The Evening Star TUESDAY, JUNE 12, 1934. PARLIAMENT AND PUBLICITY.

Evening Star, Issue 21744, 12 June 1934, Page 8

The Evening Star TUESDAY, JUNE 12, 1934. PARLIAMENT AND PUBLICITY.

How many more times is Mr Savage to say it? The Leader of the Opposition has been repeating at Wanganui that “ the Government should meet Parliament at the end of the month, and, having obtained Supply and passed urgent legislation, it should immediately ask for a dissolution. Ministers wore not entitled to expect the people to wait until next year for an opportunity to pass judgment upon them.” Since last session closed Mr Savage has had but one occupation. He must have visited almost every town and village in the dominion tirelessly reiterating the Labour programme which is to make a millennium for everyone in contrast to these dark days. Codlin is the electors’ friend, not Short. Once put Labour in possession of those Treasury benches with control of the monetary system, and the whole complexion of things will be transformed. How it is to be done has never been explained precisely. The natural inference would be inflation, and it has been said, after sore experience, “ one only inflates once.” The Labour Party’s vagueness on the most essential points is for the present its power. Since the “ Outs ” must come in to make all people happy, the day cannot bo too much hastened for the “ Ins ” to go out. The Act postponing for twelve months this year’s elections has been an outrage to the Labour Party. Mr Savage has harped on it continually. • He did so at Wanganui. A little earlier he was reported as doing so at Te Aroha. The “ dangerous precedent ” was provocative, but there was more to be said for it from the Government’s viewpoint than would appear from Labour speeches. The Coalition Government, after all, appealed for a free hand, at last elections, to “ take all such measures as may be necessary ” to meet an abnormal situation, and it was given it. The decision as to what was necessary was left to the Government. The plea was granted that it must be “ free to meet new conditions as they arise.” The Government judged it to be among the necessities that it should have time io finish its job, and the fact of live I’oyai Commissions or

their equivalents being appointed recently within lour months makes the strongest evidence that the job is not yet finished. Parliament will not dissolve, before the expiry of even its three-year period, to please any party which is then a minority. And no one has the least cause to fear that it will be extended beyond four years. Everyone must admire Mr Savage’s devotion and assiduity. It is much for a politician to make the recess as laborious fot himself as the hardest session. Repetition, it has been said, is the soul of lournalism. As naturally it may be the soul of politics. But the principle would have only a fraction of its value for Mr Savage but for the repetition that is allowed him in the Press. Other people and classes and interests repeat themselves, no doubt, in those neverexhausted columns, but we might doubt if anyone else does *o to tho same extent, no one else, easy to think of, being so exclusively restricted to one job. Mr Savage should be grateful to the Press, and he is grateful, we conclude, so far as his own efforts are concerned. That makes it seem to us a little unreasonable that he should want more publicity for politics as a whole, or suggest that if the public got all the politics that is uttered—all the words instead of all the sense, we must presume—it would get a different balance of it. At New Plymouth he expressed the desire—not, we believe again, for the first time—that Parliament .when it is in session should be broadcast. “ Then the public would know just what was said and done there. At present the public know only what the newspapers thought the public ought to know.” It knows, at least, everything that Mr Savage tries to tell it. The non-Labour Press takes care of that. The Leader of the Opposition admits as much. “Ho had received good and even generous treatment,” he confessed at New Plymouth, ‘‘ from the Press of the dominion.” That being so, the general insinuation might quite reasonably have been omitted. Wo know that, in a wider application than Mr Savage gave it, it is common cant in certairi disgruntled circles. But it is only a cant. Where those circles have organs of their own they are far more exclusive, as a general rule, with regard to views with which they are not in sympathy than the daily Press. That Press publishes everything as far as possible. The gibe against *it has least application to politics. If the nightmare were created which' Mr Savage longs for, and a new terror added to broadcasting worse than any which it now possesses, the Press's fairness would be conclusively shown.