Poet Decides to Withhold Tax

The poet, James K. Baxter, last night urged New Zealanders not to pay any money they might owe the Government, but instead to pay it into funds for relief work overseas. He had done this himself with his income tax, he said, and had paid it into the Biafra fund. He had written to the Prime Minister, saying that he was doing this on behalf of the Government, as it had not given the Biafrans ‘a cracker’.

Mr Baxter was speaking to three hundred people at a religious ceremony at Hamilton’s riverbank cenotaph as part of a torchlight protest against the Vietnam War. He told the gathering that the Communists and Nationalists of Asia were at work overthrowing a structure that New Zealand was upholding with blood and guns.

He had been told by a Vietnamese student that the Viet Cong were only mudfarmers, he said. ‘All over the world the mudfarmers are fighting the wealthy. Why? Because they have no other honourable choice,’ said Mr Baxter.

He said the agony and hopelessness of the poor were the causes of Communism. ‘If we deny our surpluses to the poor of Asia then we fall under the condemnation of the apostle James who said, “Start crying now, you men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you,”’ said Mr Baxter.

‘It was madness to enter into a war against the Communists and Nationalists of Asia. We will die in the end at the hands of those we have helped to rob. I pray they will be more merciful to us than we have been to them,’ said Mr Baxter.

He urged the students gathered not to hate the police, who, he said, were ‘narrow, very conventional men conditioned over the years to solve every argument with a punch-up.’

He added: ‘New Zealanders will eventually be choked by their money, their respectability, and their boredom.’ 1970 (627)