NEW SOUTH WALES.

Globe, Volume XXI, Issue 1656, 11 June 1879, Page 3

NEW SOUTH WALES.

[PBOM ODE OWN COEBBBPONDENT.] Sidney, May 23. Still is our Parliament inflicting itself upon this long-suffering community. When I say that it is making itself an unmitigated nuisance, I honestly believe I say no more than most people would bear me out in. At the present time the Assembly is wrangling over the estimates, which are really shocking embodiments of reckless extravagance, and apparently constructed with the single object of giving eveiy man a road or a lock up or a bridge “agin ” his own door. The “consideration allotted to this precious production is quite in keeping with it. Item after item is dealt with in a happy-go-lucky fashion. It is in vain to attempt to discover any principle in the way in which the business is dealt with. Ever and anon some member jumps up and declares that such and such an expenditure is unnecessary, and inevitably up starts another and vows that there is nothing equally urgent in the whole list. Then there is a skrimmage all round, and perhaps this and the next half-dozen items are negatived or reduced. This lasts perhaps twenty minutes or so, and then members appear to become fatigued, and a whole series of items, apparently just as objectionable, are allowed to pass with scarcely a word of comment, till back comes some professor of economy from tho refreshment room, makes a dead set against whatever vote happens to be proposed as he enters, and recommences to air his patriotic particularity till rivals in tho same line get jealous, and another fit of cutting down or rejecting ensues, and so the wheel goes round. It is positively appalling to observe the recklessness with which sums ranging from two thousand to ten thousand pounds are voted for the purpose of providing court houses where there are but petty villages, bridges where there will not pass, for years to come, half-a-dozen vehicles in a week, or where excellent fords, only obstructed for a few days in any year while floods are at their highest, exist, and miles of road which only perhaps one bustling electioneering resident is ever h’kely to benefit by. People appear indifferent to these facts at present because the colony possesses an accumulated sum from the surplus revenue of past years. One often hears of “a blessing in disguise.” Well, it appears to me that tin's surplus is for the colony a curse in disguise. It has been created under a species of false pretence. Ascribed to tho excess of revenue over expenditure, it really represents extensive realisations of the capital possessed by the colony—its land. Without entering into tho subject of the fictitious and unsound system of credit which has been occasioned by these surplus funds having been lodged with the banks at low interest, end by them lent out again to their customers, it may bo remarked that the very existence of this surplus has created and is sustaining a habit of extravagance in dealing with the public funds which will not readily bo shaken off. The surplus is practically a figment. No Treasurer dare call it in. In fact, we have just had to borrow in the London market an equal sum, for which tho State will have to pay a higher rate of interest than it receives for its own money advanced to tho Banks. Although the colony is undoubtedly in a fairly prosperous condition as regards its chief industries, and consequently there is nob likely to bo any pinch for some years to come, unless, indeed, some exceptional circumstance, such as a war in which Great Britain would have to wrestle with a maritime Power, or a tremendous fall in the price of wool,should supervene, still if it does not ultimately suffer from the blundering, the extravagance, the corruption, and the misgovermmnt it is undergoing year after year, it will show itself to bo a much more wonderful country than I seo any reason to believe it to be. The new Land Bill now being wriggled through the Assembly wiU serve to illustrate in some degree how things are arranged. Please to understand that the fundamental principle of all our land legislation since the year 1861 has been that it is desirable to substitute agriculture for grazing. This has been tho ground upon which tho tenure of the squatters has been upset. To ensure this wholesome substitution certain conditions of improvement have been required, and very fallacious they have proved. Instead of making actual cultivation maintained for successive seasons a condition the style of improvement was left open, and only its extent defined. Selectors had to spend £1 per acre before the lapse of three years. The present Bill, as far as it has been shaped in tho Assembly, reduces that amount to 10s per acre at one swoop, and allows five years for tho expenditure of that enormous amount, so that any man who spends a florin per annum on each aero of his selection will be all right. Now, is not this a farce. But to aggravate it, it is not sufficient to make this provision applicable to future selections. The Act is retrospective, and any lucky selector who has been putting off improving, and perhaps not intending to improve at all, is thus given an advantage over tho bona fide man who settled down to live on his land, and to whom the £1 per acre represented only a part of what he had necessarily to expend either in cash or in his own labor to make a habitation for himself, and to render hio selection useful, cither as a paddock for grazing, or as a farm. Tho fact is that the squatters, who arc acquiring tho land on their runs by every possible means—auction purchases and dummy selections being the two

