who went abroad 
| and to the dependants they left at home, the spiders of 
| money have been left absolutely free to continue 
| spinning webs in which to prey upon the nation's 
| vitality. </p>
| <p> Corboy goes to the Swan to offer challenge to this 
| outrageous pandering of a Government in war time to the 
| pursuits of mammon.  He will make the demand upon the 
| merits of his argument, and by virtue of his own 
| personal qualifications as a spokesman for the 
| colleagues with whom he shared midnight vigil in the 
| black chasm and hell's roaring blasts on the lead-swept 
| plain, that the orgy of profiteering must end. </p>
| <p> And as this contest is to be a clean, a straight and 
| convincing contest, the labor candidate will fearlessly 
| stand for the peace formula which his party submits to 
| the world as a reasoned basis upon which to found a 
| reconciled humanity.  He will outline the argument that 
| military decisions of themselves, and unaccompanied by a 
| determination of rival projects as between great and 
| powerful belligerents, leave the sources of war 
| unobliterated.  The man who speaks for Labor in Swan 
| will speak for the principles upon which a permanent 
| peace of peoples can be founded.  That he will have to 
| withstand the criticism of the claquers of governing 
| casts will not deter him from this splendid and 
| humanity-serving purpose. </p>
| <p> The issues dividing the candidates are capable of 
| exact statement.  There is no reason for any 
| misapprehension of where each stands.  The Labor 
| candidate seeks election as a straight out opponent of 
| the Nationalist Government.  He believes it is wedded to 
| projects and interests which are incompatible with the 
| true needs of the country.  Its title of win the war is 
| a gross presumption out of keeping with the fitness of 
| things, to say nothing of the relationship Australia has 
| to the other allied countries.  The methods the 
| Government employs in order to live up to its 
| preposterous appellation are no longer worthy of 
| consideration at the hands of thinking citizens. </p>
| <p> We put it as plainly as we can that only a sharp and 
| sudden defeat in a constituency traditionally regarded 
| as a stronghold of conservatism will shock the 
| Government out of its complacent contempt for the 
| growing public dissatisfaction towards it peurilities 
| and its injustices.  Let the Swan administer a much-needed
| lesson.  We thoroughly realise that the election 
| of Corboy will not defeat the Government.  It will, 
| however, assuredly give us a Government that will be the 
| wiser for the event.  That at least will ensure some 
| improvement in the management Australia now suffers 
| from. </p>
| <trailer><p> <J Curtin, 40 Stirling Street, Perth.> 
| <September 20, 1918> <The Westralian Worker> 
| <Friday, September 20, 1918> </p></trailer>