LINEN-WASHING

Evening Star, Issue 19781, 3 February 1928, Page 14

LINEN-WASHING

IN PARLIAMENT PRIVILEGE ABUSED. The debates during the session of the Queensland Parliament just closed were marked by a good deal of recrimination and abuse. Parliamentary privilege was used to impute personal misdemeanors to opponents and to make unkind insinuations. 1 The Premier (Mr JVPCormack) set a bad example by disclosing during a heated passage that a member of Parliament had fallen into arrears with his income tax, and that payments due had been taken from his parliamentary salary. Perhaps by way of retaliation the Leader of the Opposition revived a story that the Premier had at one time proposed to pay an obscure newspaper to attack certain officials of the Australian Railways Union. This statement, at the time it first gained currency, gave rise to a threat by the Premier to take legal proceedings. When party leaders indulge in such tactics it is small wonder that private members feel that they have license to say things which they dare not say outside the House. “What about the time you burned down your sawmill?” was another, interjetion made across the House by one private member to another. It is typical of a good deal of back-biting and scandal-mongering which has been going on under the cover of parliamentary privilege. In an acrimonious debate the Premier twitted the Opposition with being in league with a mat to whom the police had refused a permit to address open-air meetings. At a later stage the Premier expressed regret that he had disclosed the fact that an account due by one of the members for income tax had been deducted from his parliamentary salary, and he made it clear that the information. had . come to him in - an order served on him as Treasurer, and was not the result of any special knowledge of income tax assessments'. He declared that, compared with the House of Commons, the Queensland Legislative Assembly' was a Sunday school. '