ends of their methods—work through the L-gislature principally by resorting to the “ poor man ” ticket. That is to say, they encourage all the silly or selfish creatures, who think they are doing a stroke for themselves bv yelling out whenever it is attempted to exact absolute fulfilment of conditions, that “the poor man ” is being sacrificed and oppressed. A very numerous class of laboring men make it their business to select choice lots for the solo purpose of being bought out by the owner of the nearest big estate, and these gentry always go under the disguise of hona fdc settlers, and make it very warm at election time for any candidate whom they regard as likely to be a purist, and to go in for the maintenance of conditions of improvement and residence which they have no mind to comply with. By-and-bye, when there remains no goo land to dummy and traffic in thus, and when the bulk of the territory will have passed into the hands of the great estate owners, these smart persons will turn round on the opposite tack, and raise their sweet voices in denunciation of the monopoly they have been chiefly instrumental in creating ; and then there will arise in this colony an outcry for the bursting-up of big estates, for the taxation of absentees and so forth, and New South Wales will produce in her turn from her fermenting political muck-heap a Q-raham Berry of her own. As if it wore not sufficient that our representative chamber is a pretentious sham, it must also needs become an outrageous nuisance. Night after night, of late, there have been in the Assembly such scenes, such speeches, and such farces, as could not occur in any lees privileged precinct, and would not be endured in any other assemblage in the country. While the Premier is fermenting a quarrel with the Legislative Counc 11 because that body refuses to join ia conferring upon Parliament powers to summarily punish any one considered to have trespassed upon privileges altogether undefined, he lias himself indulged in a style of vituperation which anywhere else would assuredly have occasioned a breach of the peace, and has been stung hy the furious and outrageous rejoinders he has provoked, actually to intimate that ho will devise means to restrain members from availing themselves of the privileges they already possess to utter slander on individuals. The occasion for this outburst has been a development of the long-standing quarrel between Mr M’Elhonc, M.L.A., a scavenger of abuses, and Mr Q-arrott, M.L. A., a person of ability, whose personal habits have always exposed him to animadversion, and who stood accused by Mr M’Elhone with having while Minister for Lands been concerned in the actual sale of appointments in his deportment. For extremely plain and uncomprising statements made by Mr M’Elhone in Parliament to this effect, Mr Garrett took the preliminary steps to bring against him an action for libel, laying the damages at £SOOO. M’Elhone’s solicitors set up a pica of “Privilege,” and Garrett, being advised by eminent counsel that this would bo a bar to his recovery of a verdict, called attention to the matter in the Assembly. Upon this, Sir Henry Parkes, who, be it noted, had formerly said nearly as much against Garrett as M’Elhone did, but is now suspected of designing to take bim into the Cabinet ns Minister for Lands, vice Hoskins, invalided, made a tremendous onslaught on M’Elhone. Here I append an extract from the “Herald” report. Sir Henry, loquitur: —“ Anxious as I am for the proper privileges being conceded to this House to secure to it ]the utmost freedom of speech, I think it is a course of conduct so atrocious —[hear, hear] —so entirely and purely infamous —[hear, hear] —to abuse the privileges of Parliament for blasting the reputation, destroying the fortunes, ruining the family of any person, be he a member of this House or the poorest person living out of doors, and then shrinking from the necessary consequence of this —[hear, hear]—l think the abuse of this power so utterly indefensible, so damnablein its nature, that it exhibits a desire to wound other persons’ feelings without any desire to do any public good— a desire to wreak cruelty upon persons without the slightest twinge of conscience as to the suffering it causes, and a kind of feeling that might belong to the lowest creature in the reptile part of creation —[hear, hear] —but only belongs to mankind in shrinking from the just consequences of these infamous charges. [Hear, hear.] We ought to consider whether the standing orders cannot bo so amended as to prevent any person standing up here and making charges against another unless he make them in some form where evidence can be taken, where proof can bo given, where the person charged may defend himself, and where if the charges are not proved, the infamy shall recoil upon the reckless and unprincipled author. [Hear, hear.]” Of course that reads well, till onohears the rejoinder. Here is some of the latter which was in disjointed fragments. The Speaker interfering in the interests of order, and Sir Henry Parkes interrupting continually: — Mr MeElhone said that he never was accused of going about the back slums to get information to damn Mr Garrett’s character, and when Mr Dransfield came before the House the parties who brought him here would not give him an indemnity. The reason Mr Garrett did not prosecute Sir Henry Parkes was because bo knew that ho could get nothing out of bim. He recollected when Sir Henry Parkes cheered the statements he made about Mr Garrett after that gentleman returned from Melbourne, and when they wanted to get Sir John Eobertson out of office. He forgot the words used by Sir Alfred Stephen when Chief Justice, in regard to a prominent man whom he sard ought to be at Cockatoo instead of walking the streets of Sydney. Ho had never lived on bis position as a politician borrowing money from people, thousands of pounds, and when asked to pay, had gone up King street (where the Insolvency Court ia situated). He had never been charged with drawing two sorts of cheques, one marked for payment and one which was not to be paid. Sir Henry Parkes could tell whether he had or not. If his character were fifty thousand times as bad as it was, ho would not change it for the character of the hon. member at the head of the Government. The hon. member borrowed money of Mr Scholey on more than one occasion, which he never paid. Then Mr Buchanan, who forms his style upon Carlyle, and is not a very bad imitator, took up the running, and delivered himself, for Mr McElhone’s behoof as fo’lows :—He did not wish to exceed any of the rules of that House, but he would just put this before them— Suppose they were to encounter in any Assembly in the world, say in the British Parliament —if that wero possible—a low bred, illiterate, ignorant ruffian, destitute alike of truth and common rectitude, and wholly unable to understand the meaning of either ; whose very nature was made up of falsehood and malice—a living, moving, incarnated lie ; whose whole public action was occupied in the basest slander of bettor men than himself, who publicly proclaims himself a liar, with an utterly insensibility to the accompanying degradation ; who, when met by one of his fellow representatives whom he had insulted, with ‘hold up your hands, you mean, despicable coward, and I will strike you to my foot and trample your unworthy carcase under it,’ crawls away from the encounter in the spirit of a craven and a dastard —who stands pilloried in the universal opinion as a common slandermonger and a dealer in falsehood, and who, when dragged before the tribunals to answer for his vile calumnies, basely shelters himself behind the cowardly plea of privilege. He asked what more appropriate treatment could you offer such a ruffian than to allow him to sink out of eight, deep in your contempt, covered with your scorn, and enveloped in the hatred and detestation of all true men.” All this is charming and elevating. Nothing could be better calculated to form the minds of the rising generation on a noble model than the perusal of such oratorical efforts in our legislative halls. Ever since the foregoing occurred Mr MeElhone has nightly moved the ad journment of the House, in order to “ get at” Sir Henry Parkes. He has given notice of motion that ho will call for returns relating to that Knight’s several insolvencies, with all particulars. As soon as he gets fairly under way, some one or other of the Government supporters calls attention to the presence of strangers, and the gallery is cleared, so we are having Mr McElhone’s reminiscences of Sir Henry by instalments. Ho begins one night where ho left off the previous one. Sir Henry leaves the Chamber as soon as his persecutor commences. The fact is, disgraceful as the whole business is, and unmannerly ruffian as MeElhone is, there is a general belief that his charges against Garrett are not unfounded, although legal proof may bo difficult to procure ; and as regards Sir Henry Parkes, his unreliability in money matters is notorious, so thatMcElhono is hitting on a raw. But altogether this will convey some idea of what legislative “deliberations ” may descend to in this colony. There is an overwhelming agitation in progress in favor of the commutation of the

