The Dominion. THURSDAY, OCTOBER 26, 1911. POLITICIANS AND WORK.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1269, 26 October 1911, Page 6

The Dominion. THURSDAY, OCTOBER 26, 1911. POLITICIANS AND WORK.

$ . The protests of the Australian politicians against Lord Dudley's denunciation of the payment of members of Parliament are natural enough, and arc quite negligible. The only protest that is worth any consideration is that of the New South Wales Premier, Mr. M'Gowen, who is reported to-day as saying that "he knew of his own experience that members earned their honorariums." We can only guess at the standard Mb. M'Go wen uses; as a Labour man lie probably has some sort of notion that the honorarium is a wage, to be earned by the devotion of so much time per day or week or session to the work of legislation. As a matter of fact it can never be said of a politician that he "earns his salary." His labours are not assessable. If he is a wise and useful legislator, no wage could bo too high to pay him; if not, no wage could be too low. It is difficult to measure in pounds, shillings, and pence tho work of a legislator; and a great many politicians appear unable even to understand what can be called "work" in Parliament. Few politicians would care to say, or indeed would allow themselves to believe, that talk in the House is work in any proper sense; but,there is a type of politician who lielieves that the usefulness of any Parliament is measurable by the number of Acts that it passes. Quality does not matter; quantity is the thing. This kind of politician, who is a perpetual target for the ridicule of. sensible people, loves to flourish the appalling statistics of the laws for which he or the Government he belongs to is responsible. In Great Britain no statesman on either side ever thinks of appealing to the number of laws his party has placed upon tho Statute Book, _ but the case is otherwise in America and New Zealand. Three or four years ago the Right Hon. James Bryce, in an address in New York, quoted some remarkable figures bearing upon the craze for law-making in the United States. In two years Congress and the various State Legislatures passed 25,' Mli Acts and adopted 157(i resolutions. We looked up the statistics for New Zealand at tho time, and found that from 1891 to 1907 inclusive, our Parliament passed no fewer than 1002 public Acts,. 482 local find personal.

Acts, and 41 private Acts, a total of 1575 statutes altogether. To-dav the figure approaches 1800. In Great Britain the average for the four years 190-1-7 was less than 45 Acts per annum.

Most of us arc familiar with the stress that our Liberal friends so comically but so pathetically lay upon tho number of its enactments. In the House yesterday Sin Joseph Ward made it plain that he still cherishes this ridiculous standard of statesmanship. He complained bitterly that the House had for two days "done no work," and he explained his meaning by saying that Parliament had not during'that time passed any Bills worth mentioning. The immediate inference must be that if Parliament had swallowed everything without comment, and passed into law all the new Bills that the Government brought down this week, it would have done a. splendid piece of work; and that it can even now redeem itself and perform a great national service by shutting its eyes and allowing the Government to rush its measures on to the Statute Book so fast as to leave tho Clerk far behind as he tries to make a list of their titles. That is the strictlylogical corollary of the proposition that Parliament is only working while it is passing Bills. As a matter of fact the best work that Parliament can do just now is the stoppage or rejection of Bills. At this stageof the session the day that sees no Bill or only one Bill passed into law is a better day, from the point of view of national interest, than tho day that sees half a score of measures hastily passed into law. The Prime Minister yesterday was indignant because certain members actually proceeded to treat as of some importance the question of university administration. He did not go so far as Mr. Laup.exson, to whom the university question is "a contemptible triviality," but he did not attempt to conceal his opinion that this important subject should have been dismissed without discussion. He has also neglected to carry out his promise to provide an opportunity for a discussion upon the Imperial Conference. Brilliant Imperialist as he is, pioneer and prophet in Imperial concerns, he yet apparently considers that to discuss the Conference would be a waste of time, and anything but "work." In his own showing, only the rapid passing into law of his own ill-considered proposals is to him deserving of the name of "work." To him, therefore, they only "earn their honorariums," in Mr. M'Gowex's phrasc,_ who are willing to abandon all their functions and neglect their duty to the nation. Tho unhappy thing about all this is that the Prime Minister is probably genuinely ignorant of the lowliness of his standard of political values. Lord lloseuery has compared this method of measurement by the number of Acts passed with the method of the sportsman who boasts of his bag. But the true comparison should be with the'"sportsman" who counts in his bag all the cats, vermin, and "grey hens" that fall to his irresponsible gun.