A PECULA BLUNDER

Hokitika Guardian, 23 January 1920, Page 4

A PECULA BLUNDER

PARLIAMENT AND PRINTING OFFICE DISAGREE. (N.Z. Times.) It will be remembered that in the closing days of the last session a' disagreement took place between the two Houses of Parliament, concerning the Hawke’s Bay Rivers Bill. The Lower House took exception to the power asked by the Rivers Board to raise a loan of £150,000 without the formality of taking a poll, and struck out the clauses giving this power, besides inserting a provision requiring a poll to be taken before .the money could be raised. The Legislature Council, when the bill came before it, re-insedted these clauses and deleted the poll provision on the ground that the work had been approved of by a Royal Commission, and that the raising of the money was indispensable to the prosecution of the works. There was something like a deadlock, but in order that the bill should not be jeopardised, the Legislative Council did not press its amendments, and the bill passed in the form desired by the Lower House. An extraordinary discovery lias now been made in the bound volume of the sessional statutes that has just' been issued. The Act appears not in the form in which it was passed, but as the Legislative Council desired that it should be. The- provision for the poll of the ratepayer does not appear, but on the contrary, the Act provides that the money may be raised without a poll. Apparently, there has been a blunder somewhere. The Act as it appears in tlie statute book is apparently not the Act as it was when it finally passed the House of Representatives. The matter has caused some perturbation in the Hawke’s Bay district, to which too pleasure applies, and opinions there differ as to whether the money may be raised without a poll or not. The Act, as it appears in the statute book, says otherwise.