sentence of death which the Executive have decided shall be carried out in the case of a young man and a lad who had been guilty together of a shameful outrage upon a youn girl There are admittedly no extenuating circumstances as regards the offence, but with the leniency displayed by the Executive but a few weeks’ ago in the case of the Hatfield bushrangers in remembrance, the public have received with a shock of surprise the decision te carry out the extreme penalty of the law upon these youths, of whom one is about twonty-one years of ago, and the other not yet fifteen! Further, a growing objection to the penalty of death for anything short of minder is apparent. A most influential meeting was held last evening in .Sydney, to protest against the penalty being eairied out in this instance, but thus fur the Executive have remamed obdurate, despite a number of similar meetings in country places, and a host of petitions to the same effect. Still, it appears probable that they will now feel it requisite to give way, although there are many persons who think the law should take its course. In short, opinions are divided in the community, but those whose views the Executive decision traverses are active and making a noise. The contention between the two Houses still continues, bub has sunk a little out of notice, in consequence of the ParkesMcElhono duel. The Council stands to its guns, but has slightly shifted its ground, and has been “ awfully polite ” in its messages to the Assembly of late, conceding nothing, but deprecating any desire to offend. In short, the suavitcr in modp, fortiter in ve is their present lino of conduct. This does not seem to suit the Premier at all, who actually took occasion to attack the Council for a superfluous attention pa : d by them to the Assembly in forwarding an extract from their journals elucidatory of the progress of a measure. There is, therefore, room to expect that the quarrel with the Council may ho again trotted out as a cheval dc battaille, should Sir Henry see no better way of holding the majority in the Assembly under h : a management. The Exhibition Building rises apace, and its external form will bo soon complete, A tramway to convey passengers from the railway terminus, which lies about a mile from the heart of the city, to (ho vicinity of the Exhibition, has been commenced. The rails arc being manufactured at the Lithgow Valley Iron Works, and ns the Hon. George Sutherland is a partner in the company wko owns these works, his seat has been challenged in consequence of the contract being held by them. His defence is that the company has no contract with the Government. It sells at £lO per ton to a Mr Williams, one of its shareholders, who has the Government contract at £ll per ton. Neat, but fishy.