The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News and The Echo. THURSDAY, AUGUST 15, 1907. AN ELECTIVE UPPER HOUSE.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 194, 15 August 1907, Page 4

The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News and The Echo.

THURSDAY, AUGUST 15, 1907. AN ELECTIVE UPPER HOUSE.

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Sir William Steward certainly deserves his long delayed snccess in engineering his legislative Council Election Bill through the House of Representatives. The essential feature of the measure is that the present system of nominsStion to the Upper House shall be superseded by some form of election; and this is the one point on which the great majority of members of Parliament are really in accord about the bilL No one at all familiar with the history of nominated Upper Chambers in this colony or elsewhere is at all likely to fight enthusiastically in their cause. The right to fill the Upper House with Government nominees may easily be utilised so as to become a serious menace to public morality, as well as the integrity of the constitution. As a form of political patronage by which faithful followers of Government can be assured of their just reward, the nominee system is always fraught with the possibilities of evil. And on the constitutional side there is always the danger that the Government of the day. may strive to bolster itself up by strengthening its party in the Upper House, or may even employ the Revising Chamber like another House of Lords to defy or to thwart the will of the people's representatives. Happily, these objections to the nominee system, so far as this country is concerned, are mostly theoretical; but they have appealed to the more tuoughtful of our electors and politicians with sufficient force to create a strong body of public feeling in favour of an Upper Chamber constituted on an electoral basis.

But when, we have gone thus far, we have to face a much more difficult problem. On what plan are we to frame the constituencies, and what should be the qualification of the electors? As a general rule, constitutions which—as in South Australia and Victoria—include an electoral "House of Lords" endeavour to differentiate the two legislative chambers from each other by varying the boundaries of the constituencies, and demanding some form of property qualification from electors to the Upper House. The c-oject of these expedients is, of course, to make the two Houses sufficiently dissimilar in character to enable them to act as mutual checks upon each other. The one great virtue of the nominee system in the old pre-democratic era was that it enabled the Crown to provide an Upper House, drawn from a distinct class, and representing political theories and social and material interests different from those represented in the Lower Chamber. But now that we have adopted Democratic Liberalism as a permanent and fundamental policy, it cannot logically be claimed that this divergence of interests or political ideals any longer exists. With the disappearance of the old-school Conservatism from the political stage, it is impossible to select a Legislative Council that can fairly be regarded as standing for anything but "the views and opinions already adequately represented elsewhere. A Revising Chamber, as most constitutional jurists hold, is a prime necessity, more especially under a democratic Government. But if the two Houses are of the same political character and recruited directly from the same sources, what is the value of such an Upper House in the system of "checks and balances" that goes to make up our Constitution?

Sir William Steward's attempt to meat this difficulty has at least the great merit of simplicity. He proposes that the Upper House shall be elected by the Lower. Any seven or more members of the House of Representatives may nominate a candidate for the Legislative

Council -when a vacancy occurs, and the voting is then conducted by baliot. Ti>c bill., as originally drafted, provides thai no one could become a candidate for the Upper House who -was not legally eligible for the Lower. But, at the instance of Mr. Wilford, an amendment has been inserted that would permit women to sit as members of the Revising Chamber. It is generally understood that the object of the supporters of this amendment was to make the bill ridiculous; but the idea, though somewhat ■ fantastic, is by no means a novelty, and has been discussed in all seriousness both in the colonies and at Home. Readers of the •■N.Z. Graphic" may' recollect an interesting article —i "An Upper House of Dames" that appeared in its columns last year, in which the case for an Upper House -composed entirely of women was argued with much humour and force. But we need hardly expect that so serious an innovation upon our constitutional traditions will be speedily adopted. Nor can we anticipate that Sir William Steward's bill will have a safe, or, at all events, an easy, passage through the Upper House. Revising Chambers are never ready to sign their own death •warrants; and Sir W. Steward's triumph may prove but short-lived. But there is certainly genuine political merit in the measure. It would avoid the difficulties involved in the constitution of an Upper House by direct popular election, and it ■would provide a constituency that, while itself popular in basis and origin, might fairly be assumed to approach such a task with wider experience and political knowledge than could be claimed by the average possessor of the franchise. A i urtae.r ja<iyunt3ge is. £ha_t in this w>y

the Upper House anight come to , contain a strong Opposition element, and could thus more' effectually do its work as a Kfivising-Chamber. But we fear that Sir W. Steward is not likely to induce the existing Upper House to pass, fiis-foill in anything like its present form.