THE DESPERATION OF DESPAIR

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1366, 17 February 1912, Page 4

THE DESPERATION OF DESPAIR

The Governor's Speech laid before Parliament yesterday will bring even more ridicule and contempt on the Ward Administration than did the preposterous electioneering Budget brought down a few weeks before the polls in December last. The people were then treated as fools to be duped by any sort of promise and tricked by empty flatteries, and they showed their resentment of this insult to their intelligence by sweeping away the majority which Waraism had boasted. Now, having been tried, convicted, and sentenced at the general election, the Ward Administration comes down with a further high-sounding series of bribes in an endeavour to buy a remission of its sentence. And what are the bribes it offers? Promises and More Promises—the same threadbare trick; the same reckless prodigality of profession ; the same fine budget of good intentions to pave the deeper depths of political turpitude to which the Government has sunk. It is possible of course that there may be people who will fail to see through the flimsy design of the Ministry to obscure the real issue now before Parliament and the country, but we doubt if anyone can read the Speech from the Throne without realising the utter insincerity of the Ward Administration. It must be plain to the meanest intelligence that tho one purpose behind tho proposals outlined or hinted at is the retention of office at all costs. _ Tho public interest is tho last thing considered. The Government in its desperation has reached out and grasped at every possible idea likely to appeal to any section of the community, and has piled up a mountain of promises utterly regardless of its anility to carry them out. and quite unconcerned as to their general effect, so long as its own immediate purpose is It jji not rwmhlG to rovj.cnv in ana nrfciok Um hart, af pwpotyiLi

mentioned in his Excellency's Speech, but it is singularly unfortunate, and an evidence of the desperate anxiety of the Government, that the list should be headed by that old familiar friend, local government reform.. On more than a dozen occasions during the past IS years the Governor's Speech or the Financial Statement has contained promise of local government reform; and on more than a dozen occasions that promise has been broken. And now at the present critical juncture the Government drags it out once more in a vain endeavour lo prop up its falling fortunes. New members who may regard proposals outlined in the Governor's Speech as something akin to accomplished facts will do well to bear in mind that under .the "Liberal" ri't/ime such proposals are, .ylmost as often as not, conveniently forgotten ere the session is half-way through. Many of them do not again appear, while others, like local government reform, are dragged to the front at the opening of each session year after year with a show of great virtue, only to be just as often conveniently forgotten by Ministers, when the real work of the session is in hand. At the elections in December last the people had before them a budget of promises put forward by the Government, which, if the electors had attached any real value to the professions of the Ward Ministry, should have returned the Liberal party to power with undiminished strength. But the public judged the Ministry on its actions, not on its promises and professions. It judged it on its administration as well, and condemned it outright. The situation since then has changcd for the worse so far the Government is concerned. The public has had further evidence of its disregard of all else than its own immediate interests. It has witnessed the spectacle of the Government scheming and manoeuvring to retain office, in defiance of the fact that a majority of the members of the House of Representatives were elected pledged to remove it from office. It has witnessed a continuance of the old bad methods of government by trickery; of favouritism in the matter of public appointments, and the attempt to induce members to dishonour their pledges to their constituents. And now it is regaled with the spectacle of the Ministry, defeated on its desperate policy' of promises at the elections, affronting the intelligence of members of Parliament and the country by seeking to purchase support with still more extravagant promises, and still more impossible of fulfilment. It is really very surprising that the Government should_ so deceive itself as to think that its insincerity is not patent to all who take any interest whatever in> political affairs. It would almost seem that the Prime Minister has quite lost his capacity for forming anything like a true estimate of public opinion, and even now fails to realise how discredited his Ministry is and how deeply distrusted both in and out of Parliament.