The Dominion. THURSDAY, MARCH 11, 1912. INDUSTRIAL REGULATION

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1388, 14 March 1912, Page 4

The Dominion. THURSDAY, MARCH 11, 1912. INDUSTRIAL REGULATION

New Zealand has acquired, or has been forced into, something very like a proprietary interest in the efforts of tho Governments of other countries to regulate by statute the disorders of industry. At the present moment our own Arbitration Act, the theme of hundreds and thousands of lyrical plaudits in our own and in other countries' in the past, is stripped of all its clothing of fictitious credit. All the more, therefore, is the work oi other countries in the field of industrial regulation of interest to us. We are told in a Sydney cable to-day that the Legislative Council in New South Wales is still considering the Arbitration Bill of the M'Gowen Government and has deleted several more of its vital clauses. This Bill as introduced was a, particularly bad one. The two principal features of the measure to which the Legislative Council took exception last week were, first, a proposal that the appointment of dispute boards, and of the members of those boards, should be a Ministerial prerogative; and, second, the proposal that the boards might order preference to unionists. In defending the first of these proposals the Government's representative in the Council took up an attitude that is characteristic of modern political oligarchies, whether they are Labour oligarchies, as in Australia, or class and clique oligarchies, as in New Zealand. He objected that it would be anomalous to curtail the ultimate authority of the Minister. His idea, as the tiydnctj Morning Herald pointed out, seemed to be "that restrictions upon the power of Ministers are a species of Ihemajeslc." His purpose actually was to retain in the hands of the Ministry such a power of creating and appointing boards as could be exercised or not as the Ministry's political requirements might dictate. The Herald's comment upon the underlying doctrine of Ministerial autocracy is so good that we must quote it for the benefit of a public that has suffered, enough from the itch of Ministers for power to control not only Parliament but the Courts:— It is no derogation of tho Ministerial position, and certainly no curtailment of Jlinisterinl privilege, that in matters where political interference may bo misunderstood, power is given to tho dispassionate persons who stand apart from politics altogether. A Minister is a politician all the time. . . . But sinco tho Labour ideal is "spoils to the victor," it is not difficult to understand how any curtailment of tho power of patronage is strongly resented. The Council's rejection of the idea of compulsory preference io unionists has natuially aroused the, anger of the Trades Hall. At the present time it is perhaps too much to expect a strong public opinion against tho principle of, in the words of Slit Joseph CarRCTHERS, "giving a preferent right to one class of men who have political power as against another class who have not political power"; but there i 3 every reason to hope that before very long it will b realised by most people that it is at bottom a monstrous invasion of liberty to ordain that permission to work and live shall be dppiMuliuif. upon membership of a particular political society. The civil rights nf a wage-earner sis a member of society —and surely nobody demands more than equality in civil rielits—do not require the legal establishment nf (hat. tyranny any move than (hoy require that the Ministers of the day shall possess as Ministers, and usn flf party politicians, nlmoit unfpt-t-everl power to loose and bind abovo [the lαvi