The Press Thursday, December 4, 1930. Australia's Governor-General.

Press, Volume LXVI, Issue 20102, 4 December 1930, Page 10

The Press Thursday, December 4, 1930. Australia's Governor-General.

The appointment of Sir Isaac Isaacs, lately Chief Justice, to be GovernorGeneral of Australia is of great constitutional interest. For the first time his Majesty lias acted solely on the [ advice of a Dominion Government; ' and for the first time he has been advised to appoint a citizen of the Dominion itself. The possibility of the second change was of course implicit ; m the tir.-t. The function of advice | being once transferred from the | Ministers of the Crown at Home to : the Ministers of the Crown in the I several Dominions, there could be no question of limiting it in any new way. • M r Scullin had to be as free as Mr | .MncDomild. To avoid the dangers of j this freedom by contracting it- would | have been to rob it of all the significance ; which, in tlio new conception of the ' Empire and of Imperial relations, it is : intended to bear; but that is not to j -,ay that they cannot or ought not to !be avoided. Many people will feel—- , many Australians do feel —that al- ; though ti Dominion Government might I sometimes be quite safe in advising I the King to appoint one of its own | citizens, this would be exceptional good j fortune. Sueli good fortune, no doubt, |is Australia's now. It would, at least, b_ difficult to think of any other Australian who has reached such an eminence as Sir Isaac Isaacs and j stands as clear as ho does of political j attachments. But if the King's ad- ! visors in a Dominion were to persuade

1 themselves that they should always 1 make a domestic choice, oil principle, I they would be narrowing their own ! freedom very dangerously. Nobody j needs to have it explained to him that ! the office of Governor-General is

politically useful in the widest sense, covering l national and Imperial politics, because it is non-political. The King has no polities; neither has his personal representative. But it is exceedingly rare in any Dominion to find a citizen who has no Party allegiances or sympathies, or who could shed them aii.l bo wholeheartedly believed to have .shed them on the instant of his being appointed Governor-General, whether by the advice of Ministers belonging to his own Party or to some other. But anxiety in this respect, while it i« widely admitted, should not be too deep, since it is anxiety over a possibility which a little good sense will avoid; and good sense is not yet extinct in any Dominion. Nor should it, even when deeply felt, blind anybody to the fact that the constitutional change which has been made was a natural and necessary consequence of defining the status of the Dominions in the new terms of 1926. The slightly bewildered reluctance with which New Zealand has accepted its independent status in the Empire, and its unqualified and welljustified satisfaction with the old conditions, under which its GovernorsGeneral have been appointed, and with the appointments themselves, are not arguments against a constitutional advance which was bound to come and which registers the living growth of the Empire. Nevertheless, Australia becomes the seat of an interesting experiment, which will be studied closely and from every angle; and the interest is even raised a little by the coincident development of a constitutional problem of a different kind in New South Wales, not new but. possibly more troublesome.